Affective Architectures: More-Than-Representational Geographies of Heritage 9780367152116, 9780429055737

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AFFECTIVE ARCHITECTURES

Edited by Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas and Angela M. Person

Critical Studies in Heritage, Emotion and Affect

AFFECTIVE ARCHITECTURES MORE-THAN-REPRESENTATIONAL GEOGRAPHIES OF HERITAGE Edited by Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas and Angela M. Person

an informa business

ISBN 978-0-367-15211-6

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Affective Architectures

How do places manipulate our emotions? How are spaces affectious in their articulation and design? This book provides theoretical frameworks for exploring affective dimensions of architectural sites based on the notion that heritage, as an embodied experience, is embedded in places and spaces. Drawing together an interdisciplinary collection of essays spanning geo­ graphically diverse architectural sites—including Ford’s Theatre, the site of President Lincoln’s assassination; the Estadio Nacional of Santiago, Chile, where 12,000 detainees were held following the ouster of President Salvador Allende; and Unit 731, the site of a biological and chemical warfare research unit of the Imperial Japanese Army in Harbin, China, amongst others—this edited collection assembles critical dialogue amongst scholars and practi­ tioners engaging in affective and other more-than-representational approaches to cultural memory, heritage, and identity-making. Broken into three main sections—Affective Politics, Embedded Geographies, and Affective Meth­ odologies—this book draws together multidisciplinary perspectives from the arts, social sciences, and humanities to understand the role of architecture in generating embodied experiences at places of memory. This book offers interdisciplinary perspectives on fundamental questions of memory, identity, and space. It will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of geography, architecture, cultural studies, and museum and heritage studies. Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas, PhD is Assistant Professor of Museum Studies and Public History at the University of Central Oklahoma and Director of the Master of Arts Graduate Program in Museum Studies. Her research explores the cultural politics of place-making at sites of difficult heritage. She is also author of the forthcoming Routledge title Curating Trauma: Affective Heritage and the Politics of Memorial Museums After 9/11. Angela M. Person is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma. Her research looks at relationships between built environments and cultural memory. She is co-author of The Care and Keeping of Cultural Facilities, and co-editor of Renegades: Bruce Goff and the American School of Architecture.

Critical Studies in Heritage, Emotion and Affect In Memory of Professor Steve Watson (1958–2016) Series Editors: Divya P. Tolia-Kelly (University of Sussex) and Emma Waterton (Western Sydney University) This book series, edited by Divya P. Tolia-Kelly and Emma Waterton, is dedicated to Professor Steve Watson. Steve was a pioneer in heritage studies and was inspirational in both our personal academic trajectories. We, as three editors of the series, started this journey together, but alas we lost his magnificent scholarship and valued counsel too soon. The series brings together a variety of new approaches to heritage as a sig­ nificant affective cultural experience. Collectively, the volumes in the series provide orientation and a voice for scholars who are making distinctive pro­ gress in a field that draws from a range of disciplines, including geography, history, cultural studies, archaeology, heritage studies, public history, tourism studies, sociology and anthropology – as evidenced in the disciplinary origins of contributors to current heritage debates. The series publishes a mix of speculative and research-informed monographs and edited collections that will shape the agenda for heritage research and debate. The series engages with the concept and practice of Heritage as co-constituted through emotion and affect. The series privileges the cultural politics of emotion and affect as key categories of heritage experience. These are the registers through which the authors in the series engage with theory, methods and innovations in scholarship in the sphere of heritage studies.

Heritage in the Home Domestic Prehabitation and Inheritance Caron Lipman Affective Architectures More-Than-Representational Geographies of Heritage Edited by Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas and Angela M. Person The Museum as a Space of Social Care Nuala Morse For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Critical-Studies-in-Heritage-Emotion-and-Affect/book-series/CSHEA.

Affective Architectures More-Than-Representational Geographies of Heritage

Edited by Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas and Angela M. Person

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas and Angela M. Person; individual chapters, the contributors The rights of Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas and Angela M. Person to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-15211-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-05573-7 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

Our bodies and movements are in constant interaction with the environment; the world and the self inform and redefine each other constantly. The percept of the body and the image of the world turn into one single continuous existential experience; there is no body separate from its domicile in space, and there is no space unrelated to the unconscious image of the perceiving self. Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin

Contents

List of figures List of tables Acknowledgements Foreword

x xiii xiv xv

HANS E. BUTZER

List of contributors Affective architectures: An introduction

xvii 1

JACQUE MICIELI-VOUTSINAS AND ANGELA M. PERSON

PART I

Affective politics: Negotiating identities in places of difficult memory 1 “Give them more and more for their dollar”: Searching for slavery amongst the plantation edutainment complex

17 19

AMY E. POTTER, STEPHEN P. HANNA, PERRY L. CARTER AND E. ARNOLD MODLIN, JR.

2 The old/new Unit 731 Museum: A place of memory and oblivion

40

JING XU

3 Dwellers of silence: Conflict and affective borderlands of the Estadio Nacional, Santiago de Chile

55

JOHANNA LOZOYA

4 Toxic landfills, survivor trees, and dust cloud memories: More-than-human ecologies of 9/11 memory JACQUE MICIELI-VOUTSINAS AND JULIA CAVICCHI

67

viii

Contents

5 The affect of memorializing the loss, the affect of losing the memorial: Confederate war monuments in New Orleans

90

JOCELYN EVANS AND KEITH GADDIE

PART II

Embedded geographies: Negotiating the affective in (extra) ordinary landscapes 6 Memorializing Lincoln’s life where he died

105 107

COLLEEN PRIOR, AYSHA PRESTON, DAVID MCKENZIE, SARAH JENCKS AND KENNETH FOOTE

7 Body in the Forbidden City: Embodied sensibilities and lived experience in the affective architecture

120

PENG LIU

8 Colonial unknowing and affective uncertainty: Sewers and eels in Troy, New York

140

JULIA CAVICCHI

9 Lamenting the dead: The affective afterlife of poets’ graves

151

PAUL GILCHRIST

10 Placing affective architectures in landscapes of public pedagogy at the university

168

CHRIS W. POST

PART III

Affective methodologies: Negotiating more-than-representational approaches in spatial design

185

11 The memory in bodily and architectural making: Reflections from embodied cognitive science

187

´ AND ALEKSANDAR STANIC ˇ IC ´ ANDREA JELIC

12 Architecture as memorialisation: “Using” buildings to remember the Shoah

204

MICHELLE BENTLEY

13 Using game engines to create activist spatial experiences of the occupation of Palestine RUSAILA BAZLAMIT

220

Contents 14 Embedded memories of site at Woodford Academy, National Trust of Australia

ix 236

SARAH BREEN LOVETT

15 Virtual reality and memorials: (Re)building and experiencing the past

252

TESS OSBORNE AND PHIL JONES

Index

267

Figures

1.1 Gruesome scenes greeted visitors on the Nature Tram Tour in October of 2017 for Magnolia’s Ninth Annual Fright Night 1.2 Tickets issued to visitors feature the alley of oaks and invite visitors to “Come enjoy her beauty and dream of her past” 1.3 Historical characters in Shirley’s Scavenger Hunt where enslaved people are identified as servants 1.4 At Houmas House, along Louisiana’s River Road, weddings are framed by the white pillars. Guests sit in chairs facing the Big House while the marriage ceremony is performed on the steps or directly in front of the home 1.5 While Oak Alley prioritizes the big reveal of oak trees on the second floor of the house tour, Whitney Plantation reminds visitors not to romanticize the view by placing one of the Children of Whitney at the end of the alley 2.1 The new Unit 731 exhibition hall (in the center) and the old one (in the left-hand corner) 3.1 Marcelo Montecino. Estadio Nacional, September 21, 1973 3.2 Wally Kunstmann. Dressing Room where women were imprisoned in 1973. Caminando por la Memoria Permanent Exposition. Estadio Nacional, 2019 3.3 Wally Kunstmann. “La Dignidad” grandstand. In the background, it reads, “A nation without a memory is a nation without a future.” Estadio Nacional, 2019 5.1 Map of New Orleans 5.2 Postcard view of Lee Circle in the early twentieth century 5.3 Celebration of Robert E. Lee’s one hundredth birthday 6.1 Visitors lining up to enter Ford’s Theatre, the gable-roofed building in the right center of this photograph. Visitors now enter through a new lobby and visitor facility 7.1 The quantity and cultural meaning of each fantasy animal figure on the roof are as much part of the architecture as their moving shadows

20 25 29

34

36 42 59

62

64 93 95 97

107

127

List of figures 7.2 My hand touching cracked bricks exposed to the below-zero outdoor temperature during a winter visit. The body heat travels from my finger to the brick and warms the material while simultaneously cooling my fingertips. Retracting my hand, my body walks away with some sandy granules on my fingertips, while leaving my fingerprints on the brick 7.3 Seemingly endless doorways guiding the body through various courtyards. The ground is evenly covered with a thin layer of fresh snow which clearly shows a walking path in the middle made by tourists’ footprints. However, there seldom are footprints found in corners or at dead ends. This becomes the evidence that our eyesight might have been to many other areas of the space where our bodies did not go 9.1 Jesmond Old Cemetery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, United Kingdom 9.2 Detail from the tombstone of J. P. Robson 9.3 Ballast Hills burial ground, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, United Kingdom 10.1 Mapping the relationship between landscape, affect, and public pedagogy 10.2 The May 4 Memorial at Kent State. Clearly inspired by Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, the memorial was the second-place entry in a design competition and built to a fraction of its proposed structure and budget, and lacks the visitor agency of the VVM and other contemporary memorials 10.3 The Good Deeds Chairs at Syracuse University in 2013. Laid out as the killed students were seated on Flight 103, members of the Syracuse community decorated the chairs with statements of good deeds that they had or would perform for others 10.4 Rendering of proposed memorial at Fort Laurens State Historic Site, Ohio 11.1 Sketch of the enactive-embodied conceptual framework for memory- and meaning-making in affective architecture 12.1 Jewish Museum in Prague (I) 12.2 Jewish Museum in Prague (II) 12.3 Jewish Museum in Prague (III) 13.1 re:Visit Palestine exhibition. The middle projection shows the virtual environment while the two adjacent walls show a video projection 13.2 A comparison between the Apartheid Museum in South Africa and the VE in the Gaza scene 13.3 A screenshot illustrating a point in the experience. The viewer is standing inside a refugee tent while a video of an elderly refugee woman is being shown 14.1 WeiZen Ho in Palimpsest Performance #1

xi

128

132 158 160 161 173

175

177 179 194 205 205 210

227 229

230 241

xii

List of figures

14.2 Honi Ryan’s Palimpsest Performance #2 14.3 Sarah Breen Lovett—The Void 2017 15.1 Workshop participants using the Oculus Go Headsets on the National Mall 15.2 The National Mall recreated in Unity

244 247 256 257

Tables

1.1 1.2

Admission to Magnolia Plantation and Gardens Selected ephemeral events

30 32

Acknowledgements

This book would not be possible without the inspiring engagement and com­ mitment of its dozens of contributors over the past two years. Understandings of affect and more-than-representational approaches to heritage are notor­ iously difficult to articulate, and these authors each rose to this task with an uncommon sense of care and precision. We are indebted to them for produ­ cing a culturally and methodologically rich volume that will help ground scholarship on places of memory for years to come. This book stems from two “Affective Architectures” sessions organized during the 2017 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geo­ graphers (AAG) in Boston, Massachusetts. Through these sessions, we recognized that a book drawing together key ways contemporary geo­ graphers—and their colleagues from allied disciplines—engage with affective architectures will help strengthen this emerging area of scholarship. What began as a conversation quickly surpassed our wildest dreams as our call for submissions received incredible proposals from scholars from all over the world—China, Australia, Mexico, Denmark and beyond. We would like to offer special thanks to the Routledge Critical Studies in Heritage, Emotion and Affect series, Emma Waterton and Divya Tolia-Kelly. Emma participated in one of the AAG sessions and encouraged us to bring this book to fruition. Emma and Divya offered sensitive, critical feedback during the early stages of planning and helped us navigate the Routledge review process smoothly. We wish to acknowledge the Routledge team members who helped us bring this book to fruition, including Ruth Anderson, Faye Leerink, Nonita Saha, and countless others. We are also grateful to Carolin Cichy, who provided vital assistance with final manuscript preparations. Finally, we would like to extend special thanks to our partners and the caregivers who supported our families when this project drew us away.

Foreword Hans E. Butzer

How did it make you feel? The increasing awareness of the plots and subplots to everything we do in our information-rich cultures suggests naiveté is not an option and that the architect’s responsibilities have grown yet further. The notion of affective architectures critically enhances our growing under­ standing of just how complex the conception and crafting of the built envir­ onment may be. I recall countless instances while in architecture school as a student and subsequently as faculty of a student expressing the desire for their design “to make people feel …” (insert happy, constrained, hopeful or myriad other emotions or observations here). The history of architecture confirms examples where awe is achieved through scale or symmetry invokes power, and its public may quickly note and accept the architect’s suggestions without a second thought. Politics, social standings, and religion have consistently informed the architect’s work through conscious or other efforts for millennia. The signals and provocations of buildings and landscapes are there, for better or worse. The work of our own architecture practice, Butzer Architects and Urban­ ism, deliberately embraces the underlying design inspiration and its ensuing materiality and space as an affective means of engaging those who “use” our spaces. Torrey and I have, however, intentionally sought to avoid the antici­ pation of an emotion or reaction through our designs. We have long appre­ ciated an implication posited by the twentieth-century philosopher Walter Benjamin that architecture should be an “offering,” and not an imposition. Architectural theorist and historian Kenneth Frampton provided an outline for an architecture which prompts the visitor through an architecture of topography, tectonics, and tactility. The Oklahoma City National Memorial project serves as an example of this, through a spatially diverse place of recording and recollection using locally relevant materials, landscape features, and shadows to awaken those who come to the memorial to seek an under­ standing of the bombing and its impact. Our own and our client’s bias or predispositions that shaped what and how aspects of the event may partici­ pate in the memorial space are admittedly present. Nevertheless, we attemp­ ted to abstract the visual and bring focus on to the material. We wish for visitors to find their own anchoring in the forum we created.

xvi

Foreword

Bringing attention to the role architecture plays in the public’s education and formation of impressions is a necessity fulfilled by this volume of rich essays. As the emerging field of neuroscience opens new understandings of how our brains, bodies, and emotions respond to spatial triggers, we are reminded that empathy is one of the most important tools available to those of us who accept responsibility for the built environment’s impact. Archi­ tectural messaging in the early twenty-first century is a slippery slope when misinformation, conspiracy theories, and multivalent interpretations prevail. The efforts of the architect may be misread or misrepresented as the result of a media post intended to elicit unrelated evocations. Abuse of architecture is equally common as a tool of illusion and allusion. Discussion and debate must continue to help us understand how and what designed places of the far and recent communicate to or awaken in us. Intentionality can and should be scrutinized, as every detail of material, shadow, and proportion becomes an opportunity to leverage. Architecture and heritage can be interchangeable notions in the case of this intellectual compilation, as affect is an ever-present tool and result of the stories we tell through the offering of our monuments to both the unsuspecting and the engaged. Hans E. Butzer, Academic and Practicing Architect Recipient of the American Institute of Architects Thomas Jefferson Award for Public Architecture Oklahoma City

Contributors

Rusaila Bazlamit is a sessional academic at the School of Design and Built Environment at Curtin University, Australia. Her research interests are in digital and interactive media, new museology, interactive architecture, design activism, and media representations. She is also a designer operating through her own atelier, “Lab Tajribi | Experimental Expressions.” Michelle Bentley is a Reader in International Relations and the Director of the Centre of International Public Policy at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. Her research has been published in prominent journals, including Security Studies, Review of International Studies, and International Affairs, and she is the author of Weapons of Mass Destruction and US Foreign Policy (Routledge, 2014). Hans E. Butzer is an award-winning architect and educator, and co-founder of Butzer Architects and Urbanism (BAU), together with his wife Torrey A. Butzer, Assoc. AIA. Butzer is best known for his role in the design of key public sites in Oklahoma City, his civic engagement and advocacy, and his role as an educator and leader at the University of Oklahoma. Perry L. Carter is an Associate Professor of Geography at Texas Tech University. His research areas include Black Geographies, Environmental Justice, and Spatial Data Science. He is a RESET Fellow (Race, Eth­ nicity, and Social Equity in Tourism), whose work can be found in Annals of Tourism Research, The Professional Geographer, and Tourism Geographies. Julia Cavicchi is currently a research associate at the Rich Earth Institute in Brattleboro, Vermont, where the community is reclaiming urine as fertilizer. She has an MRes in Human Geography from the University of Glasgow and a BA in Environmental Studies from Skidmore College. Jocelyn Evans is a Professor of Political Science and Associate Dean of the College of Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at the University of West Florida. She is the author or coauthor of several books and articles on American politics, the US Congress, and the social meaning of civic space.

xviii

List of contributors

Kenneth Foote is a Professor of Geography and the Director of the Urban and Community Studies Program at the University of Connecticut. Much of his work focuses on the social and geographical dynamics of public memory and commemoration, especially the response to violence as expressed in landscapes of the United States and Europe. Keith Gaddie is President’s Associates Presidential Professor of Journalism and Architecture at the University of Oklahoma in the United States. He is the author or coauthor of several books on American politics and the American South as well as editor of the journal Social Science Quarterly. Paul Gilchrist is a Principal Lecturer in Human Geography in the School of Environment and Technology at the University of Brighton, UK. He tea­ ches social and cultural geography, and has research interests in the geo­ graphies of leisure, heritage, and popular culture, publishing widely in these areas. Stephen P. Hanna is a Professor of Geography at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He is a Research Fellow with Tourism RESET, and his research interests lie at the intersection of land­ scape, race, and memory. Andrea Jelic´ is a postdoctoral researcher at Aalborg University, Denmark. Her research explores the nature of architectural experience and the effects of built spaces on people’s health and well-being from the integrated per­ spectives of architecture, embodied cognitive science, and phenomenology. She holds a PhD in Architecture from the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. Sarah Jencks is the Director of Education and Interpretation at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC, where she oversees all student and teacher programming, as well as both digital and on-site history storytelling. She sits on the education and interpretation committees for the American Alliance of Museums and the American Association for State and Local History. Phil Jones is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Geography in the School of Geo­ graphy, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birming­ ham, UK. His research interests revolve around creative approaches to research methods used to examine the cultural geographies of cities. Peng Liu is an Assistant Professor at Macau University of Science and Tech­ nology in China. He received his PhD in Visual Art at Curtin University, Australia. He is a practicing artist working with a wide range of media, and writes academic papers and book chapters in the field of cultural studies and visual culture. Sarah Breen Lovett is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Manager of the Future Building Initiative at Monash University Art Design &

List of contributors

xix

Architecture (MADA) in Melbourne, Australia. She is interested in inter­ disciplinary practices between art and architecture, specifically focusing on awareness of relationships to the built and landscape environments. Johanna Lozoya is the Director of GEE-MX Laboratory of Ideas: City and Emotions, and a Senior Researcher at the Center for Research on Archi­ tecture, Urbanism and Landscape (CIAUP) at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Her research and writing focuses on globalization, sensibilities and emotions, architecture and war, and cultural studies. David McKenzie is a public historian who works as Associate Director for Interpretive Resources in the Education Department at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC. He previously worked at the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington, The Design Minds, Inc., and the Alamo. He is a History PhD candidate at George Mason University, studying the United States and Mexico in the nineteenth century. Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas, PhD is Assistant Professor of Museum Studies and Public History at the University of Central Oklahoma and Director of the Master of Arts Graduate Program in Museum Studies. Her research criti­ cally explores the cultural politics of place-making at sites of difficult heritage, as well as the affective power of traumatic memory to shape national identities and their imagined publics. She is currently publishing a monograph on the National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center (Routledge, forthcoming). E. Arnold Modlin, Jr., is an Associate Professor of Geography at Norfolk State University in Virginia. He received his PhD in Geography and Anthropology at Louisiana State University. He is a Research Fellow with Tourism RESET and has written extensively on race, identity, and social memory at historic sites associated with slavery. Tess Osborne, is a Lecturer and Researcher in Demography in the Faculty of Spatial Sciences at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Her research interests focus around a biosocial approach to embodiment, technology, and mobilities. Angela M. Person is the Director of Research Initiatives and Strategic Planning for the College of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma. Her research looks at relationships between built environments and individual, commu­ nity, and public identities. As a fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, she co­ authored The Care and Keeping of Cultural Facilities (2014). Person is also co-editor of a book documenting the legacy of Bruce Goff and his protégés. Chris W. Post is an Associate Professor of Geography at Kent State University at Stark in Ohio. His research as a cultural and historical geographer focuses on the heritage of place, particularly as it becomes manifest on the cultural landscape through commemoration, place naming, and sense of place.

xx

List of contributors

Amy E. Potter is an Associate Professor at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia. She is a Research Fellow with Tourism RESET. Her research in the Caribbean and the US South centers on the themes of Black Geographies, cultural justice, and tourism. Aysha Preston holds a PhD in Global and Sociocultural Studies from Florida International University. Her work focuses on the African American middle class and material culture in Washington, DC. She is currently a user experience researcher contracting with Google. Colleen Prior is the Visitor Services Manager at Ford’s Theatre in Washing­ ton, DC, where she trains staff to give tours of the site, oversees the Visitor Services team, and maintains the Ford’s Theatre Society exhibit spaces. She is a doctoral candidate at The Catholic University of America focusing on religion in American culture. Aleksandar Stanicˇ ic´ is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research examines the calculated destruction of architecture in modern-day conflicts and the production of memory, identity, and power via the (mis)treatment of architectural heritage in post-conflict reconstructions. Jing Xu is an Assistant Professor in the English Department of Guangdong Ocean University, China. Her research focuses on the postcolonial mem­ ories of cities in Northeast China, especially memories of the Russians and the Japanese in Harbin, which she examines from the perspectives of architecture, literature, and film.

Affective architectures An introduction Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas and Angela M. Person

How do places manipulate our emotions? How are spaces affectious in their articulation and design? How do surrounding architectures assist in curating embodied encounters that are not just cognitively accumulated, but also visc­ erally experienced and acquired? What is the relationship between architecture and memory, affect and emotion, in fostering contemporary relationships to events, peoples, and places long past? Affective Architectures emerges from a growing literature at the interface of cultural geography and heritage studies which theorizes the significance of affect in shaping embodied encounters at places of memory (see Sturken 1997, 2007; Landsberg 2004; Williams 2007; Crang and Tolia-Kelly 2010; Doss 2010; and Sather-Wagstaff 2011 on affect in heritage; see Hoelscher and Alderman 2004; Johnson 2005; Jones 2005; Till 2005, 2006; Legg 2007; Dwyer and Alderman 2008; G. Hoskins 2007; Azar­ yahu and Foote 2008; Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and Azaryahu 2008; Hoel­ scher 2008; and Stangl 2008 on geographies of memory). Moving beyond representational conventions, this scholarship marks an important shift towards the ‘more-than-representational’ spaces (Thrift 2004; Thien 2005; Bondi 2005; Anderson and Harrison 2006; Lorimer 2008) of contemporary memorial and museum design (Gurian 1995; Yanow 1998; Vergeront 2002; Huyssen 1995, 2003; Waterton 2014). In the late nineteenth and early twen­ tieth centuries, for instance, dominant modes of memorialization relied heavily on monumentality. This aesthetic and mnemonic genre served to preserve his­ torical memory in place (see Nora 1989). Limits to monumentality came, however, in that, as an immobile, static manifestation of collective memory within the landscape, monumentality did the work of cultural remembering on its own (see Young 1993). Put otherwise: why remember if we have places that do it for us? As monuments became graveyards of collective memory over time, places for memory to live and die, the late twentieth century developed new memorial aesthetics favoring ‘anti-monumentality’ (see Carr 2003). Breaking with the rules of traditional memorial design, including figura­ tion, iconography, and doctrinal elements, the anti-memorial favors abstract, spatial, and experiential elements of memorial architecture. This trend prior­ itizes spatiality and the affective dynamics of memorial design in creating embodied experiences for visitors. As the scholarship acknowledges:

2

Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas and Angela M. Person Even as background, spaces are evocative. They speak to us … . The settings we inhabit—bedrooms and buses, airports and art galleries, playgrounds and pubs, museums and mosques—shape us as much as we shape them. (Vergeront 2002, 8, 12)

Built spaces are at once storytellers and part of the story being told. As storytellers they communicate values, beliefs, and feelings using vocabul­ aries of construction materials and design elements … . In this way [museum] spaces are both medium and message. (Yanow 1998, 215) [T]hinking about the spaces of heritage means shifting from the static ‘site’ or ‘artefact’ to questions of engagement, experience and perfor­ mance … . These are all multi-sensual sites, alive with intense and often lingering sounds, smells, and sights. (Waterton 2014, 824, 830) Although monumentality has never been fully abandoned in Western practices of memorialization, this shift towards “affective heritage” (MicieliVoutsinas 2017) has become commonplace in post-modern memorial architecture (see Gurian 1995; Linenthal 1995; Huyssen 2003; Savage 2009). According to Micieli-Voutsinas, “affective heritage redirects public learning at places of memory towards embodied, emotional learning” (Micieli-Voutsinas, forthcoming). Unlike its mnemonic predecessors, affective heritage relies less on authoritative narratives and official rhetoric to shape and sustain meaning at commemorative sites. In affective heritage, the impetus is for visitors to feel meaning as it is produced through embodied encounters with and within memorial spaces. As Waterton understands, [N]arratives of heritage are mediated in affective worlds that shape their reception, tapping into everyday emotional resonances and circulations of feelings … which means understanding heritage as a complex and embodied process of meaning- and sense-making. (2014, 824) This collection of essays explores how “affective heritage” mobilizes Affective Architectures to produce embodied experiences for site visitors in relation to memorial dogma. Here, Affective Architectures are understood as the mne­ monic structures that assist in memory and heritage-making. From the intimate spaces of the familial grave and innocuous urban infrastructures to the grandeur of the Southern Plantation and Imperial Palace, such affectious spaces constitute a lexicon of more-than-representational gestures recorded in both material and immaterial registries, forged throughout spatial design,

Affective architectures: An introduction

3

including structure, scale, materiality, texture, touch, lighting, sound, smell, enclosure, egress, and exposure. Absorbed into unconscious, conscious, and semi-conscious modes of embodiment, affective architectures “produce a kind of ‘feeling truth’” about the historical present in places of memory and heri­ tage (Micieli-Voutsinas 2017, 94). This is especially true in places com­ memorating traumatic pasts, wherein the more-than-representational spaces of memorial and museal landscapes are vital to representing that which is ‘unrepresentable’ and unknowable: trauma itself (see Freud 1939, 1955; Felman and Laub 1992; Caruth 1995, 1996; Brown 1995; LaCapra 1994, 2001). Drawing together an interdisciplinary collection of essays spanning geo­ graphically diverse architectural sites—including Ford’s Theatre, the site of President Lincoln’s assassination; the Estadio Nacional of Santiago, Chile, where 12,000 detainees were held following the ouster of President Salva­ dor Allende; and Unit 731, the site of a biological and chemical warfare research unit of the Imperial Japanese Army in Harbin, China, amongst others—this edited collection assembles critical dialogue amongst scholars, practitioners, and students engaging in affective and other more-than­ representational approaches to cultural memory, heritage, and identitymaking. Building upon earlier scholarship on non-representational theory (see Thrift 2004; Anderson and Harrison 2006; Lorimer 2008, amongst others), more-than-representational scholarship encompasses how affective worlds are produced through both material and immaterial processes, experi­ entially negotiated through embodied encounters with and within built envir­ onments, difficult and banal. Throughout Affective Architectures, the authors engage and define the “more-than-representational” modes of inhabiting heritage environments—the affective, visceral, and atmospheric. This collec­ tive exploration of heritage architectures through more-than-representational lenses is one of the significant contributions of this text. Chapters engage themes such as: architectural performativity and spatial narratives of place and place-making; thanatourism and the more-than-representational affective economies of difficult heritage sites; everyday negotiations of affect, embodi­ ment, and subjectivity in built environments of (extra)ordinary use; spatial design and affectious place-making in virtual reality; as well as ethical dilem­ mas of Affective Architectures on contemporary publics. What is the rela­ tionship between architecture and memory, affect and emotion, in fostering contemporary relationships to past events, peoples, and places long past? Chapter contributions negotiate the im/material landscapes of our built environments and how such Affective Architectures are experienced, felt, and mediated by and through the bodies that patron them. As Tolia-Kelly, Waterton, and Watson have observed in Heritage, Affect and Emotion: Politics, Practices and Infrastructures, “feeling the past through embodied presencing of geological/environmental space-time is core to understanding identity, difference and alterity at heritage sites” (2017, 3; emphasis in original; also see Rose and Tolia-Kelly 2012). Affective

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Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas and Angela M. Person

approaches to places and other landscapes of memory have since dominated heritage studies as scholars, practitioners, and artists account for ‘feelings of place’ at sites of heritage (again, see Sturken 1997, 2007; Landsberg 2004; Williams 2007; Crang and Tolia-Kelly 2010; Doss 2010; Sather-Wagstaff 2011; Picard and Robinson 2012; Saul and Waterton 2019; De Nardi 2020). Affect, according to Thrift, is “a sense of push in the world” (2004, 64). In memorial architecture, affect “is pushing, pulling, or lifting us to feel, think, or act” in relation to place-based knowledges and narratives (Kraftl and Adey 2008, 215). Distinguished from emotion, affect is both unconscious and semi-conscious interactions with the im/material worlds that inform our pre­ sent-day feelings of and about the im/material dynamics oscillating between past and present. These visceral impressions engage the body as ‘raw’ bio­ sensory ‘data’ through biophysical stimuli that trigger the body to neurologi­ cally process surrounding environments, moods, and sensations, translating these sensations into more-conscious modes of being: “I am feeling over­ whelmed”; “I am feeling anxious.” Emotion, on the other hand, is largely understood as “a cognitive process that can be linguistically represented, while affect is a bodily experience of intensity that cannot be captured by narration” (Yang 2014, 10; see also Massumi 2002, 28). Beyond words then, affect is “the how of emotion” (Thien 2005, 451; emphasis in original); it describes “the motion of emotion” (Thien 2005, 451) as it moves through body-mind channels to become—although not always—a knowable emotional state: “I am sad”; “I am fearful.” The import of bodies to these affective encounters is even more pronounced in places commemorating difficult, or traumatic, pasts. According to Nord­ strom, “because the encounter with violence is a profoundly personal event, it is fundamentally linked to processes of self-identity and the politics of per­ sonhood” (Nordstrom 1997, 4 quoted in Drozdzewski, De Nardi, and Waterton 2016, 1). As such, the aforementioned literature traces the politics of affect as radiating outward from places of difficult heritage through embodied encounters with both official and unofficial heritage and memorymaking. From post-humanist theories to digital humanities, this ‘affective turn’ in heritage studies has reinvigorated interest in spatial approaches in both the humanities and social sciences and, in some instances, led to the creation of new hybrid fields of study, such as the spatial humanities. Architecture, in particular, is experiencing a turn toward place-based, emotional practice, and this manuscript is at the leading edge among resour­ ces for architectural practitioners and educators interested in engaging affect. In 2017, Charu Suri wrote in Architectural Digest that “architects and designers are increasingly seeking to imbue spaces with deeper sensory reso­ nance.” Evidence of architecture’s turn toward affective practice can also be seen in the recent books Creating Sensory Spaces: The Architecture of the Invisible (Erwine 2017) and Mind in Architecture: Neuroscience, Embodiment and the Future of Design (Robinson and Pallasmaa 2015). In Creating Sensory Spaces, Erwine argues that architects should consider “sensescapes,”

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including thermal, olfactory, acoustic, and somatic factors, alongside the tec­ tonic and visual characteristics normally privileged by designers. Bringing together the work of neuroscientists, architects, philosophers, and others, Mind in Architecture suggests ways architects and scientists can share expertise to enhance embodied experiences. In response to such more-than-representational elements of design, more and more architects are grounding their work in evidence-based approaches that draw on interdisciplinary research to enhance outcomes for occupants. For example, Boston-based MASS Design Group has shaped its programming around research questions that consider how atmospheric design can positively influence behavioral outcomes. Their 2016 Maternity Waiting Homes project in Malawi explored how improving mothers’ experiences in the homes could increase their use, thus improving outcomes for both mothers and their newborn children. MASS Design Group is not alone; so-called human-centered design practices are increasingly pop­ ular with multinational firms like Gensler, whose principals have asserted that “[t]he best experiences anticipate people’s needs, tap into their emotions and engage the senses” (D. Hoskins and Cohen 2017). Affective Architectures is in direct conversation with this emerging body of interdisciplinary scholarship and practice. By assembling interdisciplinary scholars spanning cultural geography, architecture, heritage studies, art, poli­ tical science, and other fields, Affective Architectures emphasizes the spatial awareness of memorial architectures in contemporary practices and processes of commemoration, emotion, and memory-making. With particular emphasis on more-than-representational aspects of heritage design, user interaction, and interpretation, Affective Architectures expands these conversations to emer­ gent areas of inquiry, such as methodological and pedagogical considerations (Timm Knudsen and Stage 2015; Drozdzewski and Birdsall 2019; Post in this volume), including political, as well as geopolitical, subjectivity-making (Micieli-Voutsinas, forthcoming). Affective Architectures is broken into three main areas of inquiry: 1) Affective Politics; 2) Embedded Geographies; and 3) Affective Methodologies. Woven throughout these three sections are explorations of personal and political meaning-making. The essays within “Affective Politics” illustrate how acts of remembering at difficult sites, like the Estadio Nacional de Santiago de Chile, may intentionally privilege some emotions over others for political purposes. “Embedded Geographies” considers how meaning-making practices trans­ form ordinary places, like gravesites and sewers, into extraordinary ones over time. The final section, “Affective Methodologies,” documents means of engaging with affective heritage from scholarly and artistic perspectives that span cognitive science, virtual reality, and performance. By considering embodied facets of public history and remembering, this collection establishes rich precedents for future research that looks at how emotive histories are made, re-made, and sustained. Essay contributions are made by both leading and emerging scholars in their respective fields, and grounded in empirical and experiential approaches

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to more-than-representational ways of understanding everyday practices and places of memory, heritage, and meaning-making. Trained in both cultural geography and museum studies, the editors hope to facilitate greater interac­ tion between scholars, practitioners, and students, encouraging a new gen­ eration of interdisciplinary approaches to Affective Architectures that can serve as a springboard for further discussion, research direction, and design.

Part I. Affective politics: negotiating identities in places of difficult memory Memorials, and other sites of public history, are premier examples of affective architecture within contemporary civic life. As “archives of public affect … embodied in … material form and narrative content,” memorials are reposi­ tories of collective experience, including affects and emotions (Doss 2010, 13). How a society feels about its past is dynamic, the result of power in motion. According to Thrift, “affect has always been a key element of politics” (2004, 64). “When we manipulate affect in memorial architecture, we are making political decisions with political ramifications,” as Evans and Gaddie instruct us (this volume). How society remembers events, peoples, and places, and commemorates those histories within the built environment, reveals much about contemporary society and its relationship to the past. As Paul Connerton expands: We experience our present world in a context which is causally connected with past events and objects, and hence with reference to events and objects which we are not experiencing when we are experiencing the pre­ sent … . present factors tend to influence—some might say distort—our recollections of the past, but also because past factors tend to influence, or distort, our experiences of the present. (1989, 2) Sites of heritage are thus infused with political sentiments and sensibilities as sometimes-divergent publics seek to vie for their ‘definitive’ meaning. In their essay “‘Give them more and more for their dollar’: Searching for Slavery Amongst the Plantation Edutainment Complex,” Amy E. Potter, Stephen P. Hanna, Perry L. Carter, and E. Arnold Modlin, Jr. look at how antebellum plantations, important heritage sites in the US South, have been reluctant to engage in meaningful discussions of slavery in an attempt to appeal to general audiences and attract (mostly white) tourist dollars. Using ‘edutainment’ as their analytical framework for exploring the intensifying economic constraints placed upon the “plantation edutainment complex,” the authors reveal an affective economy that privileges ‘pleasant emotions’ for site visitors at the expense of generating more meaningful discussions of racebased slavery. As “a vendor of commodified history,” the plantation museum thus “works to disengage visitors from affectively engaging with the painful histories of African enslavement” in favor of ‘family-friendly entertainment’

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predicated on antebellum-romanticism (Potter et al., this volume). Here, the strategic avoidance of black laborers and systematic human bondage affec­ tively redirects plantation-goers’ emotional attachments to non-human ele­ ments—such as plantation architectures, pastoral and romantic sceneries, and historical trees—circumventing more meaningful, more truthful histories of the antebellum South and the racialized economy that created it. In “The Old/New Unit 731 Museum: A Place of Memory and Oblivion,” author Jing Xu looks at the site of a former biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army in Harbin, China during World War II, or Unit 731, as it was known. After being abandoned for decades, the Chinese government established the first Crime Evidence Exhibition Hall in the former Japanese Army headquarters of Unit 731 in 1985, with a new, stand-alone exhibition hall later constructed just across from the original site in 2015. Comparing the new and the old exhibi­ tion halls as sites of traumatic remembrance and erasure, Xu explores the politics of preserving difficult history ex situ, with the original architectural site falling into disarray nearby. For Xu, the two sites work cooperatively and competitively to tell stories of national humiliation—but at the expense of forgetting the ‘authentic’ architecture of trauma and its embedded place-memories of torture. Johanna Lozoya’s essay similarly traverses the tenuous dynamics of social memory and forgetting as architectural sites are transformed from places of pleasure into places of torture, and, more recently, to places of ‘difficult heri­ tage.’ In “Dwellers of Silence: Conflict and Affective Borderlands of the Estadio Nacional, Santiago De Chile,” Lozoya explores one particular aspect of the embodiment, practice, and architectural performance in places of terror and violence: “silence.” The Estadio Nacional de Santiago de Chile was a public sports stadium that was violently transformed into a concentration camp during Augusto Pinochet’s military coup d’état in 1973. As a site that pulls visitors to encounter egregious human rights abuses, disappearance, torture, and detention, circulations of affect at the Estadio Nacional place visitors in political conflict with the politics of collective memory and forget­ ting: “on the part of the survivor, the suppression of telling; on the part of the descendant, the fear to finding out” (Lozoya, this volume). Much like Xu, Lozoya approaches the authentic site of trauma as an archive of affective pasts that needs to be excavated—or, in Xu’s case, preserved—in order to be collectively recalled, re-experienced, and ultimately redressed in the present. But whose victimization is being remembered and why? Such questions are ultimately politically charged by the equally vexing question of perpetration, and this is especially true for sites where culpability is the provenance of the state itself. Here, the affective politics of memory and forgetting informs, and is informed by, national reckoning with human rights atrocities, whereby contemporary political subjects are drawn into sometimes competing histories of national pasts and present-day conceptions of national belonging and nation-building.

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In “Toxic Landfills, Survivor Trees, and Dust Cloud Memories: More-thanHuman Ecologies of 9/11 Memory,” Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas and Julia Cavicchi explore the symbolic power of non-human elements in memorializ­ ing the September 11th (9/11) terrorist attacks on the United States. As sur­ vivors of traumatic events, nonhuman elements have long been preserved in, even added to, memorial landscapes for their representational capacities to “say what cannot be said.” Beyond their mobilization as passive symbols, however, nonhumans also exert a “creative presence” that affectively shapes memorial sites, wherein memorial ecologies are negotiated and co-constituted through human and nonhuman lives. At the World Trade Center, both human and nonhuman experiences of violence and violation are implicated in the “ecologies of memory” preserved and curated at “Ground Zero.” Focusing on ecologies of 9/11 memory, the authors argue that spatially fixed narratives of trauma obfuscate the environmentally diffuse human victims of the Septem­ ber 11th terrorist attacks, as well as how nonhuman actors co-constitute, contradict, and transform these memorial spaces emotionally. Here, 9/11 memorial spaces employ the affective power of nonhuman actors to repro­ duce exclusionary narratives of cultural trauma while obscuring very real environmentally diffuse human victims and ongoing harms, domestically and abroad. In Jocelyn Evans and Keith Gaddie’s essay “The Affect of Memorializing the Loss, the Affect of Losing the Memorial: Confederate War Monuments in New Orleans,” the authors explore the politics of affect as Confederate memorials express competing cultural values in built form. Efforts to remove Civil War monuments as symbols of white supremacy and pro-slavery senti­ ment thus raise critical, moral questions concerning the role of memorial architecture in the US South, specifically the role of Civil War memorials in projecting communal values. By critically examining the symbolism of the Lee Memorial in New Orleans, Louisiana, and the removal of the Lee Statue from its column in 2017, this chapter contemplates how “Confederate monu­ ments present a problem of competing and disturbing affect.” Here, the memorial landscape evolves as it is reproduced through the bodily encounters and interactions of multiple publics, wherein public contestation directly shapes and is shaped by the affective power relations expressed through and encoded within memorial space. The fate of Confederate monuments thus challenges readers to consider the implications of two separate affective rea­ lities stitched across unequal racial geographies and their ensuing power struggles to resist or dominate the cultural landscape and its hegemonic meaning. In highlighting the complex relational quality of affect in memorial archi­ tecture, the chapters in this section beckon us to engage with the traumatic past as various national cultures struggle to sense—and therefore make sense of—their painful pasts, drawing meaning for their collective futures. “These sentiments align with the observation that in the new museum econ­ omy, the goal is to generate ‘creative and memorable experiences’ rather than

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simply ‘contemplation and the acquisition of knowledge’” (Potter et al., this volume, quoting Balloffet, Courvoisier, and Lagier 2014, 8). As Yang notes, “affect can direct people to act in ways that support (or challenge) power” (Yang 2014, 17 quoted in Xu, this volume).

Part II. Embedded geographies: negotiating the affective in (extra) ordinary landscapes In embedded geographies, the politics of memorial architecture is negotiated through the delicate interplay of agents, actions, and affects as places are transformed from sites of relative obscurity to sites of deeply personal—and political—meaning, sometimes over generations. “Memorializing Lincoln’s Life Where He Died” by Colleen Prior, Aysha Preston, David McKenzie, Sarah Jencks, and Kenneth Foote, for example, explores how Ford’s Theatre underwent a century-long journey from a working theater to crime scene, to federal office building, to museum—back to working theater—and, even­ tually, to historic site, after Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865. Simi­ larly, the house where Lincoln died, the Petersen House, was transformed from private residence to law office, to museum, and finally to a historic house. These changes did not occur all at once, however, nor did they occur without conflict and controversy. The affective meanings of places like Ford’s Theatre and the Petersen House are important in understanding the trans­ formation of ordinary, everyday buildings into major visitor destinations; sites of extraordinary significance. What tourists see and feel at the Ford Theatre today is the result of debates over memory, meaning, and emotion that extend back to 1865. The intergenerational resonance of Beijing’s Forbidden City and its imper­ ial architecture is the subject of Peng Liu’s chapter “Body in the Forbidden City: Embodied Sensibilities and Lived Experience in the Affective Archi­ tecture.” Here, the author investigates the interrelationship between embodied affects, city ruins, and tourist bodies that enables visitors to the imperial ruins ‘to feel’ the evocative power of the former dynastic spaces, creating emotional legacies for contemporary Chinese subjects and their descendants. The con­ struction and design of the Forbidden City to illicit bodily control and confer rule throughout the Ming and Qing reigns, for example, ‘moves’ into the present day by attaching itself onto the body of the author, mobilizing its Confucian affects in contemporary embodied encounters. Despite the poli­ tical transformation of the former dynastic headquarters into a cultural museum in the early twentieth century—marking the official end of state Confucianism—the former imperial site retains its cultural authority to impose upon, and ultimately ‘reign over,’ site visitors, despite the site’s official demotion to a tourist destination. In her essay “Colonial Unknowing and Affective Uncertainty: Sewers and Eels in Troy, New York,” Julia Cavicchi looks at the urban infra­ structure of refuse. Exploring the sewer system as a vestige of colonial

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‘architecture,’ Cavicchi argues that the sewer operates as a form of “indus­ trial amnesia,” obscuring the affective residue of settler colonialism in everyday urban life (Nadir and Peppermint 2015). As mundane reservoirs of history and urban displacement, sewers are abject, forgotten sites of subterranean waste flows, palimpsestic ecologies that simultaneously pre­ serve and obfuscate indigeneity from the landscape. Cavicchi traces the infrastructural haunting of these dilapidated colonial arteries by generations of glass eels that invade the pipes from the nearby Poesten Kill stream. Haunting the city’s subterranean colonial architecture, the eels carry with them intergenerational memories, and microbes, of toxicity and survival, illuminating the potentiality of the sites as counter-archives of indigenous knowledge. Here, eels become “specters that collapse time, rendering empire’s foundational past impossible to erase from the national present” (Tuck and Ree 2016, 654), reflective of both human and nonhuman practices of migration and memory. In “Lamenting the Dead: The Affective Afterlife of Poets’ Graves,” Paul Gilchrist similarly traces how everyday meanings and usages of memorial architecture change over time. Steeped within a long tradition of writers paying respect and performing rituals of homage at poets’ graves, Gilchrist highlights how poets’ graves have become spaces of emotional encounter and affective exchange as a new generation of artists hopes to cement their own imaginative agency and burgeoning poetical identities with those of their poetical forebears. In this tradition, Gilchrist explores the importance of ‘famous’ gravesites as sites of contemporary literary and heritage tourism. Traversing the ancestral path of the author’s great-great-great-grandfather, Robert Gilchrist (1797–1844), considered to be one of the finest and most prolific poets working in the town of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the chapter is interwoven with the author’s own narrative of discovery, re-membering, and visiting the dead in search for im/material traces to his kin. Drawing upon research into the early Victorian poetic community in the northeast of Eng­ land, Gilchrist details how the poets’ graves map onto the present and con­ siders the multi-temporal and affective afterlife of these extra/ordinary places as both spaces of public heritage and private meaning. In his essay, “Placing Affective Architectures in Landscapes of Public Pedagogy at the University,” Chris W. Post similarly engages the delicate politics of remembrance and forgetting as violence re-produces educational spaces as extra-ordinary places of cultural import. Exploring how com­ memorative landscapes perform the work of public pedagogy within uni­ versity campuses, Post explores the institutional cultivation of ‘difficult’ memory at Kent State University and Syracuse University. Responding to the May 4, 1970, Kent State shootings, as well as the commemoration of faculty and students’ lives lost to the 1982 Lockerbie bombing, Post pontificates the complex emotional landscapes of remembrance and forgetting as institutional memory is both encouraged and challenged by public desire to learn more about these painful histories. The essay concludes with an example of

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collaborative public commemoration at local memorial sites. Although the collaboration fails to transform the proposed memorial in more complex pedagogical ways, the chapter culminates in emphasizing the critical role architecture and design play in cultivating pedagogical and affective potential within memorial landscapes.

Part III. Affective methodologies: negotiating more-than-representational approaches in spatial design Beginning this section on affective methodologies, “The Memory in Bodily and Architectural Making: Reflections from Embodied Cognitive Science” by Andrea Jelic´ and Aleksandar Stanicˇ ic´ explores how, following a recent experiential and embodied turn in architecture, a new field of research inspired by embodied cognitive science has started illuminating brain and bodily mechanisms behind architecture’s ability to affect our perception, emotions, memory, and imagination—and, by extension, how design strate­ gies like ‘affective architecture’ can be effective in creating meaningful and memorable places. Starting from the enactive-embodied cognition perspective, the authors propose that the fundamental pre-condition of memory- and meaning-making in memorial architecture resides in the embodied and affec­ tive experiences of spatial settings. Here, the embodied experience of archi­ tecture is conceptualized as the materialization of sociocultural patterns, practices, and meanings, whose power of triggering emotional responses is both a source of understanding the scripted, designed narrative as well as a place for reinvention of the socio-political self in our fast-changing times. To conclude, the authors underline the changeability of the politics of affect and embodiment in architectural design and, consequently, architecture’s role and limits in creating affective heritage. This intricate oscillation between the politics of affect and affective politics is readily employed in Michelle Bentley’s essay “Architecture as Memor­ ialisation: ‘Using’ Buildings to Remember the Shoah.” Exploring the role of performativity in relation to ‘more-than-representational’ architecture, Bent­ ley specifically looks at embodied, visceral responses to the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague, a Holocaust memorial whose interior walls are covered with the names of nearly 80,000 Jews killed in the Holocaust. Consequently, Pinkas is not simply a building that contains a memorial, but is a memorial unto itself. Etched into the walls of the synagogue, the names at Pinkas transform the building’s interior into ‘fleshy wounds.’ Here, the names envelop visitors in their sheer volume, performing the scale of mass murder, where the presence of the scars is visceral. The chapter thus identifies key ways in which Pinkas is performative: when architecture is mobilized as a direct mode of memorializa­ tion (i.e., commemorating names), creating an emotionally moving, immersive experience. Such affective usages of space underpin the essay’s wider con­ clusion that performativity is both essential and central to comprehending more-than-representational atmospheres.

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“Using Game Engines to Create Activist Spatial Experiences of the occupation of Palestine,” by Rusaila Bazlamit, similarly contemplates the utilization of memorial space to communicate difficult histories, like the Holocaust in Europe or Apartheid in South Africa. Bazlamit also notes how peoples in contemporary conflicts do not have the means or capacity to build physical structures, like buildings and memorials, to communicate human rights abuses and raise awareness for contemporary suffering. This chapter introduces the term ‘activist spatial experiences’ to describe more ephemeral, temporary memory-spaces created through virtual reality and artistic environments. With a focus on communicating Palestinian narratives of the conflict and spatial experiences of Occupation, a prototype entitled “re:Visit Palestine” was designed using the low-cost immersive and interactive Unity game engine. The prototype consisted of an interactive virtual environment and video projections to communicate complex political narratives for audiences by simulating the spaces and places of Occupied Palestine. Here, the author argues that virtual memory environments are similarly effective to traditional memorial architectures in supporting both didactic and emotional learning, and can be applied to other contested or complex political narratives, allowing for more nuanced meaning and means of representation. Space is significant in places of contested narratives, as Sarah Breen Lovett likewise discusses in her chapter “Embedded Memories of Site at Woodford Academy, National Trust of Australia.” With the ambition of “loosening narrative,” Breen Lovett discusses a series of contemporary art works from the Woodford Academy in order to allow for more-than-human memories of site to emerge. Here, loosening of narrative means allowing for the absence of dogmatic histories to allow new conscious and subconscious forms of meaning-making in situ. By looking at her own art and curatorial practice, writings by other artists involved at Woodford Academy, as well as writings by Deleuze, Spinoza, and contemporary affect theorists, she suggests how place may hold indigenous memories that can be felt haptically or emotionally by visitors. Drawing on contemporary art practices as methodologies for ‘loosening’ of the (colonial) historical narrative, Breen Lovett demonstrates how space for embedded place-memories can emerge through embodied encounters with the environment. In “Virtual Reality and Memorials: (Re)Building and Experiencing the Past,” Tess Osborne and Phil Jones artfully discuss the promises and problems that arise from using simulated environments as a mode of memorymaking. Reflecting upon an international workshop in Washington, DC, that explored virtual reality (VR) as an embodied methodology for exploring affect in historical geographies, the authors critically analyze how VR can be used to reconstruct history (both real and imagined) and the implications of being immersed ‘in the past.’ Whilst VR may have promise in memory research, Osborne and Jones argue that it is important to avoid the pitfalls of ‘solutionism’ (cf. Morozov 2013), and to consider the practical and embodied nature(s) of being in a virtual environment to ensure that VR is used effectively, and ethically, in memory and heritage research.

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Affective Architectures is organized to engage scholars and practitioners with questions familiar to the fields of cultural geography, heritage, museum studies, art and architecture—for instance, what is the relationship between memory, identity, and place?—and introduce them to more contemporary engagements with emotion and affect like those mentioned earlier: How does place manipulate our emotions through embodied encounters with the built environment and why? How are spaces affectious, in their articulation and design, in ways that curate embodied encounters of place and of memory that are not just cognitively accumulated, but also viscerally acquired? We hope that scholars and practitioners will engage this collection of authors, and the questions they raise, as a springboard for new and intentional directions in interpreting and designing heritage spaces and the “feeling truth(s)” they evoke. We envision an intellectual landscape in which heritage scholars, like those represented in this volume, regularly collaborate with heritage practi­ tioners—a creative community in which architecture and public history stu­ dents are exposed to evidence-based affective approaches as part of their core curricula. Affective Architectures contributes to this vision by documenting how particular identities negotiate difficult history through architectural design, how ordinary landscapes become extraordinary, and emerging meth­ ods for exploring how more-than-representational phenomena can articulate hidden feelings and memories of place. As you read Affective Architectures, we invite you to consider how your own experiences and work can be enri­ ched by cultivating a deliberate attentiveness to how “sense[s] of push in the world” operate all around us and the particular powers these entanglements hold when they converge on geographies of heritage (Thrift 2004).

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Jones, Owain. 2005. “An Ecology of Emotion, Memory, Self and Landscape.” In Emotional Geographies, edited by Joyce Davidson, Liz Bondi, and Mick Smith, 205–218. Aldershot: Ashgate. Kraftl, Peter, and Peter Adey. 2008. “Architecture/Affect/Inhabitation: Geographies of Being-In Buildings.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 98 (1): 213–231. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045600701734687. LaCapra, Dominick. 1994. Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. LaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Landsberg, Alison. 2004. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Legg, Stephen. 2007. “Reviewing Geographies of Memory/Forgetting.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 39 (2): 456–466. https://doi.org/10.1068/a38170. Linenthal, Edward T. 1995. Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum. New York: Columbia University Press. Lorimer, Hayden. 2008. “Cultural Geography: Non-representational Conditions and Concerns.” Progress in Human Geography 32 (4): 551–559. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0309132507086882. MASS Design Group. n.d. “Maternity Waiting Village Evaluation.” Accessed January 17, 2020. https://massdesigngroup.org/work/research/maternity-waiting-village-evaluation. Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Micieli-Voutsinas, Jacque. 2017. “An Absent Presence: Affective Heritage at the National September 11th Memorial & Museum.” Emotion, Space and Society 24: 93–104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2016.09.005. Micieli-Voutsinas, Jacque. Forthcoming. Mining Memory, Mediating Trauma at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum: An Affective Heritage. New York: Routledge. Morozov, Evgeny. 2013. To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. New York: PublicAffairs. Nadir, Leila Christine, and Cary Peppermint. 2015. “Edible Ecologies and Industrial Food.” Paper presented at the ASLE Biennial Conference, Moscow, ID. Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26: 7–24. https://doi.org/10.2307/2928520. Nordstrom, Carolyn. 1997. A Different Kind of War Story. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Picard, David, and Mike Robinson, eds. 2012. Emotion in Motion: Tourism, Affect and Transformation. Farnham: Ashgate. Robinson, Sarah, and Juhani Pallasmaa, eds. 2015. Mind in Architecture: Neuroscience, Embodiment, and the Future of Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rose, Gillian, and Divya P. Tolia-Kelly, eds. 2012. Visuality/Materiality: Images, Objects and Practices. Farnham: Ashgate. Rose-Redwood, Reuben, Derek Alderman, and Maoz Azaryahu. 2008. “Collective Memory and the Politics of Urban Space: An Introduction.” GeoJournal 73 (3): 161–164. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-008-9200-6. Sather-Wagstaff, Joy. 2011. Heritage That Hurts: Tourists in the Memoryscapes of September 11. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Saul, Hayley, and Emma Waterton, eds. 2019. Affective Geographies of Transformation, Exploration and Adventure: Rethinking Frontiers. London: Routledge.

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Savage, Kirk. 2009. Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape. Berkeley: University of California Press. Smith, Laurajane, Margaret Wetherell, and Gary Campbell, eds. 2018. Emotion, Affective Practices, and the Past in the Present. New York: Routledge. Stangl, Paul. 2008. “The Vernacular and the Monumental: Memory and Landscape in Post-war Berlin.” GeoJournal 73 (3): 245–253. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-008-9206-0. Sturken, Marita. 1997. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sturken, Marita. 2007. Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Suri, Charu. 2017. “Inside the Rise of Emotional Design.” Architectural Digest. Accessed January 20, 2020. www.architecturaldigest.com/story/emotional-design. Thien, Deborah. 2005. “After or Beyond Feeling? A Consideration of Affect and Emotion in Geography.” Area 37 (4): 450–456. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762. 2005.00643a.x. Thrift, Nigel. 2004. “Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect.” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 86 (1): 57–78. https://doi.org/10. 1111/j.0435-3684.2004.00154.x. Till, Karen E. 2005. The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Till, Karen E. 2006. “Memory Studies.” History Workshop Journal 62 (1): 325–341. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbl023. Timm Knudsen, Britta, and Carsten Stage, eds. 2015. Affective Methodologies: Devel­ oping Cultural Research Strategies for the Study of Affect. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Tolia-Kelly, Divya P., Emma Waterton, and Steve Watson, eds. 2017. Heritage, Affect and Emotion: Politics, Practices and Infrastructures. New York: Routledge. Tuck, Eve, and C. Ree. 2016. “A Glossary of Haunting.” In Handbook of Autoethnography, edited by Stacy Holman Jones, Tony E. Adams, and Carolyn Ellis, 639–658. London: Routledge. Vergeront, Jeanne. 2002. “Shaping Spaces for Learners and Learning.” Journal of Museum Education 27 (1): 8–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/10598650.2002.11510455. Waterton, Emma. 2014. “A More-Than-Representational Understanding of Heritage? The ‘Past’ and the Politics of Affect.” Geography Compass 8 (11): 823–833. https:// doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12182. Williams, Paul. 2007. Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities. New York: Berg. Yang, Jie, ed. 2014. The Political Economy of Affect and Emotion in East Asia. London: Routledge. Yanow, Dvora. 1998. “Space Stories: Studying Museum Buildings as Organizational Spaces While Reflecting on Interpretive Methods and Their Narration.” Journal of Management Inquiry 7 (3): 215–239. https://doi.org/10.1177/105649269873004. Young, James E. 1993. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Part I

Affective politics Negotiating identities in places of difficult memory

1

“Give them more and more for their dollar” Searching for slavery amongst the plantation edutainment complex Amy E. Potter, Stephen P. Hanna, Perry L. Carter and E. Arnold Modlin, Jr.

On a warm Saturday in October 2017, Amy (first author) and her parents toured Magnolia Plantation and Gardens in Charleston, South Carolina. They each paid twenty-eight dollars for a package including access to the grounds and a forty-five-minute Nature Tram Tour. The sold-out tour of over forty people featured a scenic tram ride through landscapes of rice fields and marshes filled with local wildlife. On the first leg of the tour, the tram rounded a lake where the guide directed riders to admire a family of turtles sunning themselves. An alligator, resting on the road, lingered as the multiple-car tram rumbled by. Visitors squealed in delight while rapidly snapping photos of the reptile. Over the loudspeaker, the guide, who was clearly elated, yelled back to the alligator, “I’ll talk to your boss about getting you a pay raise!” Throughout the tour, the guide focused visitors’ attention on the oak trees along the route, describing the stately trees on the property as survivors—survivors of hurricanes and the Civil War. When the guide eventually introduced the topic of the famous Carolina Gold Rice, there was initially no mention of enslaved laborers who toiled to grow the crop, and whose ancestors—brought to South Carolina in the 1700s—transferred knowledge of rice production from Senegambia (Carney 2001). When the production of rice was finally linked to slave labor, the guide jokingly stated that the crop was “hand planted by slaves” as there “was no John Deere [tractors].” Much later, visitors were reminded that Charleston became one of the richest cities in the United States, with thirteen signers of the Declaration of Independence deriving their fortunes from rice production. During the tour, the tram passed various Halloween-themed scenes pre­ pared for the plantation’s annual Fright Night (Figure 1.1).1 At one point, these scenes framed the slave cabins in the distance. The tram sped up as it passed the four antebellum-era slave cabins. The guide prompted visitors to “look at the scenery as we drive by.” The Magnolia Nature Tram Tour is one example of the ways the Plantation Edutainment Complex (PEC) pushes the lives of the enslaved to the margins

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Figure 1.1 Gruesome scenes greeted visitors on the Nature Tram Tour in October of 2017 for Magnolia’s Ninth Annual Fright Night

by curating a visitor experience that prioritizes affective connections to weal­ thy white elites and non-human actors such as exotic animals, ancient trees, and the architectural style of the Big House. Most research on plantation tourism has concentrated on the representation of slavery by guides in the space of the Big House (Eichstedt and Small 2002; Modlin 2008). We argue that these previous approaches have largely ignored the various ways operators commodify their sites, which ultimately compete with meaningful affective engagements with slavery, even as sites shift to more inclusive narratives. Using the framework of edutainment and affect, this chapter moves beyond the house tour to explore the growing PEC. What are the possibilities of doing justice to the enslaved and engaging in reparative history work when slavery is but one component of a multifaceted commercial enterprise?

Theoretical framework: edutainment and affect In the United States, historic sites witnessed an increase in interest after World War II, especially leading up to the nation’s 1976 bicentennial year (Tyson 2013). However, recent museum literature points to an alarming trend of visitor decline occurring within heritage tourism.2 The former vice pre­ sident of Colonial Williamsburg, Cary Carson, noted “history museum administrators should be … prompted to consider a ‘Plan B’ to ensure that

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their programming speaks more intensely to modern visitors’ learning pre­ ferences and their persistent desire to connect to the past” (Tyson 2013, 12). Van Aalst and Boogaarts contend the shift has resulted in a repositioning in museum function: Traditionally their core activities have been the conservation and restoration of the collection and the pursuit of scholarly research. These activities are now given less priority. The museum is becoming more a (temporary) exhibition space, whereby its other characteristic museum functions are pushed into the background. (2002, 197) This state of affairs, they argue, results in the performance of “edutainment” at these sites (see also Balloffet, Courvoisier, and Lagier 2014), where educa­ tional and historical presentations are interwoven with amusing and light­ hearted elements (van Aalst and Boogaarts 2002, 197). Amusement, however, can occlude more difficult affects that can manifest as anger, shame, guilt, and horror. At plantation museums, amusement makes conveying stories of enslaved people difficult, because there is nothing amusing about forced labor, rape, and torture. Visitors to museums and historic sites travel in search of unique experiences that will move and ultimately affect them. Researchers using more-than­ representational approaches seek to capture this aspect of tourism, not by forsaking the representational, but rather by foregrounding practice and experience. As described by Lorimer, the more-than-representational encompasses: everyday routines, fleeting encounters, embodied movements, precognitive triggers, practical skills, affective intensities, enduring urges, unexcep­ tional interactions, and sensuous dispositions. Attention to these kinds of expressions, it is contended, offers an escape from the established aca­ demic habit of striving to uncover meanings and values that apparently await our discovery, interpretation, judgement and ultimate representation. (2005, 83) Components in the more-than-representational, affects are attendant to feelings and emotions but are neither. Shouse insists that feelings are socially refer­ enced, categorized, and labeled sensations, and emotions are exhibitions of feelings while affects are precognitive incitements (2005, 1; Halilovich 2016, 78; Thien 2005). This is all to say that affects possess the capacity to impress upon, to move; for it is through the medium of the body that we are affected, feel, and emote (Saldanha 2010, 2415; Henry [1963] 1973). Yet another more materially corporeal metaphor for affect comes from Ahmed: “We are moved by things. And in being moved, we make things” (2010, 33). Here affect acts

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as an epoxy making things by binding subjects to the objects and places that stir the body. Geographers are also employing affective approaches in the spaces of heritage tourism (see, e.g., Micieli-Voutsinas 2017; Tolia-Kelly 2016; Waterton and Dittmer 2014). Divya Tolia-Kelly reminds us that “affect can facilitate historical understandings of traumatic events” (2016, 900). Building on the work of Bennett (2005), affect has been useful particularly at sites such as the National September 11th Memorial & Museum in the United States, which commemorate traumatic pasts to draw out feeling truths for visitors (MicieliVoutsinas 2017). “Here, the more-than-representational spaces of memorial landscapes are vital to representing that which is ‘unrepresentable’ and unknowable: trauma itself” (Micieli-Voutsinas 2017, 94). Therefore, “knowledge of the traumatic past is acquired vis-à-vis our emotional experiences of empathic re-membering in the present” (Micieli-Voutsinas 2017, 97). Of particular relevance to our work on plantation tourism and the ongoing trauma resulting from the transatlantic slave trade is Modlin, Alderman, and Gentry’s (2011) argument that: Tours through plantation house museums are more than mere factual adventures; these journeys are emotional, indeed, affective. The process of remembering means coming to terms with more than facts. Inequality can exist on tours even at sites that are committed to more fully addressing the historical facts of slavery. This inequality is not just about whether docents talk about the planter-class more than the enslaved, but also the unevenness in how tourists are encouraged to connect with these historical groups emotionally. (2011, 15) In other words, most plantation museum tours explicitly and implicitly encourage visitors to affectively empathize with the plantation owner and his things through partial narratives. Bennett makes the point that empathy is a mode of seeing, a type of perception based on an affinity to that which is being observed while remaining cognizant of the distance between the observed and the observer (2005, 10). Oliver describes it as “an empathy in and of the body that, as in the psychological definition of the term, suggests the capacity to put oneself in the place of the other while always returning to the self” (2010, 127). This empathic vision, perceived via the body, can apprehend seeing truths in contradistinction to thinking truths, which derive truths through the intellect (Bennett 2005, 26). Seeing truths feel true rather than reason true. Conversely, many PEC narratives encourage visitors to empathize with aspects of the plantations other than the enslaved by engaging in empathic dissembling—empathic lies of omission. As practiced, the architecture of the house and grounds distracts visitors from seeing traces of the enslaved latent in kitchens, back entrances, barns, outbuildings, fields, and the plantation

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home itself—i.e., spaces where the enslaved toiled and dwelled—with tales of oak trees, architecture, gardens, extravagant dinners, and alligators. They do not so much erase the enslaved as they obscure them from empathy. Visitors cannot see the truth of enslavement because many plantation museums place other objects of potential empathy before the enslaved. We contend that plantations—sites of trauma—disengage visitors from the lives of the enslaved not only through one-sided narratives but also through other components of the wider PEC. These sites, through the PEC, produce insincere “feeling truths,” often for the sake of increasing their revenues, which belie historical realities and deprive visitors of more sincere (if less comfortable) affective possibilities.

Methods We have come to understand the PEC and its impacts on affective engage­ ments with slavery through a variety of more-than-representational meth­ odologies used to study plantation museums in three major plantation tourist regions in the United States: Louisiana’s River Road, Charleston, South Carolina, and along Virginia’s James River. Across these regions, the authors collected data related to the material, representational, and performative aspects of fifteen plantation museums in order to examine the processes and politics of incorporating slavery at these sites. From March 2015 to November 2016, our team3 conducted thirty-six in-depth interviews with plantation management as well as 109 in-depth interviews with tour guides who dis­ cussed creating and performing tours. We gained insights into visitors’ prior expectations and tour experiences by interviewing or surveying over 2,000 visitors—many both before and after their visit.4 Finally, we developed a narrative mapping method to document where and in what ways enslavement emerged during 170 tours at fifteen plantation sites. On each tour, participant observers noted not only what was said where along tour routes, but also noted how guides used emotion, bodily gestures, and spoken intonation to encourage visitors to affectively engage with certain people or events in the narrative (Hanna et al. 2019). Once processed and interpreted, these qualita­ tive data yield unique insights into how the PEC is reproduced through the practices of museum management, guides, and visitors and how these most often discourage affective engagement with the enslaved.

The plantation edutainment complex Building on the work of van Aalst and Boogaarts (2002), we define the plan­ tation edutainment complex as a multifunctional site that seeks to both edu­ cate and entertain. Site owners and managers design and invest in material objects, narratives, and performances that appeal to a broad range of visitors and enable them to host events, such as weddings and festivals, that may have little to do with the history the museums purport to preserve and reproduce.

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As a result, visitors can participate in a variety of tours and activities outside of the traditional house tour. Thus, the plantation museum is not primarily an educational site, but is more a vendor of commodified history. The PEC works to disengage visitors from affectively engaging with American histories of enslavement in four ways: 1) architecture and grounds, 2) everyday practice, 3) tour variety, and 4) the ephemeral event. Architecture and grounds Waterton and Dittmer remind us to pay attention to the ways the atmo­ spheres of museums are engineered to “provoke a range of experience and affective potentialities that afford, in turn, all kinds of movements and feel­ ings” (2014, 126–27). The architecture of the Big House and the carefully designed grounds surrounding it are at the center of the PEC and feature heavily in representations and practices intended to appeal ultimately to a visitor fantasy for nostalgia and romance. Architecture The plantation Big House was designed to impress, astound, seduce, and enchant. Made most famous by the fictional Tara in the 1939 movie Gone with the Wind, the white pillars of the Greek Revival-style mansion both framed the “picture of the Old South” and worked to give it substance (Hoelscher 2006, 47). After reconstruction and during Jim Crow, southern elites invented the plantation museum landscape, a landscape Hoelscher dubs “the white-pillared past.” Greek Revival, he argues, actually increased in popularity after the Civil War and gave visible materiality to the Lost Cause movement, a narrative quite often reproduced into the present (Hoelscher 2006). According to our visitor interviews, experiencing beauty while learning about history is a common motivation for visiting a PEC, and the Big House is the embodiment of both history and romance. During a tour, guides use the material culture of the house in ways that encourage visitors’ affective engage­ ments with the master, reminding visitors, for example, that they are walking on the “same floors he walked on.” As one visitor to Houmas House in Louisiana gushed, “the one object that I liked the best about it was the music box and just the … the massive rooms, the … architecture and … and all was just … amazing” (Interviewed March 6, 2015). While some guides at certain houses credit enslaved laborers with constructing the house, most seldom challenge the link built between the Big House and its original owner. Grounds A plantation museum’s gardens and lawns are designed to frame the Big House and draw visitor attention to the site’s flora and fauna. Grounds and

Figure 1.2 Tickets issued to visitors feature the alley of oaks and invite visitors to “Come enjoy her beauty and dream of her past”

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gardens are usually included in the admission price and, when purchasing tickets, visitors are encouraged to wander through flower gardens and to spots providing beautiful views of the estate. While there may be signage explicat­ ing a site’s history, these landscapes exist for visitors to see, smell, hear, and touch beauty. This is part of a larger trend in heritage tourism where sites seek to “commodify the rural landscape through a deliberate appeal to our sense of the romantic, the mystical and the spiritual in an effort to appeal to contemporary visitors” (Davidson and Milligan 2004, 526). Indeed, some plantations foreground their gardens in their marketing. In Charleston, Magnolia Plantation and Gardens describes itself as “America’s Oldest Romantic Gardens,” having opened their grounds to visitors in 1870. A few miles away, Middleton Place claims to host “America’s Oldest Landscaped Gardens.” A visitor interview from Houmas House in Louisiana illustrates the power of landscape design in guiding visitors’ affective response: “The grounds are gorgeous. The old oak trees are beautiful. And just to hear the history of the house … But really, what’s very phenomenal are the trees, and the landscape is gorgeous” (Interviewed March 7, 2015). Oak Alley in Southern Louisiana provides an example of the tensions between appealing to visitors’ desires to experience romantic gardens and connecting visitors to the lives of the enslaved (Hanna 2016). While this PEC has built a slavery exhibit and increasingly incorporated slavery into house tours, the plantation’s alley of 300-year-old live oak trees is the centerpiece of its identity as the “Grande Dame of the Great River Road” (Figure 1.2). More significantly, the house tour’s most dramatic moment remains when guides open the doors to the second-floor balcony overlooking the alley of oaks. One guide swung open the doors to the balcony in April 2018 and proclaimed, “This is what you really came for!” Indeed, on most tours, visitors took advantage of the time the guides provide—more time than is devoted to any other room in the house—to photograph, gaze, and marvel at the trees. Despite Oak Alley’s efforts toward a more intentional inclusion of slavery on the site and in the house tour, the affective connections are still directed unequally. Everyday practice While the materiality of the Big House and gardens, as typically designed, direct affective engagement away from the enslaved, visitor experiences of the PEC are most directly created through everyday spatial and social practices by the guides that quite often work to disengage the visitor from the lives of the enslaved. Guides Interactions with tour guides are central to visitors’ experiences at plantation museums (Potter 2016). Guide performances of tour narratives give a

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27

plantation’s material culture meaning. Our interviews with visitors before guided tours indicate that most expect to learn about history, but also seek to be entertained. And our exit surveys and interviews strongly indicate that visitors greatly prefer guides who are enthusiastic and passionate. Some site managers are keenly aware of the importance of finding guides who can entertain visitors. As one owner in the River Road region states: When I hire people, I tell them, “We’re in the hospitality business, and we are here not to educate people.” I get a lot of people who are teachers … that want a job and I say no. This is the tourism business, not education. If you want that, go in the museum business. Here, you have to be an entertainer if you want people to enjoy themselves when they come. (Interviewed December 15, 2015) Guides often acknowledged in interviews that visitors are paying for history and entertainment. Keeping visitors engaged requires guides to assess tour groups quickly. As one explained: The minute that they step into … the first room on the tour and I say, “Good morning, how are you?” I automatically know what I’m going to talk about with these people. If they’re coming in [replying], “Good morning!” I know … whiskey, lust, ghosts, fun! But if they come in and I say, “good morning” and they just kind of look at me like I’m a corpse, I know to stick to just historical information and point out antiques … (Interviewed March 5, 2015) Ensuring that visitors enjoy their experience has consequences for slavery’s inclusion. Guides understand that the techniques employed to keep their customers entertained—adding jokes or weaving in tales of family romance or drama—do not mix well with the history of slavery. It is no coincidence that when asked about the entertainment value of tours at slavery-centered sites like Whitney and McLeod Plantations visitors respond: “I did not come here to be entertained.” Tour variety Guided house tours emphasizing affective engagement with the planter class remain the most common elements of visitors’ plantation experiences. Yet, tour ticket receipts seldom generate sufficient revenue, requiring PECs to offer a broader variety of tours and activities. At smaller sites, this is limited to offering seasonal tours—especially ghost tours during autumn months—and designing special activities for school fieldtrips. Larger PECs can also broaden tour options available on a daily basis.

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Ghost tours It is not uncommon for visitors on plantation tours to ask if there are ghosts—signaling a hope for a paranormal experience binding them to both place and past. And, knowing that some visitors enjoy hearing about such experiences, a guide might suggest that the house is haunted. Management at some sites, however, discourages this practice. As an owner of one Louisiana plantation museum said, “When you have history, you don’t have ghosts. And when you have no history, you have ghosts, because they [tourism plantation staff] have to make up the stories” (Interviewed March 29, 2013). Never­ theless, the idea of paranormal activity at historic homes excites some visi­ tors’ imaginations and museum owners cannot keep their sites from being described as “haunted” in books and on ghost tour websites. Therefore, it is not surprising when many tourism plantations capitalize on such interest by offering special ghost tours prior to Halloween or by promoting “Fright Night” events. As with other events hosted by PECs, ghost tours augment the bottom line. For example, Bacon’s Castle, a plantation museum in Surrey, Virginia, is owned and operated by Preservation Virginia, a non-profit with a mission to make “historic places of memory stronger and more vital” (Preservation Vir­ ginia 2018). Yet, they allow the Center for Paranormal Research and Investi­ gation (CPRI) to seek evidence of haunting within the house. In return, CPRI runs the property’s Historic Haunt Night Tours every October. In 2017, these yielded over $7,500, representing more than nine percent of Bacon’s Castle’s total annual revenue from ticket sales. Ghost tours hold out the promise that dark affective experiences may be found in spaces often romanticized and sanitized for mass heritage tourism consumption (Gentry and Alderman 2015). Within plantation museums, ghost tours focus on the tragic and macabre but, as D’Harlingue (2015) argues, visitors are often encouraged to form affective connections with plantation-owning families or Civil War soldiers. MacKrell and Hanna’s (2016) examination of ghost stories included in plantation websites or in Southall’s (2015) book on haunted plantations, confirms this. Of the eighty different stories they studied, fifty-two percent featured members of the plan­ tation owner’s family or Civil War soldiers. While almost fourteen percent of plantation ghost stories included an enslaved character, most were portrayed as local slaves who were happy to remain on the plantation forever or ren­ dered as brutal villains or submissive victims in violent scenes concocted as spectacle for the tourist audience (Miles 2015). School fieldtrips School fieldtrips can also contribute significantly to the bottom line and but­ tress plantation museums’ educational claims (Stone et al. 2016). At Shirley Plantation in Virginia, fieldtrips account for over fifteen percent of total

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visitors. At Meadow Farm, owned by Henrico County, a large suburban county near Richmond, Virginia, forty percent of the site’s visitors are school children. While fieldtrips are sold as educational, children must be entertained as well. Thus, the planned activities must be interactive. As a manager of a Vir­ ginia PEC explained, “We do several programs like the role of religion, or the mighty James River, or lawn bowling. Something that’s more hands-on, where they can burn up some energy” (Interviewed July 14, 2016). The subject matter at the heart of these activities varies with age. Staff members at Mid­ dleton Place in South Carolina described how they ensure that children are not traumatized but rather exposed to histories deemed “age appropriate.” This does not mean that enslavement is excised from these programs. Staff at several plantation museums note that their programs meet state education standards by including slavery. Yet, content related to the enslaved is sani­ tized. A Middleton staff member stated at a June 2017 conference in Char­ leston, South Carolina, that “[for] younger kids, we focus on the positives of the enslaved population.” At Shirley Plantation, for example, fieldtrips often include a scavenger hunt called, “Mission Shirley” (Figure 1.3). Beginning with a sign placed in the plantation’s original laundry building, children walk or run to different out­ buildings where clues help them deliver a message from Beverly Carter, the

Figure 1.3 Historical characters in Shirley’s Scavenger Hunt where enslaved people are identified as servants

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plantation owner’s son and Confederate soldier, to his sick mother while Union troops occupy the plantation during the American Civil War. Intended to encourage students to embody Carter, the narrative comprises clues written as warnings and offers of help from Carter’s sister as well as two enslaved persons, “Phibby” and “Libby.”5 The language used emphasizes danger and urges children to both hurry and be secretive while playing the role of the white master. It also places enslaved people in the roles of loyal servants. Alternative tours The nature tour described in the introduction is an example of the variety of tours that the larger PECs surrounding Charleston, South Carolina, offer each day. Managers stress that they want visitors to stay on-site for at least half a day and diverse tour offerings help them promise “an experience” to a wider range of visitors. As one supervisor states, I tell my staff that you know everybody is in competition in the hospi­ tality tourism business we’re all in it—so we’re not, we’re not fighting or in competition with just the Magnolias, the Middletons, or the planta­ tions near us. We’re in competition for anywhere that they could spend that $20 … So that’s what I try to think of, of every time of the experi­ ence and what we try to build is to give them more and more for their dollar. (Interviewed April 7, 2016) With a multitude of tour offerings, slavery is often segregated to a special tour or separate display (Eichstedt and Small 2002). Visitors must allot extra time on their visit to learn about slavery at the site or pay an additional fee to participate in the slavery-focused tour (Table 1.1).6 For the PECs that offer separate tours concentrating on slavery, guides employed a number of strategies to evoke affective responses from their guests. We observed several guides encouraging visitors to identify as the enslaved. Guides also went in and out of character as both the enslaver and enslaved. One white guide on Magnolia’s Slavery to Freedom Tour, while Table 1.1 Admission to Magnolia Plantation and Gardens Admission Adults Kids (6–12) Kids under 6

$20 $10 Free

Historic House $8 $8 Free

Nature Tram $8 $8 Free

Nature Boat $8 $8 Free

Slavery to Freedom

Audubon Swamp

$8 $8 Free

$8 $8 Free

Note: Basic admission to Magnolia plantation includes access to the grounds and gardens. Visitors can customize their admission with different types of tours. Admission includes the grounds and gardens. Source: www.magnoliaplantation.com/admissioninfo.html.

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inside the 1800s slave cabin, said, “I don’t care if you hang me, Masta. I’m not doing it” (Tour Documented on April 7, 2016). Another white guide on Middleton Plantation’s Beyond the Fields Tour gave a theatrical performance in the chapel singing spirituals of the enslaved. We observed several visitors crying in response (Tour Documented on April 9, 2016). Though these tours are supposed to focus on the lives of the enslaved, guides still prioritized trees and even described agriculture divorced of enslaved labor. We documented several tours describing benevolent plantation owners, perpe­ tuating the “faithful slave” narrative as described on this Magnolia Tour: “The most evocative moment on the tour seemed to be the story about the [enslaved] groundskeeper during the Civil War burying all of the Drayton treasures and being beaten for refusing to reveal the location to Union soldiers. The tour visitors gasped and awed about his allegiance to his owner” (Tour Documented on April 10, 2016). By performing dramatic narratives within spaces such as slave cabins, guides can and do affect visitors’ bodies as evidenced by the crying and gasping we documented. Yet even on tours devoted to slavery, such emo­ tional responses are often directed toward the “benevolent owner” or beautiful trees, leading to feeling un-truths that mask the harsh realities of slavery. The ephemeral event While tour variety increases ticket sales, many PECs also stage ephemeral events—sometimes entirely unrelated to the site’s history—to enhance rev­ enue. These events, including festivals and weddings, last from a few hours to several days and are not permanent exhibits or tours. The income they pro­ vide offsets visitor decline at struggling sites. To work, however, they tend to draw upon landscape elements, appealing to people’s desire to experience excitement or romance. Festivals Nearly all the plantations in our study host large seasonal events on the property, such as weekend strawberry festivals, Halloween Fright Nights, 5k fun runs, pumpkin patches, and wine tastings (Table 1.2). Such “family friendly” events attract thousands of people over a weekend. Magnolia Plan­ tation’s ladybug release, targeting families in the surrounding Lowcountry, has drawn upwards of 3,000 people. A Facebook event page described the event in this way: “Children will scatter throughout the gardens to find the perfect spot to release their share of ladybugs. The event will feature a Volkswagen Beetle, resembling a gigantic ladybug. It will also include nature displays, interactive activities, crafts and face painting” (Magnolia Plantations and Gardens 2017). Rather than emphasizing the role of enslaved persons in engineering the creation of these gardens, engaging visitors instead in the reproduction of beautiful gardens through the ladybug release leads to feeling un-truths for visitors about the space.

Table 1.2 Selected ephemeral events Plantation Bacon’s Castle (Virginia)

Berkeley Plantation (Virginia)

Boone Hall (South Carolina)

Drayton Hall (South Carolina) Houmas House and Gardens (Louisiana)

Magnolia Plantation and Gardens (South Carolina)

McLeod Plantation (South Carolina)

Meadow Farm (Virginia)

Events Guy Fawkes Day Descendants Day Surry Fun Hunt Castle Christmas Romance at the Castle Tippecanoe and Tyler Too Berkeley Plantation Annual Wreath Laying Ceremony Berkeley Plantation Corn Maze and Pumpkin Patch Berkeley’s Twilight Ghost Tour Virginia Thanksgiving Festival at Berkeley Plantation Centuries of Christmas at Berkeley Plantation Lowcountry Oyster Festival Rugged Maniacs Obstacle Race St. Andrews Easter Service Lowcountry Strawberry Festival Stars and Guitars Concert Boone Hall Fright Nights Boone Hall Pumpkin Patch Scottish Games Christmas at Boone Hall Plantation Distinguished Speakers series Flower Crowns and Cocktails in the Gardens Mother’s Day Buffer Spring Wine Gala Dinner and Wine under the Oaks Ladybug Release Wishes in Bloom Living History through the Eyes of the Enslaved Mad Hatter Tea Party Easter Egg Hunt Valentine Chocolate Walk An Old Fashioned Christmas Yuletide on the Ashley Arts and Crafts Fair Family Fright Nights Poetry at McLeod The Civil War at McLeod Plantation Christmas through the Eyes of the Enslaved Sea Island Cotton Day Nature Walks Unveiling McLeod Lecture Series Sheep to Shawl Holiday Lantern Tours Harvest Festival

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Plantation Middleton Place (South Carolina)

Oak Alley Plantation (Louisiana)

San Francisco (Louisiana) Shirley Plantation (Virginia)

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Events Celebrating Independence Junior Historian Summer Camp Leisurely Pursuits and Grand Entertains Garden Stroll and Wine Tasting Barbados Rum Stroll Hands on Rice Planting Program Easter Eggstravaganza Beauty and History: Camellias at Middleton Place Beyond the Fields Documentary Screening Christmas 1860 Reveille at Oak Alley 5k Run/Walk Oak Alley Candlelight Valentine’s Dinner Christmas Sunday Jazz Brunch Spring Arts and Crafts Festival Various concerts Frisco Fest Slavery Walking Tour Haunted Tales and Tours Homeschool Days Genealogy Day Santa Claus is Coming to Shirley Candlelight Christmas Tour

Sources: Plantation websites and Facebook pages.

One staff member at one South Carolina plantation described the intended impacts these experiences are to have on the visitor. I want them to leave happy, and I want them to leave with a feeling of “Wow. What an incredible place. What an incredible staff that they have.” I want them to leave with the knowledge of what [name removed] is. Hopefully they learn something on it here … . Hopefully they will want to come back and visit Charleston. I just want them to leave with a happy experience and a feeling that our staff made them feel welcome. (Interviewed February 26, 2016) This interview illustrates the tension between educating visitors and allow­ ing them to have an enjoyable experience. These sentiments align with the observation that in the new museum economy, the goal is to generate “crea­ tive and memorable experiences” rather than simply “contemplation and the acquisition of knowledge” (Balloffet, Courvoisier, and Lagier 2014, 8). Weddings More than any other use, weddings connect visitors to themes of beauty and romance found in PEC landscapes. They intentionally displace affective

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engagement with enslavement in that they require a willful forgetting of the brutality of slavery and the history of these sites. The grounds, gardens, and particularly the architecture of the “Big House” play a significant role in creating the desirable plantation wedding setting (Figure 1.4). At Boone Hall, in South Carolina, guests are seated with views of both the Big House and the original slave cabins. When we asked a wedding coordinator why couples select a plantation as their venue, she responded, “They want a Southern plantation wedding. They want something Southern and different than obviously banquet halls and everything that’s the norm in the Northeast. This is definitely your quintes­ sential plantation” (Interviewed February 26, 2016). A plantation staff member in James River, Virginia said, “We do have a lot of things going in our favor when it comes to—we have a beautiful venue. It’s a gorgeous place” (Interviewed July 14, 2016). Some PECs host between 150 to 400 weddings a year with a capacity to generate upwards of $1.5 million annually. One Louisiana plantation charges as much as $15,000 per wedding. These profits serve as alternative sources of revenue for plantation museums experiencing decline in visitor numbers or limited financial support. The political economy of a plantation hosting weddings can completely undermine a larger moral imperative for sites seeking to center slavery on visitor tours. Staff at McLeod Plantation in Charleston, a site that foregrounds the

Figure 1.4 At Houmas House, along Louisiana’s River Road, weddings are framed by the white pillars. Guests sit in chairs facing the Big House while the marriage ceremony is performed on the steps or directly in front of the home

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lives of the enslaved on their tours, described the tension they feel hosting weddings on-site while still guarding the integrity of their interpretive plan, which explores the transition of African Americans from slavery to freedom: If we’re going to do weddings here, what is the appropriate way to do that? What’s the appropriate level? … From the interpretive perspective, I’m super clear that the most important part of that site is the history of the site. Anything that infringes on telling the history of that site is secondary to me. (Interviewed February 19, 2016) Daily tours in 2016 at McLeod had not yet offset operating costs, creating the need to seek out alternative revenue streams, like weddings, to keep the site open. And, like at all PECs that host weddings, selling the promise of a beautiful and romantic experience requires the maintenance of architectural and garden elements that foster such feelings.

Conclusion In the preceding pages we have described the plantation edutainment com­ plex—essentially the many ways plantations utilize edutainment to commo­ dify their sites and ultimately undermine affective engagements with the memories of enslaved individuals on the plantation. PEC operators seek to create a variety of experiences for visitors which make their site stand out from competitors and appeal to a broader range of tourists. The resulting multitude of entertainment options, combined with the pressure on guides to entertain their audiences, leads to the elision of trauma and pain associated with slavery, ultimately creating feeling un-truths for visitors at these sites. While plantation museums of the past engaged in an intentional form of social forgetting, the commodification of many plantations through events like Magnolia’s Fright Night creates new challenges for the inclusion of slavery at antebellum plantations. To fully understand the history and legacy of enslave­ ment on present-day race relations, racism, and white supremacy within the United States, slavery must become the centerpiece of the plantation museum experience. Given that the public considers historical sites to be trusted sources for historical information, plantation tourism has “an obligation to the public to share a comprehensive and conscientious story of the past” (Gallas and Perry 2015, xiii)—an obligation that should not be lost as PECs peddle amu­ sement or romance to a predominantly white, educated, middle- to upper-class visitor in order to increase their revenue at the expense of the enslaved. Witcomb (2013) observed that “there is an increase in exhibitions that deal with ‘difficult’ subject matter, particularly around the theme of dark histories such as those of genocide, imprisonment, colonialism, racism, and war” (Witcomb 2013, 255). While PECs in our three study regions continue to make affective connections to enslaved women and men difficult, there are a

Figure 1.5 While Oak Alley prioritizes the big reveal of oak trees on the second floor of the house tour, Whitney Plantation reminds visitors not to romanticize the view by placing one of the Children of Whitney at the end of the alley

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few signs of a shifting prioritization toward an affective engagement with the lives of formerly enslaved persons. Whitney Plantation, located in Southern Louisiana, is in many ways the antithesis of the traditional plantation tourist experience. Rather than center tours on the house and planter family, Whitney foregrounds the voices of the enslaved, even inverting the spatial narrative with much less emphasis on the Big House. One way in which visitors affectively engage with slavery at the site is through the encounters with the Children of Whitney, a series of sculptures created by artist Woodrow Nash, who was inspired by nineteenthcentury photographs of enslaved children. These same children appear on the lanyards visitors wear around their necks—another intentional effort by the museum to encourage visitors to connect emotionally with enslaved persons throughout their tour (Figure 1.5). Nigel Thrift reminds us that “affect has always been a key element of politics” (2004, 64) and can be understood “as a form of thinking” (2004, 60). Heritage sites are inherently political. The whitewashed histories they tradi­ tionally put forth are engineered to affectively center the visitor’s attention on nearly everything except the enslaved. Thus, for most visitors, their experi­ ences are part of a re-membering centered on feeling un-truths that disregard the atrocities of the transatlantic slave trade and disconnect slavery from present-day struggles of racial inequality.

Notes 1 Fright Night consisted of a haunted train ride and a variety of other “family friendly activities,” including a hay bale maze and pony ride. The bounce house was directly across the road from the slave cabins. 2 Applying a museum label to plantations is debatable as interviews with management and guides offer a variety of perspectives on this point. 3 The research team also included Derek Alderman, Candace Forbes Bright, and David Butler, alongside dozens of graduate and undergraduate students. 4 While Thrift (2004) criticized the use of surveys within non-representational theory studies because emotions are largely non-representational, we will nonetheless seek to tease out their potentialities for understanding affective encounters. 5 The sign identifies Phibby and Libby as servants rather than enslaved persons. 6 Seventy-two percent of visitors surveyed at Magnolia only added the house tour to their package. It is quite possible to tour this plantation (based on documentation of ten house tours) and not engage with slavery.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2010. “Happy Objects.” In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg, and Gregory J. Seigworth, 29–51. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Balloffet, Pierre, François H. Courvoisier, and Joëlle Lagier. 2014. “From Museum to Amusement Park: The Opportunities and Risks of Edutainment.” International Journal of Arts Management 16 (2): 4–18. Bennett, Jill. 2005. Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Carney, Judith. 2001. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Davidson, Joyce, and Christine Milligan. 2004. “Embodying Emotion Sensing Space: Introducing Emotional Geographies.” Social & Cultural Geography 5 (4): 523–532. D’Harlingue, Benjamin. 2015. “On the Plantation with Ghosts: Antagonisms of Slavery Tourism.” South Carolina Review 47 (2): 74–92. Eichstedt, Jennifer, and Stephen Small. 2002. Representations of Slavery: Race and Ideology in Southern Plantation Museums. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press. Gallas, Kristin L., and James DeWolf Perry. 2015. Interpreting Slavery at Museums and Historic Sites. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Gentry, Glenn W., and Derek H. Alderman. 2015. “‘A City Built upon Its Dead’: The Intersection of Past and Present through Ghost Walk Tourism in Savannah, Georgia.” South Carolina Review 47 (2): 49–73. Halilovich, Hariz. 2016. “Re-imaging and Re-imagining the Past after ‘Memoricide’: Intimate Archives as Inscribed Memories of the Missing.” Archival Science 16 (1): 77–92. Hanna, Stephen P. 2016. “Placing the Enslaved at Oak Alley Plantation: Narratives, Spatial Contexts, and the Limits of Surrogation.” Journal of Heritage Tourism 11 (3): 219–234. Hanna, Stephen P., Perry L. Carter, Amy E. Potter, Candace F. Bright, Derek A. Alderman, E. Arnold Modlin, Jr., and David L. Butler. 2019. “Following the Story: Narrative Mapping as a Mobile Method for Tracking and Interrogating Spatial Narratives.” Journal of Heritage Tourism 14 (1): 49–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 1743873X.2018.1459628. Henry, Michel. (1963) 1973. The Essence of Manifestation. Translated by Girard Etzkorn. The Hague, NL: Martinus Nijhoff. Hoelscher, Steven. 2006. “The White-Pillared Past: Landscapes of Memory and Race in the American South.” In Landscape and Race in the United States, edited by Richard H. Schein, 39–72. New York: Routledge. Lorimer, Hayden. 2005. “Cultural Geography: The Busyness of Being ‘More-thanRepresentational.’” Progress in Human Geography 29 (1): 83–94. MacKrell, Christine, and Stephen P. Hanna. 2016. “More than Just a Ghost Story: Plantations, Hauntings, and the Trivialization of Dark Tourism Experiences.” Paper presented at the Race, Ethnicity, and Place Conference, Kent State University, Ohio, September 2016. Magnolia Plantations and Gardens. 2017. Facebook Invite to 4th Annual Ladybug Release. Accessed May 25, 2018. www.facebook.com/events/1521225607940781/. Micieli-Voutsinas, Jacque. 2017. “An Absent Present: Affective Heritage at the National September 11th Memorial and Museum.” Emotion, Space and Society 24: 93–104. Miles, Tiya. 2015. Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Modlin, E. Arnold, Jr. 2008. “Tales Told on the Tour: Mythic Representation of Slavery on Docent-Led Tours at North Carolina Plantation Museums.” Southeastern Geographer 48 (3): 265–287. Modlin, E. Arnold, Jr., Derek H. Alderman, and Glenn W. Gentry. 2011. “Tour Guides as Creators of Empathy: The Role of Affective Inequality in Marginalizing the Enslaved at Plantation House Museums.” Tourist Studies 11 (1): 3–19.

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Oliver, Sophie Anne. 2010. “Trauma, Bodies, and Performance Art: Towards an Embodied Ethics of Seeing.” Continuum 24 (1): 119–129. Potter, Amy E. 2016. “‘She goes into character as the lady of the house’: Tour Guides, Performance, and the Southern Plantation.” Journal of Heritage Tourism 11 (3): 250–261. Potter, Amy E., Stephen Hanna, and Perry L. Carter. 2017. “Commemorating the Enslaved Along Louisiana’s River Road.” American Association of Geographers Online Newsletter (December). Preservation Virginia. 2018. https://preservationvirginia.org/. Accessed June 1, 2018. Saldanha, Arun. 2010. “Skin, Affect, Aggregation: Guattarian Variations on Fanon.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 42 (10): 2410–2427. Shouse, Eric. 2005. “Feeling, Emotion, Affect.” M/C Journal 8 (6). Accessed June 23, 2018. http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php. Southall, Richard. 2015. Haunted Plantations of the South. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications. Stone, Meredith, Ian Spangler, Xavier Griffin, and Stephen P. Hanna. 2016. “Search­ ing for the Enslaved in the ‘Cradle of Democracy’: Virginia’s James River Planta­ tion Websites and the Reproduction of Local Social Memories.” Southeastern Geographer 56 (2): 203–222. Thien, Deborah. 2005. “After or beyond Feeling? A Consideration of Affect and Emotion in Geography.” Area 37 (4): 450–456. Thrift, Nigel. 2004. “Intensities of Feeling: Toward a Spatial Politics of Affect.” Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography 86 (1): 57–78. Thrift, Nigel. 2007. Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. London: Routledge. Tolia-Kelly, Divya P. 2006. “Affect: An Ethnocentric Encounter? Exploring the ‘Universalist’ Imperative of Emotional/Affectual Geographies.” Area 32 (2): 213–217. Tolia-Kelly, Divya P. 2016. “Feeling and Being at the (Postcolonial) Museum: Presencing the Affective Politics of ‘Race’ and Culture.” Sociology 50 (5): 896–912. Tyson, Amy M. 2013. The Wages of History: Emotional Labor on Public History’s Front Lines. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. van Aalst, Irina, and Inez Boogaarts. 2002. “From Museum to Mass Entertainment: The Evolution of the Role of Museums in Cities.” European Urban and Regional Studies 9 (3): 195–209. Waterton, Emma, and Jason Dittmer. 2014. “The Museum as Assemblage: Bringing forth Affect at the Australian War Memorial.” Museum Management and Curatorship 29 (2): 122–139. Witcomb, Andrea. 2013. “Understanding the Role of Affect in Producing a Critical Pedagogy for History Museums.” Museum Management and Curatorship 28 (3): 255–271.

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The old/new Unit 731 Museum A place of memory and oblivion Jing Xu

Unit 731 was a biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army in the Pingfang District of Harbin, China. It was officially established in 1936 and operated until Japan’s defeat in World War II. What became Unit 731 was formerly the Togo Unit, a site based in Beiyinhe, a village about one hundred kilometers south of Harbin (Keiichi 2010, 24). Unit 731 primarily conducted germ-warfare research and lethal human experimentation, involving bacterial inoculations, vivisection, frostbite, and poison gas. Unit 731, alongside similar units set up in several other occupied cities “throughout China and Southeast Asia,” has been understood as “the counterpart of Nazi medicine for East Asia” (Nie et al. 2010, 1). The majority of the 3,000 victims used in the human experiments were Chinese, but there were also Russians, Mongols, Koreans, and Allied prisoners of war. When the Japanese officials responsible for the unit realized the inevitability of their country’s defeat, they blew up large parts of Unit 731 before retreating to Japan, but some building ruins remain. The first Crime Evidence Exhibition Hall (zuizheng chenlie guan) was established by the Chinese government in the former headquarters of Unit 731 in 1985, with the purpose of teaching visitors about the difficult history of this place. The site of Unit 731 was designated as one of the One Hundred National-Level Patriotic Education Sites in China in 1997. Twenty-three of the ruins have been designated as National Cultural Heritage Sites (Yang 2016, 122). The Chinese government’s revitalization of the memory of Unit 731 has more to do with contemporary China-Japan relations, which remain turbulent, and the current administrative crisis of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). To further promote the memorialization of Unit 731, a new exhibition hall was constructed on the site in 2015, which, according to Chinese official dis­ course, is to “celebrate the 70th anniversary of the victory of the World Anti­ fascist War” (He 2017). According to a staff member at the exhibition hall, the hall was originally scheduled to open in 2017, a date that would have allowed for a detailed preparation of the exhibition. However, top officials wanted the whole project ready by August 2015.

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Thereafter, historical artifacts were relocated from the former headquarters to the new exhibition hall. The former headquarters does not accommodate exhibitions, except for the restored office of Shiro Ishii, the director of Unit 731; the original building does, however, house the offices of current museum staff. As a result, visitors’ attention has been drawn away from the actual historical site of the former headquarters, putting it in jeopardy of isolation. Renovations further reduce the historical ambience of the former head­ quarters, making the ‘real’ site of memory, the original place of violence, vulnerable to oblivion. In this sense, while the historical site remains visible, its aura and the feeling it conveys are mostly lost on contemporary publics. Paradoxically, the former headquarters, the original site of torture, is in situ yet at risk of being forgotten. The new exhibition hall, on the other hand, is physically removed from the genuine historical site, yet sustains memory by presenting information about the horrific events that took place nearby. This chapter compares the new and the old exhibition halls of Unit 731 as sites of memory and oblivion through the lens of affect. Specifically, I exam­ ine the roles of materiality and temporality in shaping visitors’ embodied experience of the two exhibition halls. In the first part of this chapter, I investigate how the spatial design of the new exhibition hall frames visitors’ affective engagement in and with this place of memory, contributing to the visceral production of a kind of “feeling truth” of Unit 731’s difficult history (Micieli-Voutsinas 2017, 96; see also Bennett 2006, 28–29). However, I bear in mind that such a feeling truth of history is always mediated. I then examine how the space of the new exhibition hall allows visitors to escalate personal empathy for the victims of Unit 731 to a collective empathy for the victimhood of China as a country. The sense of national humiliation that the new exhibition hall evokes in Chinese visitors suggests a certain political persuasion of this memorial space, which manipulates visitors’ affect (see Thrift 2004), favoring Chinese victimization and Chinese visitors. The central government of China values the pedagogical and political connota­ tions of Unit 731 and uses its significance in China’s diplomatic relationship with Japan. Moreover, according to Denton, the emphasis by the Chinese officials on the Japanese atrocities has ethical and economic implications. China seeks a kind of moral upper hand in Asia in its economic and political competition with Japan (Denton 2014, 135). In the second part of this chapter, I explore the temporal layer of this “feel­ ing truth” of Unit 731 by comparing the new exhibition hall with the old one (Figure 2.1). I analyze the debate over the role of the new hall as either an erasure of the original site’s authenticity or as sustaining historical continuity in memorializing Unit 731. I focus on spatial analysis of the (dis)connection between the two halls. Further, I compare my own embodied experiences in the former headquarters in 2009 and 2017: the before and after of this building as the Crime Evidence Exhibition Hall. While I felt a sense of “authentic” history in 2009, in 2017 the new headquarters seemed reduced to history “in sight,” with a diminished aura (Abbas 1997, 66). Located meters apart from each

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Figure 2.1 The new Unit 731 exhibition hall (in the center) and the old one (in the left-hand corner)

other, the old and new exhibition halls paradoxically connect to and dis­ connect from each other in terms of temporality and spatial functionality. I argue that the two halls work cooperatively and competitively to tell a story of presence and absence, past and present, memory and oblivion of Unit 731—a memory of national humiliation and oblivion of the historical site per se. To demonstrate this argument, I adopt a comprehensive approach, including auto-ethnography, documentation of visitor participation and my own perso­ nal experience, exploration of media coverage, and discourse analysis. More­ than-representational theories and the politics of affect are the theoretical frameworks in which I situate my examination of Unit 731 memorialization.

The spatial framing of affect in the new exhibition hall and its political signification In examining the relationship between more-than-representational theories and the politics of heritage, Emma Waterton states that “there is the more recent injunction to take up interest in the ‘more-than-human,’ through which we might recognize the spaces of heritage as agents or co-participants/produ­ cers of a heritage experience” (2014, 824; see also Harrison 2013). Similarly, Zachary Beckstead and his colleagues highlight the agency of “objects” in shaping viewers’ embodied experience in war memorials (Beckstead et al. 2011, 193–94). Further, Janet Marstine understands lighting, sound, and color in memorials as frames that “provide an ideologically based narrative context that colors our understanding of what’s included” (2006, 4). In other words, memorial space is by no means neutral. It mediates visitors’ experiences and sometimes elicits specific affective responses.

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Moreover, memorial building per se is not ideologically free, because it is a social production. Among the many factors that contribute to the social pro­ duction of buildings are “the political institutions they are embedded in” (Rose, Degen, and Basdas 2010, 334). The communist regime in China and the precarious contemporary diplomatic relationship between China and Japan certainly played a role in the design of the new Unit 731 Crime Evi­ dence Exhibition Hall. In Patrizia Violi’s semiotic analysis of the Memorial Hall for Victims of the Nanjing Massacre, she describes this Chinese mem­ orial as “a monument to nationhood, as an important step in the building of a modern national identity” through collective witnessing and cultural heal­ ing (2012, 45). The new Unit 731 Crime Evidence Exhibition Hall carries a similar weight of memorializing trauma in the re-making of national identities amidst the contemporary Chinese. Nevertheless, the ideological construction of nationhood in the Unit 731 memorial requires unpacking. The affective dimension in constructing col­ lective identity is too important to be downplayed. As Emma Hutchison argues, “[e]motions were necessarily embedded within the type of national identity and community that was implicated in response” (2016, 161). Sara Ahmed likewise suggests the connection between collective affect and poli­ tics, stating that “together we hate, and this hate is what makes us together” (2004, 118; emphasis in original). Here, I am aligned with Brian Massumi, understanding emotion as “a cognitive process that can be linguistically represented, while affect is a bodily experience of intensity that cannot be captured by narration” (Yang 2014, 10; see also Massumi 2002, 28; Grossberg 1992, 81). I also define affect as transpersonal and mobile (Waterton 2014, 827; also see Anderson 2006). The social circulation of affect speaks to Nigel Thrift’s notion of “affective contagion.” Thrift argues that “it is the concept of contagion that gives affect a political bent” (2009, 88). Memorials rank high among popular political instruments that channel the contagion of certain affects and thus engender a particular collective identity. The scholarship briefly discussed above highlights the importance of mem­ orial objects in shaping visitors’ affects as well as the significance of affect in constructing national identity. In what follows I therefore examine how the framing achieved through spatial layout, lighting, color, and sound in the new exhibition hall shapes visitors’ embodied experience, all the while, of course, bearing an ideological message. I explore how the design endows the museum space with “barely tangible forces” that unite visitors and trigger a particular nationalist sentiment (McCormack 2007, 372; see also Kraftl and Adey 2008, 224). In keeping with this broad outlook, the specific items exhibited and the history of Unit 731 lie beyond the scope of the present chapter (but see Nie et al. 2010; Yang 2016). This chapter contributes to an understanding of the affective politics of Chinese memorials in relation to Japan, exploring the affective construction of (trans)national identities in the old and new memorial space of Unit 731.

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The spatial framing of affect in the new exhibition hall Architecturally, the new exhibition hall resembles in shape a “black box” (He 2017). Metaphorically, it refers to a flight recorder and suggests that this museum has the function to reveal the “truth” of history. From a bird’s-eye view, the “black box” appears to have a “crack” through its middle, “as if it is cut by a scalpel” (He 2017). This surgical allusion is intentional. The “wounded” building itself is meant to tell of the atrocities that occurred within Unit 731 under the Japanese military. The harsh crack or cut speaks an architectural language of trauma and denunciation; the building was conceived as “an evocative entity that is in dialogue with its content” (Giebelhausen 2003, 7). It functions, in other words, as “both medium and message” (Yanow 1998, 215 quoted in Micieli-Voutsinas 2017, 94). Outside the museum, two artificial, twisted, and withered trees symbolize maruta (“log” in Japanese, referring to the subject of human experimenta­ tion). As more-than-human witnesses, the trees create a somber “mood of memory” before visitors enter the building (Linenthal 1995, 168; see also Denton 2014, 149). The museum’s main exhibition hall has three floors, two above ground and the other underground. Six sections comprise it: Japan’s Biological Warfare against China, Unit 731 Biological Warfare Head­ quarters, Human Experiments, Development of Biological Weapons, Imple­ mentation of Biological Warfare, and Destroying Evidence and Trials. Visitors enter the first exhibition room through a dark corridor, to heighten within them “a sense of foreboding” and imply the start of a gloomy jour­ ney into Unit 731’s history (Waterton and Dittmer 2014, 129). To further underscore the somber mood, the exhibition hall in its entirety features no natural light, with the exception of the final room, the Contemplation Room. In terms of size and lighting, the first exhibition room is small and dark, while the last one is big and bright. Such a layout provides “con­ trasting vocabularies of light/spaciousness and darkness/constriction [telling] a story of hope in the face of despair” (Yanow 1998, 223). It proffers visi­ tors not only the embodied experience of a violent past but also a space to envision a better future. To evoke the imagery of blood or bloodiness, some internal walls and exhibition boards are rust-colored: the bright red of any victim’s blood, ima­ gined as sedimented over time into the color of rust. Occasionally, a cross constructed of white and red light beams appears on the floor of the exhibi­ tion hall. It symbolizes a scalpel and the flesh wounds that surgical instru­ ments would cut.1 Stepping on such a “wound” might affectively resonate with visitors, bringing to mind (and body) the human experiments conducted in Unit 731. Produced here is a bodily remembering and re-experiencing of the trauma of human experimentation across space and time. Moreover, in the section titled Human Experiments, an electronic screen is incorporated into the reconstructed scenario of a vivisection in a lab. The juxtaposition of the cloth curtain with an electronic “curtain” in this

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re-imagined space of the lab indicates a coexistence of Unit 731 and its modern, technological recreation. It suggests a sense of historical continuity in memorializing Unit 731. The blurry image of a person’s face projected on the electronic “curtain” signifies the hidden yet unveiled atrocities of Unit 731. It will likely, simultaneously, trigger in visitors the ambiguous feelings of both fear and curiosity, catching them in their attempts to walk toward yet step away from the figure and all it suggests about the past and the present of Unit 731. By blurring the seemingly clear-cut boundaries between clarity and ambiguity, light and darkness, and the absence and presence of shades and shadows (see Edensor 2012, 1106; Waterton and Dittmer 2014, 129), the new exhibition hall uses lighting to conspire with image to mediate visitors’ visual experience of the vivisection located within Unit 731. In addition, gloomy music hovers over this reconstructed scenario of vivisection. According to Yi-Fu Tuan, “sound dramatizes spatial experience. Soundless space feels calm and lifeless despite the visible flow of activity in it” (2001, 16). The bleak music contributes to the production of an “auditory geography” that might augment visitors’ sensations of empathy and identification with the victims (Rodaway 1995, 82). The use of imagery, lighting, and sound suggests a moral reading of Unit 731, conveying to visitors an embodied message of the abhorrent nature of vivisection, and eliciting visitors’ emotional responses of fear, horror, empathy, even indignation. Multi-sensory experience is further encouraged in a reconstruction of the Japanese military’s poison-gas testing on victims in a field. The screen show­ ing the victims tied to crosses is accompanied by the spoken testimony of a former Japanese member of Unit 731 and is placed close to actual crosses that visitors can touch. Such constructions enable visitors to experience an in situ feeling of victimization visually, aurally, and tactually. Unlike the sealed display cases in many museums, those in the new exhibition hall remain half-open, with no cover on the top. The lack of glass barriers enables an intimate connection with the exhibited historical materials. The absence of a glass cover metaphorically signifies the face-to-face interaction between the past and present of Unit 731, allowing visitors to “feel as though they were [propelled back] into the past” (Gregory and Witcomb 2007, 266). After the vicariously embodied experiences of the atrocities committed in Unit 731 in the major sections of this exhibition hall, visitors finally reach the bright Contemplation Room. It provides relief from the oppressive mood evoked in the other rooms, a necessary counterpoint to the museum’s emo­ tional weight. Nevertheless, this room also carries an ideological message. Three independent showcases in this room respectively display a medical book, a scalpel, and a piece of brick from the crematory of Unit 731. They suggest a silent denunciation: medical knowledge is not supposed to be used for unethical human experimentation and war. While visitors are encouraged to envision a brighter future in this Contemplation Room, a particular future—and injunction—is implied by the three showcases: Do not forget the past.

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The contagion of the sense of national humiliation At the end of the journey through the museum, a visitor notebook is available for tourists to sign. When I visited Unit 731 in June 2017, I saw that many notes admonished, “[d]o not forget the national humiliation” (wu wang guo chi), and reminded that “to not forget the past is to be master of the future” (qian shi bu wang hou shi zhi shi) (see also Tatlow 2015). As Sara Ahmed argues, affect circulates between “the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the collective” (2004, 119). Here, at the end of the journey, the individual “I” has affectively transformed into the collective “we” (see Micieli-Voutsinas 2017, 102). The sentiment of humiliation plays a role in unifying the Chinese nation. The trauma of the 3,000 victims’ families seems contagious, spreading “like wildfire” (Thrift 2009, 88) to transform into a shared memory of “national trauma” (see Hutchison 2016, 160; Eyerman 2001, 3).2 The visitors’ patriotic notes illustrate the success of the apparent political agenda of the Chinese state to engineer “emotionally charged state-sponsored nationalism” in the Unit 731 Crime Evidence Exhibition Hall (Violi 2012, 66; see also Denton 2007, 250). The museum’s framing through spatial layout, lighting, color, and sound turns out to be ideologically loaded. These techniques, according to Thrift, “are not only being deployed knowingly, they are being deployed politically [to] political ends” (2004, 58). The spatial design in the new exhibition hall helps to propagate the moral narrative by engendering a collective identity through the facilitation of visitors’ embodied experience of China’s dark moment in history and through emphasizing the monstrous behaviors directed at the victimized Chinese by the Imperial Japanese Army. To memorialize the affect of war constitutes a political statement of survival, resilience, and vigilance. In this sense, the exhibition hall not only tells a story of the past but also a contemporary story of the nation’s strategic use of its history to serve political ends.3 The Chinese government’s emphasis on patriotic education by revitalizing such memorials as Unit 731 is motivated by recent geopolitics between China and Japan. Anti-Japanese sentiment in China reached its peak in 2005, when Japanese textbooks downplayed Japan’s World War II atrocities in China. Political stalemate between the two countries was further strengthened by Japan’s then prime minister Junichiro Koizumi’s fifth and sixth visits to the Yasukuni Shrine (in October 2005 and August 2006, respectively), where Class A war criminals are memorialized. The maritime boundary dispute and the Diaoyu Islands dispute further contribute to the political tension between China and Japan (see Smith 2009, 231–35). The re-politicization of Unit 731 thus serves China’s central government’s goal of avoiding another national humiliation at the hands of the Japanese. Moreover, nationalism is intention­ ally provoked through reconstructing the dark history because the CCP is faced with administrative crises. “As the CCP has seen its legitimacy wane since the mid-1990s, it has ‘intensified history and patriotic education’ that focuses specifically on the time of war against Japan to appeal to broader

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public approval and justify the party’s authority” (Smith 2009, 236; see also Ryosei 2005, 30). Since the 2010s, the memories of the Sino–Japanese War in China have been emphasized more intensely than before. The most obvious example is the establishment of the Nanjing Massacre National Memorial Day in 2014. Before that, memorialization of the Nanjing Massacre was conducted mainly in Nanjing. This relates to current President Xi Jinping’s emphasis on educa­ tion in patriotism, as illustrated by the title of a Chinese official report, “Xi Jinping: Vigorously Branding Patriotism, Providing Spiritual Support for Realizing Chinese Dream” (Zhu 2015). Although the establishment of the new Unit 731 exhibition hall suggests the Chinese official attempt to reinforce the dark history of this site and thus provoke nationalism, I argue that by overshadowing the original site, where the atrocities happened, the new exhibition hall has flaws in realizing its sought-after political aim. The tension between the old and new memorials and their different affective impact on visitors are addressed in the following.

Connection and competition between the old and the new exhibition halls The new exhibition hall is contested; it both connects to and disconnects from the old exhibition hall in terms of temporality and spatial functionality. The two halls cooperate in memorializing the history of Unit 731, yet they com­ pete for visitors, as well as for authority, in telling the history of this place. A museum staff member defended the necessity of this new structure by claim­ ing that “the former headquarters is no longer able to accommodate the increasing historical sources of Unit 731 that we have collected over time. It also protects the headquarters from potential damage by a large number of visitors.”4 While the former headquarters may indeed require ongoing pre­ servation, the new exhibition hall potentially puts this old building in jeo­ pardy of cultural decline, removing artifacts from their original context and taking away from their meaning in situ, as well as the meaning of the original site itself. There is also the potential danger of erasing the authenticity of Unit 731.5 On the one hand, rehousing the artifacts reinforces the memory of Unit 731 through an eloquent exhibition of the material evidence of war crimes in a new, high-tech museum. Yet the authentic, embodied history of the site has been replaced by its simulacrum, housed in a modern, state-of-the-art build­ ing. We can see the new exhibition hall as paradoxically and simultaneously communicating both a historical continuity and a loss of place-based memory. The new exhibition hall’s design connects it with the original heritage site, opening a spatial dialogue and suggesting historical continuity between the past and present of Unit 731. The north end of the new exhibition hall fea­ tures a glass wall through which visitors can see and thus be reminded of the original boiler house and poison-gas production building of the original site. A new underground tunnel also joins the exhibition hall to the former

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heritage building. The former rail track of Unit 731 now runs above the tunnel. Walking through the tunnel symbolizes a temporally overlapping experience of the past (the rail track) and the present (the tunnel) of Unit 731 at the same time. Moreover, the architectural design of the exhibition hall incorporates ele­ ments of Unit 731’s original heritage site. For example, three chimneys on top of the new hall imitate those of the original crematory, used to burn the corpses and erase any proof of crimes. However, the three chimneys on top of the exhibition hall also serve to let in daylight, metaphorically revealing the hidden darkness of Unit 731. In this way, the chimneys connect to the past as well as to the future. Furthermore, a model of the overall site of Unit 731 is displayed in the new hall, symbolically embodying the historical site in this new museum. Through the incorporation of history into the modern space of the memorial, “a telescoping and layering of memory occurs” (Yanow 1998, 233). In this sense, the construction of the new museum on the site of Unit 731 can be understood as adding temporal complexity to this place of memory, symbolizing “structures within structures, reminiscent of a Russian doll” (Giebelhausen 2006, 60). The juxtaposition of the new and the old exhibition halls provides visitors with chances to simultaneously experience the past and the present of Unit 731. Authenticity has long proven a concern in the preservation of historical sites. Proposals for the reconstruction of gas chambers in Auschwitz, for example, have been criticized by opponents, who suggest they will “render Auschwitz into a theme park, and make visitors into voyeurs” (Perlez 1994). Likewise, an opponent has disparaged the American Holocaust Memorial as “a fake Auschwitz” (quoted in Kramer 1996, 277). By the same token, the modern construction on the site of Unit 731 invites questions of whether the historical and sacred aura of the original site is desecrated or even lost, and whether it might transform and possibly distort people’s imagination of the milieu de mémoire (real environment of memory), in Pierre Nora’s (1989) sense. In that case, might visitors’ memories and understandings of Unit 731 be based more on historical reconstruction through a current lens than the original history of Unit 731? Might the latter one day be completely forgotten, with only its simulacrum remembered? The exhibition hall and the former headquarters represent two different kinds of lieux de mémoire (sites of memory). In Jane Kramer’s (1996, 272) terms, the headquarters constitutes the “real lieu de mémoire”:6 Having been there, it functions as a “historical testimony,” from which its authenticity and authority are derived (Dalton 2009, 198; see also Benjamin 1986, 220). In contrast, the new exhibition hall embodies history as a “reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete of what is no longer” (Nora 1989, 8). It lacks the ambience of the former headquarters, and seems “out-of-place” (Dalton 2009, 198). The new exhibition hall signifies a modern intervention and a constructed history that says more about Chinese officials’ current interpretation of Unit 731 than about the Unit’s actual history. While the

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former tends to cultivate the sentiment of humiliation and value the ped­ agogical significance of this place, the latter focuses more on the historical violence per se. Indeed, the relocation of individual exhibits in 2015 was not the first occur­ rence of its kind. According to Kirk Denton, “[i]n 1995, a new building to house the exhibits was constructed down the road from this site, but then in 2001 the exhibit was brought back to the original site” (2014, 149). Denton suspects that this is because “the new museum building lacked the power and authenticity of a site where the atrocities described in the exhibits actually took place” (ibid.). If this is true, I wonder whether the exhibits in the new exhibition hall will be relocated back to the former headquarters in the future. Con­ temporary museum officials corralled the history (or “ghosts”) of Unit 731 several times to locate and relocate them between their original sites and the modern museum structures. Every one of these relocations entailed a reframing and retelling of the history of Unit 731, complete with edits, reorganizations, and possible deletions and additions. Although the Chinese officials shared the same purpose of “preserving” the historical site of Unit 731, they differed in the ways of doing it: some chose to exhibit history in situ, while others chose to put the site away to protect it from potential damage by visitors. When I visited the Unit 731 complex in June and December of 2017, dozens of visitors crowded the new exhibition hall, but I did not see anyone in the historical site, except some seniors who were jogging on the square. As Yukiko Koga argues, “[t]he past is confined to the museum, so that the present outside can forget the past” (2008, 21). This might explain why the traumatic history of Unit 731 has been forgotten or ignored on this square, which has been transformed into a place of leisure for local residents. The new exhibition hall also outdoes the former headquarters in attracting visitors, isolating the latter. As Karen Till argues, “[w]hen classified as authentic and contrasted to artificial places, these sites become flattened out temporally and affectively. Rejecting global capitalism, tourism, and popular culture … denies simultaneous locations and interconnections to other people and places in multiple times and spaces” (2005, 214). It is the visitors who endow the historical site with vitality and create the presence of the past through their embodied experience, carrying it into the future. With fewer visitors, the former headquarters resembles an “archive,” in Aleida Assmann’s (2008, 98) words. It passively preserves memories of the past, rather than actively keeping the past present. In this sense, remembering history at a distance or in the constructed space of a museum (rather than through its original buildings) puts the real site of memory in jeopardy of oblivion. I would like to end by comparing my personal affective experiences in the former headquarters of Unit 731 in 2009 and 2017. Here, I use affect to explore the visceral remembering and forgetting of the historical building and as a perspective to contemplate the question whether the old and the new exhibition halls reinforce or dilute the memorialization of Unit 731.

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After the relocation of the material evidence of crimes to the new exhibi­ tion hall, the former headquarters was renovated and opened to the public in August 2015 as a heritage site. When I visited the original site in June 2017, I found the doors of each office on the first floor locked; only the plaques hanging over each door gave a sense of how these offices were used in Unit 731 before 1945. It felt like a modern building. The newly painted white wall caught my eye, somehow suggesting the covering over of the past. The east side of the second floor featured an exhibition about the office of Shiro Ishii while the western part of the second floor functioned as the office of current museum staff. In contrast to the detailed information in the exhibition hall about the atrocities committed by Shiro Ishii and his team, his office felt less emotionally charged and is much less frequented by visitors. The relocation of exhibits to the new exhibition hall, to some extent, redu­ ces the former headquarters to a historical “quotation” or decoration (Abbas 1997, 66), depriving the original building’s architecture of its historical ambi­ ence. Peter van Mensch argues that “[a] context can endow its objects with a meaning and reciprocally objects contribute to the larger meaning of the space they inhabit” (van Mensch 1988, 7 quoted in Moolman 1996, 392). The removal of memorial objects from their historical context and the renovation made it difficult for me to sense the atmosphere that a historical building is meant to convey. The renovated space evoked no ghosts. Rather, the wellindicated offices told a history “in sight” alone (Abbas 1997, 66). I saw the history, but I did not feel much of it. With the diminished historical ambience, the headquarters had witnessed a tendency that degrades a lived space into a sight (see Crowley 2014, 218), facilitating, in my view, the oblivion of the authentic history of Unit 731: I do not feel the history of this place anymore. In contrast, I have clear memories of the shock I felt during my visit to the headquarters in 2009, when it still housed all the material crime evidence. I remember the slightly dank air and smell that are unique to an old building. I felt an overwhelming sense of astonishment when the tour guide told us that the big glass equipment on display had been used to contain a person, and that the air had been extracted gradually. As a result, blood was pressured out from the captive person’s eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. I shivered at the sight of some exhibited guns as the tour guide told us that two Japanese soldiers had forced their victims to stand in two lines, and then raced to see who could kill the most in one shot. Based on my own experiences, I was not surprised to read Kirk Denton’s description of his visit to Unit 731 in 2004, at which time he saw a young woman who “suddenly ran out of the viewing room and threw up in the hallway” (2014, 151). The trauma I experienced during my visit to Unit 731 in 2009 never came back to me, neither when I visited the same building eight years later, nor when I visited the new exhibition hall. I even have a strange sense of nostalgia for that astounding sense of trauma I encountered in the real lieu de mémoire in 2009. Therefore, I argue that although Chinese offi­ cials make efforts to reinforce Chinese victimization and humiliation in this

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new exhibition hall to serve political ends, the relocation of historical mate­ rials fails in an important sense: the new exhibition hall lacks the power of authenticity; visitors cannot feel the original Unit 731, either in this new hall or in the “emptied” former headquarters.

Conclusion The two exhibition halls work cooperatively and competitively in their chan­ neling of visitors’ embodied experience of Unit 731. According to Jie Yang, “affect can direct people to act in ways that support (or challenge) power” (Yang 2014, 17). The nationalist sentiment evoked through the displays in the new exhibition hall, commemorating Unit 731, illustrates how affect might help support the current political power structure in China; however, my affective experience in the “emptied” headquarters questions the displacement of history from its context and underscores the potential danger of losing the feeling a historical site conveys in the process of relocation and reframing. This danger contradicts the desire of the current political power structure in China to achieve political affect. The Chinese government is not able to completely control the affective politics of such a dual cultural experience: pedagogical patriotic education and authentic feeling of the in situ dark history of Unit 731. In James Young’s examination of the counter-monument efforts by the new generation of artists in Germany, he explained that one of these artists’ con­ cerns is “how to build an antifascist monument without resorting to what they regarded as the fascist tendencies in all monuments” (Young 1993, 28). To some extent, the new Unit 731 Crime Evidence Exhibition Hall functions as both a monument as well as a counter-monument, especially when it is juxtaposed and compared with the former headquarters. The new hall simul­ taneously reinforces and dilutes the memorialization of Unit 731, reinforcing the Chinese official memory of victimization and diluting the real site of traumatic memory. Unit 731 paradoxically becomes a site of both memory and oblivion—a memory of national humiliation, and oblivion of the historical site and its violence.

Notes 1 Museum staff explained to me that “when the skin is cut by a scalpel, it first appears white before the blood starts flowing.” 2 Emma Hutchison’s analysis of the 2002 Bali bombing examines how media and other discourses represent this transnational trauma as a national trauma of Australia. 3 However, it is unfair to argue that this exhibition hall is designed only to cultivate national identity. The universal discourse of humanism and peace also constitutes an important message conveyed there. For example, the concluding statement of the exhibition partially reads, “[t]he Unit 731 site is a historical witness of human suf­ fering … . With clear conscience, we are obliged to defend peace and prevent this tragic chapter of history from repeating itself.”

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4 This is taken from my interview with Gao Yubao, the head of research in Unit 731 Crime Evidence Exhibition Hall, in June 2017. 5 I mean authenticity in Walter Benjamin’s sense of “the presence of the original” (1986, 220). 6 Jane Kramer (1996, 272) pinpoints Berliners’ concern about Lea Rosh’s proposal to establish the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. She states that “they worry that monuments are slowly replacing the real lieux de mémoire—the camps themselves.”

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Smith, Paul J. 2009. “China–Japan Relations and the Future Geopolitics of East Asia.” Asian Affairs: An American Review 35 (4): 230–256. Tatlow, Didi Kirsten. 2015. “Q. and A.: Gao Yubao on Documenting Unit 731’s Brutal Human Experiments.” The New York Times, October 21, 2015. https:// sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/21/china-unit-731-japan-war-crimes/. Thrift, Nigel. 2004. “Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect.” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 86 (1): 57–78. Thrift, Nigel. 2009. “Understanding the Affective Spaces of Political Performance.” In Emotion, Place and Culture, edited by Mick Smith, Joyce Davidson, Laura Cameron, and Liz Bondi, 79–95. Farnham: Ashgate. Till, Karen E. 2005. The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 2001. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. van Mensch, Peter. 1988. “Museology and Museums.” ICOM News 3 (41): 5–10. Violi, Patrizia. 2012. “Educating for Nationhood: A Semiotic Reading of the Mem­ orial Hall for Victims of the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders.” Journal of Educational Media, Memory and Society 4 (2): 41–68. Waterton, Emma. 2014. “A More-Than-Representational Understanding of Heritage? The ‘Past’ and the Politics of Affect.” Geography Compass 8 (11): 823–833. Waterton, Emma, and Jason Dittmer. 2014. “The Museum as Assemblage: Bringing Forth Affect at the Australian War Memorial.” Museum Management and Curatorship 29 (2): 122–139. Yang, Jie, ed. 2014. The Political Economy of Affect and Emotion in East Asia. London: Routledge. Yang, Yanjun 杨彦君. 2016. Guandongjun di qisanyi budui shilu 关东军第七三一部队实录 [Documentation on Unit 731 of the Kwantung Army]. Beijing: Foreign Language Press. Yanow, Dvora. 1998. “Space Stories: Studying Museum Buildings as Organizational Spaces While Reflecting on Interpretive Methods and Their Narration.” Journal of Management Inquiry 7 (3): 215–239. Young, James E. 1993. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Zhu, Ying 朱英, ed. 2015. “Xi Jinping: dali hongyang weida aiguozhuyi jingshen wei shixian zhongguo meng tigong jingshen zhizhu” 习近平: 大力弘扬伟大爱国主义精 神为实现中国梦提供精神支柱 [Xi Jinping: Vigorously Branding Patriotism, Pro­ viding Spiritual Support for Realizing Chinese Dream]. December 30, 2015. www. gov.cn/xinwen/2015-12/30/content_5029655.htm.

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Dwellers of silence Conflict and affective borderlands of the Estadio Nacional, Santiago de Chile Johanna Lozoya

“Caminando por la Memoria”—Walking through Memory—is the name of a small permanent photography exhibition opened in 2017 in an aisle of the Estadio Nacional under the Andes-Norte gallery. Three generations can walk today through the aisles, corridors, galleries, and dressing rooms of this sport stadium that at some point was used as a concentration camp. The iconic images of the stadium taken by Marcelo Montecino, Koen Wessing, and David Burnett during the first days of Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 military coup d’état are displayed openly. “Walking” is a public memorial created by the Corporación Estadio Nacional Memoria Nacional Ex-Prisioneros Políticos— Former Political Prisoners of the Estadio Nacional Corporation—and financed by the Consejo Nacional de las Artes and the Instituto Nacional del Deporte. It is also a highly emotional, intergenerational, politicized perfor­ mance of political freedom and freedom of speech in a place stigmatized by damnatio memoriae (a condemnation of memory in terms of legality, politics, social memory, free speech, cultural imaginaries, and institutional history). This place reveals the affective relation between architecture and the embo­ diment of a condemned memory: to “inhabit silence” became an everyday life experience that shaped Chilean citizens. I call them “dwellers of silence.” This paper explores “silence” as one particular aspect of embodied encounters in this place where social and political memory are in dispute. To flesh this out, I aim to trace the affective dimension of the Estadio Nacional de Santiago de Chile in the current memories of a former prisoner. Through his everyday embodiment of a memory, the paper briefly explores the border­ lands of the sayable and unsayable, and the individual and collective spatial intergenerational engagement with remembrance and forgetfulness. Ricard Vinyes (2012) explains that apologetic peaceful atmospheres must not detract from the fact that what is at stake is not the scenario of suffering, but the (civil) rights of “the others” to know and to evoke the suffering in order to be able to commemorate it as a gesture of recognition. Yet, places of violence stand by the fact that survivors experienced what hap­ pened, the perpetrators experienced what they had done, and that some memories are concealed in certain moments, and some are revealed in others. “Our abilities to respond to, and to be affected by, spaces of heritage emerge

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from the ways in which we have already reconciled previous experiences” (Waterton 2014, 828).

National borderlands of remembering and forgetting On September 19, 1973, the Estadio Nacional of Santiago de Chile—the most emblematic sport facility in the Chilean capital since 1938—was transformed after a week of the coup d’état headed by Augusto Pinochet, into a place of civil detention, torture, and murder. Until November 5th of the same year, 12,000 detainees were interrogated, thousands tortured and killed, in a sys­ tematic, illegal, and extremely violent machinery of terror (Cozzi Figueroa 2000; Montealegre 2003; Parot 2003; Piper and Jordán 2012). This sport sta­ dium was the first of its kind, but not the only one throughout the country to be used as a detention center and militarized prison. In Concepción, 500 kilometers south of Santiago, military authorities used a regional stadium as a place of confinement for citizens detained during “El Rastrillo,” the massive national seizure and arrest operation carried out by the armed forces during the coup d’état. The few photographs that record what was happening inside the Estadio Nacional in those days, mostly held by the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos in Santiago de Chile, testify to the agency of space in enforcing the military spatial organization of power and fear: galleries crowded with prisoners, dressing rooms transformed into torture cells, corri­ dors and tunnels with rows of detainees and future desaparecidos. Such architectures of pain reinforced the state’s construction of affective regimes in Chile, underpinned by political violence, human rights violations, institutional deterrence, and a politics of silence and fear. In December 1973, after the remaining detainees were evacuated and sent as prisoners to other concentration camps and houses of torture (Rebolledo 2013), the Estadio Nacional restored its sporting functions. The refurbish­ ment of the former concentration camps into functioning sports arenas radi­ cally transformed Chilean civil society’s emotional and spatial relationship towards the stadiums, over time effectively erasing their history of human rights abuse. But the international community had a much longer memory. In 1974, the Soviets refused to play in the stadium during a World Cup game between Chile and the USSR, arguing that the stadium had been used as a concentration camp. The Chilean military regime, however, took little notice of such political ‘accusations,’ leaving the game to be played as scheduled. Having no opponent, the Chilean team split up and played among themselves. According to national newspapers of the time, Chile won that match! The Estadio Nacional of Santiago de Chile contemporarily exists as a contested emotional landscape. A space of fear, sadness, and rage for the lef­ tist population; a place of forgetfulness, disbelief, resentment, and annoyance for traditional conservatives and extreme right parties, the Estadio Nacional of Santiago ambiguously exists in the national consciousness. During the more recent left-wing presidential term of Ricardo Lagos (2000–2006), the

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stadium, along with its surroundings, was declared a historic monument by the Consejo de Monumentos Nacionales de Chile in 2003. In that same year, the Estadio Chile, a small enclosure for basketball, court football, and vol­ leyball located west of Santiago that was formerly used as a center of deten­ tion, was renamed Estadio Víctor Jara after the popular communist musician who was tortured and murdered at the site in 1973. In July 2008, however, just five years later, the Estadio Nacional of Santiago de Chile was renamed yet again as the Estadio Nacional Julio Martínez Prádanos by the Partido Unión Democrática (UDI), a right-wing party founded during the military regime whose ideology is conservative, neoliberal, and Catholic. Martínez Prádanos was a nationally renowned sports journalist sympathetic to Pino­ chet’s regime; Prádanos died in 2008. Since the 1970s the location has never truly overcome its damnatio memoriae, or condemned memory. This recent request to rename the stadium was a political decision of a right-wing Con­ gress willing to overlook the grim past of this locus of memory, but served as a warning to the political opposition about who had the right to speak about these matters. The affective dimension of the stadium is continually linked to silence, which is understood as an emotional agency of materially embodied (i.e., interaction of multiple bodies) practices of remembrance and forgetfulness. Over the years, people’s self-imposed silence about the brutal acts once car­ ried out inside the building and in the nearby streets became a survival strat­ egy. It was so for those who knew in their own flesh what really happened and survived, and for those who were lucky enough to be able to stay “out of range,” “not knowing,” and avoid extreme and violent situations. Because of this, today’s incipient public condemnation of such embodied long-term social-political terror entails architectural affective engagement. Individual and collective feelings around vulnerability, mourning, acknowledgment, resentment, or evasion while visiting this place test the limits of what has been unstated, unsaid, and unknown in the larger landscape of memory. When walking through the corridors, sitting in the galleries, passing through the old dressing rooms, bodily perceptual and emotional experience overlaps with all sorts of cultural, historical, political Dasein. The circulation of extremely subtle, diffuse feelings that evoke and produce complex affective borderlands of remembering and forgetting; borderlands of memory that are understood in this paper as “onto-topologies” that overlap or separate themselves dyna­ mically, regarding the perceptual, sensorial, emotional, and cultural media­ tion on the bodily experience of the visitant (Lozoya, forthcoming) and the capacity of a building to allow inhabitation to take place (Jacobs et al. 2011; Lozoya 2018; Waterton 2014; Yaneva 2012). Silence, as conspiratorial secrecy over something which everyone is per­ sonally aware of, becomes the foremost display around places of violence. Cognitive sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel, when referring to Holocaust survi­ vors, characterizes this heavy silence among generations as a product of a tragic “interweaving of two kinds of conflicted energy: on the part of the

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survivor, [the] suppression of telling; on the part of the descendant, [the] fear of finding out” (Ruth Wajnryb quoted in Zerubavel 2010, 32; brackets added by Zerubavel). Silence is not the act of forgetting, just as much speech is not the realm of remembrance. As Jay Winter points out, Silence […] is a socially constructed space in which and about which subjects and words normally used in everyday life are not spoken. The circle around this space is described by groups of people who at one point in time deem it appropriate that there is a difference between the sayable and the unsayable, or the spoken and the unspoken, and that such distinction can and should be maintained and observed over time. (Winter 2010, 4) Silence is thus a performative, dynamic, unstable, intrusive mediation that circulates as an affective economy, shaping the borderlands of the sayable and the unsayable in places of violence (Lozoya 2014).

Stolpersteine: the body testifies Who are the “we” at whom such shock-pictures are aimed? (on Virginia Woolf, Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003)

Stolperstein means “stumbling stone.” In Berlin, it refers to small brass-covered concrete blocks that artist Gunter Demnig laid in 1996 to commemorate people who were persecuted by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. As stoneobstacles placed on the pavement in front of a victim’s residence, these are affective reminders of brutality in which survivors and descendants, victims and executioners, the unspeakable past and the controversial present “trip over” each other. Every single day. The Estadio Nacional is a stumbling stone. This Chilean Stolperstein demands reaction and inclusion from different affective worlds. An “obstacle” that compels us, for example, to pay attention to the complexity of the former prisoners’ embodied agendas (Calveiro 2010; Huffschmid 2013; Parot 2003; Prudant 2013). A reminder for some, that prison—as Jorge Montealegre, poet, journalist, and former prisoner at this stadium, reminds us—is not a place that you can abandon (see Figure 3.1). Bodies, as key pieces in the topographies of traumatic memories, contribute to the production of social memory. Cultural scientist Anne Huffschmid sug­ gests through her work on processes of social memory around political vio­ lence in Latin America that, “without falling into the essentialist assumption of the body as an instance of ‘ultimate truth’ of memory processes, I think it useful to presume that the body remembers otherwise, outside the scope of the discursive-communicative, although always connected and connectable with it” (Huffschmid 2013, 112). Following philologist Aleida Assmann on conceiving the traumatic remembering inscribed in the body (i.e., a reservoir

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Figure 3.1 Marcelo Montecino. Estadio Nacional, September 21, 1973

of pain that does not admit distance) as opposed to memory processes, Huffschmid points out that “the elaboration of the memory requires taking some distance, temporary and affective, with the lived thing. One cannot remember what is present in the present, rather one embodies it. In that sense we can conceive trauma with a corporal inscription opposed to memory” (Huffschmid 2013, 115; Assmann 1999, 247). In the Estadio Nacional, individuals experienced the violent bodily and emotional transition from being seen in the streets (and thus arrested) to being overlooked once in prison (and thus disappeared). The Estadio Nacio­ nal is not a place one can easily abandon. Former prisoners’ embodiments “remember the violence of the arrival, the several ways of humiliation and loss of personhood, the ceasing to ‘be someone,’ the impersonality of the procedure” (Calveiro 2010, 359). In such corporal inscriptions, urban and architectural landscapes trigger particular affective agendas. ** What is (really) happening? was a heartbreaking question asked through­ out Chile in 1973. It still is. In the early 1970s, while postwar inter- and intranational espionage was blooming in Latin America, the common Chi­ lean citizen had a feeling of confidence. In 1973 secrecy in Chile’s daily civic life was something that the population was not used to (or so the collective imaginary goes). Being a legalist country (a phrase and argument still in use) gave to the extended middle class a feeling of security. This would become quickly erased near the mid-1970s. The coup d’état created a popular emo­ tional atmosphere of amazement, bewilderment, and disbelief after such a

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collapse of law and the rule of law. An experience that became deeply dis­ tressing when military censorship reached the press, radio, and television. In Frazadas del Estadio Nacional (2003), Jorge Montealegre recalls that TV channels collapsed. The images of what was happening in La Moneda that morning of September 11 were partially broadcast hours later. The Junta’s message to the population was clear and forthright. [The first communication of the Junta] left us speechless, in solitary con­ finement and under threat: The press, radio stations and TV channels of the Unión Popular must suspend its information and activities from this moment on. Otherwise, they will be punished by air and land. The people of Santiago should stay at home, indoors, to avoid innocent victims. (Montealegre 2003, 21) In those first months, two newspapers with a right-wing tradition and antiAllende political position, El Mercurio and La Tercera, were the only press allowed to continue with news reports. Photographs of military violence during the coup d’état were immediately censored by the regime’s print media (Bossay 2013), and daily accounts on the military coup d’état were merely Pinochetist and right-wing propaganda. The images taken from the playing field in the Estadio Nacional, as those included in this paper, were shot by national and international press and television reporters who had been sum­ moned to a press conference (Moreno 2006; Parot 2003). The military officers in command assured the international press that those pictured in the photo­ graphs were mainly being questioned and released—a version of their arrest that soon proved to be a lie. Furthermore, behind many pictures of military violence and civil arrest taken in those days, there is a story about a photo­ grapher being arrested, imprisoned, tortured, or killed. In the months and years to come, these photographs were mostly published outside Chile and in clandestine national and international media networks. On the other hand, the military Junta’s propaganda quickly established the psychological warfare logic of “them or us” to justify repression and the violation of human rights. On September 19, 1973, the Junta openly promoted betrayal among neighbors, coworkers, and family, declaring that all information provided would be as confidential as the identity of those who filed a complaint. A radical change was triggered in the private and public behavior of the popula­ tion. In the streets, the body began to be subdued to the look of others, to the eyes of authorities, and to camera lenses; at home, “missing” people became neighbors, coworkers, compañeros, and family. Distrust and fear were emo­ tions that quickly seized people’s minds, and self-censorship became the first embodiment of it. At the end of the day, silence started with the body: [When walking,] I was terribly afraid. In one corner soldiers stopped me and threaten to cut my hair with a bayonet. I promised that I would cut it that day so they would let me go. Long hair, a hippie or a guerrilla look

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for the milicos [military] was a symptom of indiscipline, chaos and moral disorder. You had to cut it violently. Some lolos [teenagers] were not as lucky as me and they were shaved on the street in a humiliating way. It was dangerous to remain the same person. Self-censorship instinctively started by the body and those who had to cut their beard became pale twice. (Montealegre 2003, 25) While military raids in search of weapons, called “house by house operations,” were deployed in urban and rural areas, trucks and military cars roamed the streets arresting thousands of people. Two weeks after La Moneda was taken, French Press correspondent Veronique Decoudu wrote in the Mexican newspaper El Universal: With the exception of those that support the military junta, the Chileans remain locked in complete silence, refusing to comment or recall the events registered in the course of the last weeks. This climate of fear is due, in large part, to the violence and the force of repression that was unleashed after the fall of Allende and still continues … . A new wave of arrests has begun in the last hours [and it is] attributed by observers to the [use of] information obtained from the detainees during the interrogations. (Decoudu 1973) Those first weeks and months particularly paralyzed a shocked middleclass population that just couldn’t understand what was going on. Sep­ tember 11, 1973, not only broke legalist political institutions, but betrayed a way of civic life. The image of massive numbers of detainees crammed in public spaces and the experience of political kidnapping in the streets seemed strange, plainly absurd. Even more preposterous was to accept the indisputable fact that thousands of civilians were being arrested by the carabineros (police) and the military who used to be the image of legalist rectitude and high moral standards according to Chilean civic tradition. Desaparecido (missing) was no common word or concept then, a state of affairs that would change dramatically within a few months. In the streets of Santiago, corporeity was abducted, submitted, became invisible, and easily destroyed: [When detainees arrive at the Estadio Nacional] There were times where the officer in command rejected the “load” and the arrested were to be executed by the chief in command of the Capture Unit. He would argue that too many people were already kept in the building. It also happened that the vehicle would leave the stadium with an unexpected load: corpses which had to be disposed of on the road. (Montealegre 2003, 44)

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Figure 3.2 Wally Kunstmann. Dressing Room where women were imprisoned in 1973. Caminando por la Memoria Permanent Exposition. Estadio Nacional, 2019

No detainee inside the aisles and dressing rooms of the Estadio Nacional could have possibly imagined what they all were going to witness or experi­ ence in that place for the following months. Yet, collective bewilderment quickly transformed into multiple individual experiences of fear, humiliation, hunger, torture, and death. In the confusion it didn’t matter whether the detainee came from a police station, from a raid, a street, from the Estadio Chile or from the Academia Militar. Reasonable or unreasonable grounds [for being arrested], militancy, drunkenness or ignoring the curfew, were all min­ gled in the same pot. All around I could see people in the corners of rooms, facing a wall, being punished. A man with his hands tied; another one lying on the floor, like sleeping, covered with a blanket. Old people crying and begging for an explanation. There were also women who then didn’t imagine where they [the soldiers] could take them. Yet there was [a special] room for them in the stadium … . The guards with patterned bracelets on their arms [to identify themselves as soldiers], got nervous with the [people’s] eyes. The reason why we have to put our hands back on the neck, head down and elbows forward, was so we could not look sideways. Thus, in such confusion, it was also difficult for someone to recognize us. (Montealegre 2003, 45)

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The prohibition to look, [at anything or anyone], the possibility to per­ ceive only fleeting fractions [of reality], made of our immediate sur­ roundings a sordid place absolutely out of [our] control. We barely knew about our body. We knew nothing, instead, of the horror that others were living in that same stadium or elsewhere. In my head at least, I couldn’t imagine that priests were being killed or that people were being thrown in the sea or in the desert. If we’d known, the terror of the majority of us and the courage of some, would have been greater. (Montealegre 2003, 46) Indoors, the corridors, galleries, and dressing rooms turned into prison cells where to see and to be seen became a threat (see Figure 3.2). In the Estadio Nacional, thousands of Chileans experienced their own increasing social invisibility before becoming state prisoners or desaparecidos. They [the military] wouldn’t see us. We could not see each other. Once inside of the Estadio Nacional this sort of confinement was more intense. They cover us with our own arms or under blankets or under a ban­ dage or by leaving us prostrated or facing a wall, like children punished in the corner of a classroom. By no means did they want to look at us and catch our eye. It seemed an instinctive, unconscious measure, but since I was arrested it had been like that. At the stadium’s gateway, it [this attitude] had different shapes. Looking made us vulnerable and powerful at the same time. And worked for both of us. Thus, [the act of looking] could be dangerous. (Montealegre 2003, 46) ** Days became months, months became years. Photographers’ resistance to Pinochet’s material and emotional regime remained a brutal battle against all kinds of self-censorship (Moreno 2006; Sapiezynska 2013; Lorenzini 2013). José Moreno Fabbri, co-founder of the Asociación de Fotógrafos Independientes (AFI) in the 1980s, explains when interviewed in 2006: “we realized the value that photography acquired as a document because they [the military] were always after us” (Moreno 2006). Red Cross archives have revealed that by December 1973 more than 20,000 people walked through the Estadio Nacional as prisoners. Among them, a new kind of Chilean became silently acknowledged by the population for more than three decades: el desaparecido. Bodies vanished. But not space. Nowadays, this “space, place, and experi­ ence” is becoming a politically affective and emotional citizens’ agenda—one in which the record of individual intimate memory and embodiment of silence are achieving a public dimension (see Figure 3.3). Names need to be spoken, grief to be acknowledged; bodies need to meet and feelings to be embodied. In the architectural making of this past, the emotional human agency, just as much as its affective appraisal, must be recognized. As geographers Gillian

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Figure 3.3 Wally Kunstmann. “La Dignidad” grandstand. In the background, it reads, “A nation without a memory is a nation without a future.” Estadio Nacional, 2019

Rose, Monica Degen, and Begum Basdas point out: “there is a difference between things that have happened and things that might happen, and the legacy of past events carried by embodied human subjects” (2010, 345).

Conclusion On September 9, 2003, in the Andres Bello courtyard of the Universidad de Chile, a crowd of people, mostly young students, read out loud the words engraved in a commemorative plate that had just been unveiled: “In recogni­ tion of the teachers, students, graduates and workers of the Universidad de Chile and their families who were executed, disappeared, arrested, tortured, imprisoned, exiled, relegated, deposed, expelled, forced to resign and mur­ dered during the military dictatorship (1973–1990).” Now, these new genera­ tions were able to know what was previously unsayable. As Vinyes (2012) explains, apologetic peaceful atmospheres must not detract from the fact that what is at stake is not the scenario of suffering, but the (civil) rights of “the others” to the right to know and to evoke the suffering in order to be able to commemorate it as a gesture of recognition. Who has the right to speak about the violent past? Who are the privileged “we”? Only those who were there? Those who endured suffering? Those who avoided it? Are younger generations able and entitled to bodily and emotion­ ally recognize the unspeakable any different; what are they affected by? As Jay Winter points out, one primary impulse underlying silence and reconciliation

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arises from conflicts of privilege: “The entitlement to speak about war and violence is not universal. Some have the right; others do not. The difference between the two categories is a matter of social and cultural codes, which can and do change over time” (2010, 8). Thinking on affective architecture and heritage, the spatial experience of “dwellers of silence” makes us wonder what happened to these human beings in the place of detention, torture, and death, and what we experience and understand about how architectural memory triggers sensibilities, perceptions, and emotions. “When my son turned 17, he had much need to know where his father was,” testifies a woman in the Informe Retting Report (1991). “So I said to him: Son, go to a graveyard, look for the most abandoned tomb and take care of it as if it was your father’s.” The Estadio Nacional is one of many such graveyards.

References Assmann, Aleida. 1999. Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. München: C. H. Beck. Bossay, Claudia. 2013. “Dicotomías en las lecturas de lo visual en la Unidad Popular y la dictadura: El protagonismo de lo visual en el trauma histórico.” In La imagen en las sociedades mediáticas latinoamericanas. Actas de Encuentro de la IX Bienal Iberoamericana de Comunicación, 23–28. Chile: ICEI. Calveiro, Pilar. 2010. “El vaciamiento de los cuerpos: El encierro en México.” In Corporalidades, edited by Maya Aguiluz Ibargüen and Pablo Lazo Briones, 353–377. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Centro de Investigaciones Interdisciplinarias en Ciencias y Humanidades, Universidad Iberoamericana. Cozzi Figueroa, Adolfo Rafael. 2000. Estadio Nacional. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Sudamericana. Decoudu, Veronique. 1973. “Registran en Chile casa por casa buscando armas ocultas.” El Universal, México, lunes 24 de septiembre de 1973, Primera sección: primera plana, 6. Huffschmid, Anne. 2013. “La otra materialidad: Cuerpos y memoria en la vía pública.” In Cuerpos, Espacios y Emociones: Aproximaciones desde las ciencias sociales, edited by Miguel Ángel Aguilar y Paula Soto Villagrán, 111–138. México: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Iztapalapa. Jacobs, Jane M., Stephen Cairns, and Ignaz Strebel. 2011. “Doing Building Work: Methods at the Interface of Geography and Architecture.” Geographical Research 50 (2): 126–140. Lorenzini, Kena. 2013. Fragmentos/Memorias/Imágenes, a 40 años del golpe. Santiago de Chile: Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos. Lozoya, Johanna. 2014. Los monstruos del silencio: Apuntes sobre la angustia con­ temporánea. México: Taurus. Lozoya, Johanna. 2018. “Giro afectivo: Una aproximación al dilema espacial de las emociones.” Bitácora 39: 34–39. Lozoya, Johanna, ed. Forthcoming. Diseñar experiencia: Una geopolítica de la arqui­ tectura afectiva desde el sur global. México: Facultad de Arquitectura, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

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Montealegre Iturra, Jorge. 2003. Frazadas del Estadio Nacional. Santiago de Chile: LOM Ediciones. Montecino, Marcelo (y Christian). 2011. Irredimible. Diario 1973. 144,197 Chile: Ocho Libros. Moreno, Sebastián, dir. 2006. La ciudad de los fotógrafos. Movie, Claudia Barril, Nona Fernández, and Sebastián Moreno, Chile, 80 min. Parot, Carmen Luz, dir. 2003. Estadio Nacional. Movie, Chile, 111 min. Piper Shafir, Isabel, and Evelyn Hevia Jordán. 2012. Espacio y Recuerdo: Archipiélago de memorias en Santiago de Chile. Santiago de Chile: Ocho Libros. Prudant, Elisabet. 2013. Y entonces estaban ellas. Memoria(s) de las Mujeres Demo­ cráticas durante la dictadura. (Memorias y crónicas.) Santiago de Chile: Ceibo Ediciones. Rebolledo, Javier. 2013. La danza de los cuervos: El destino final de los desaparecidos. Santiago de Chile: Ceibo. Rose, Gillian, Monica Degen, and Begum Basdas. 2010. “More on ‘Big Things’: Building Events and Feelings.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series 35 (3): 334–349. Sapiezynska, Ewa. 2013. “Los no aparecidos: La protesta social invisible en los grandes medios en Chile y las políticas mediáticas del disenso.” In La imagen en las sociedades mediáticas latinoamericanas. Actas de Encuentro de la IX Bienal Iberoamericana de Comunicación, 344–355. Chile: ICEI. Vinyes, Ricard. 2012. “Prólogo: Sobre los lugares apacibles.” In Espacio y Recuerdo: Archipiélago de memorias en Santiago de Chile, edited by Isabel Piper Shafir and Evelyn Hevia Jordán, 9–11. Santiago de Chile: Ocho Libros. Waterton, Emma. 2014. “A More-Than-Representational Understanding of Heritage? The ‘Past’ and the Politics of Affect.” Geography Compass 8 (11): 823–833. Wessing, Koen. 2011. El arte de visibilizar la pregunta. Santiago de Chile: LOM Ediciones. Winter, Jay. 2010. “Thinking about Silence.” In Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century, edited by Efrat Ben-Ze’ev, Ruth Ginio, and Jay Winter, 3–31. New York: Cambridge University Press. Yaneva, Albena. 2012. Mapping Controversies in Architecture. Farnham: Ashgate. Zerubavel, Eviatar. 2010. “The Social Sound of Silence: Toward a Sociology of Denial.” In Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century, edited by Efrat Ben-Ze’ev, Ruth Ginio, and Jay Winter, 32–44. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Websites David Burnett. David Burnett Home Page. Accessed April 7, 2018. “Caminando por la Memoria”, Proyecto Estadio Nacional Memoria Nacional, Cor­ poración Estadio Nacional Memoria Nacional Ex-Prisioneros Políticos. 2017. Accessed June 15, 2018. Informe Retting Report: Informe de la Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación. 1991. Tomo I, Tercera parte, Capítulo IV, “La reacción de los familiares de la víctimas y de los organismos de derechos humanos.” Accessed November 10, 2017.

4

Toxic landfills, survivor trees, and dust cloud memories More-than-human ecologies of 9/11 memory1 Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas and Julia Cavicchi2 Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing? Where have all the flowers gone, long time ago? Where have all the flowers gone? Young girls have picked them, every one … When will they ever learn? Oh when will they ever learn? Where have all the young girls gone …; gone to young men every one … Where have all the young men gone …; gone for soldiers every one … Where have all the soldiers gone …; gone to graveyards every one … Where have all the graveyards gone …; gone to flowers every one … Where have all the flowers gone …; young girls have picked them every one … … Oh when will they ever learn? —Pete Seeger

Pete Seeger’s iconic anti-war song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” made famous by American folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary, represents a pervasive cultural theme at the heart of Western practices of commemoration: that out of death, rebirth and renewal inevitably follow. Such biologically determinist, ‘circle of life’ narratives do little, if nothing, to break the very anthropogenic cycles of violence producing them, as the song’s lyrics forebodingly conclude. Yet, this “damaging idea that burned, blood-stained ruins will naturally fade into romantic, grass-covered ruins” (Moshenska 2015, 88) remains a mainstay in contemporary frameworks of commemorating cultural trauma. The symbolic power of grass, trees, flowers, stones, water, and other every­ day objects has emerged as a cornerstone of memorialization of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (9/11), yet the affective capacity of these more­ than-human elements remains undertheorized (see Gilbert and Ponder 2014; Greenwald and Chanin 2013; Heath-Kelly 2018; Jones 2014 as exceptions). As ‘survivors,’ or even secondary witnesses to traumatic events, nonhuman elements have long been preserved in, even added to, memorial landscapes for their representational capacities to ‘say what cannot be said’—much like the metaphoric flowers of Seeger’s song. Following the September 11th terrorist attacks on the City of New York, for example, municipal authorities were left with the onerous task of clearing

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debris from the newly destroyed World Trade Center (WTC) complex. Des­ perate attempts to find living survivors quickly gave way to forensic evidence gathering, however, as the weaponized machinery of commercial airliners proved feeble the hope of locating signs of human life on the site. Although twelve survivors were rescued from the rubble alive, the majority of 9/11 victims were never recovered, even posthumously, from the approximate 1.5 million tons of WTC debris painstakingly sifted through at the nearby land­ fill, “Fresh Kills” (Feuer 2008). According to municipal sources: “The tenmonth search of the debris at Fresh Kills Landfill ended on July 15, 2002. All human remains that could be identified, were identified … Only dust remains” (Feuer 2008). The ubiquitous dust of the World Trade Center brings to the surface the unfathomable deaths that transpired at the site. Of the 2,753 people killed in the Trade Tower’s collapse, 176 bodies were recovered from the rubble, clas­ sifying the remaining ninety-four percent of victims as “missing” (Blais and Rasic 2011, 80–86). One 9/11 widow characterized this sudden and complete loss of her husband as “mind-boggling” (Spielberg 2011). As the woman continued, “It’s mind-boggling when you think about someone going to work one day and not coming back at all. They found nothing, he just kinda dis­ appeared” (Spielberg 2011; emphasis in original). The uncanniness of this human loss is embedded in the “dark ecologies” (Morton 2018) that have sprung from WTC commemoration. As the missing became the ‘disappeared,’ bodily matter transformed everyday objects and environs into dingpolitik, ‘things able to speak for themselves’ (see Latour 2005). Yet despite the site’s posthumanist turn, the ‘dark matter’ of “Ground Zero” has been deployed rather anthropocentrically to maintain hegemonic narratives of cultural trauma and victimization post-9/11. In her text Trauma and the Memory of Politics (2003), Jenny Edkins con­ ceptualizes the management of trauma discourse as essential to contemporary processes of state-making and political community in times of crisis. According to the author, [T]he production of the self and the state … takes place at the traumatic intersection between peace and war, inside and out … . Forms of state­ hood in contemporary society, as forms of political community, are themselves produced and reproduced through social practices, including practices of trauma and memory. (Edkins 2003, 10–11) Trauma, for the author, constitutes a rupture between the state and self as the basis of political community. Working to reestablish sociopolitical order in the wake of disasters, natural or man-made, the management of trauma is essential to reestablishing sovereign power and state control. As Bell (2006, 10) concurs, “discourses of state authority and legitimacy are called into question” during moments of catastrophe, “and a window for re-inscribing

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new understandings of the world emerges, albeit briefly.” Consequently, how traumatic events are remembered, if they are remembered at all, plays a sig­ nificant role in shaping individual and collective identities and reestablishing—or disrupting—postdisaster political orders. According to the aforementioned logics of ‘green’ commemoration, 9/11 memorials are symbols of collective resilience and defiance in the face of international terrorism. In the immediacy of the September 11th terrorist attacks, government leaders ushered Americans to direct public empathy towards individual practices of consumption. Most blatantly, “President George W. Bush recommended that people aid their country by shopping to stabilize the economy and defy terrorist attacks on free-market capitalism, the symbolic power of the World Trade Center buildings” (Mark 2016, 63). This dialectic of ‘creative destruction’ expands the former President’s policy to memorial sites themselves, as visitors to lower Manhattan are transformed into ‘patrons’ of collective memory, vital to the emerging war effort. This emphasis on “Never Forget” resilience, albeit economic or environs, has served to reduce the possibility of confronting more complex narratives and material experiences of loss engendered at the WTC site. By following the aftermath’s toxic memory—both figurative and literal— we begin to excavate the toxic precarity underpinning the necropolitical logics of the WTC site and its emergent memory. The convergence of ‘9/11 memory’ with WTC redevelopment, we argue, represents a form of “spatial amnesia” (Nixon 2011, 151), obfuscating the ongoing ‘spatial creep’ of the event’s toxic aftermath, impacting ecological and embodied entanglements elsewhere. We argue that spatially fixed narratives of trauma elide the environmentally dif­ fuse human victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, as well as how nonhuman actors coconstitute, contradict, and transform these memorial spaces. Focus­ ing on the ecologies of 9/11 commemoration, we argue that these memorial spaces employ the affective power of nonhuman actors to reproduce exclu­ sionary narratives of cultural trauma, obscuring very real environmentally diffuse human victims and ongoing harms, domestically and abroad. In foregrounding green ecologies of 9/11 memory and memorialization, we draw on more-than-human approaches that emphasize how both human and nonhuman matter and memory emerge from and transform each other (see Anderson 2014; Kirsch 2013; Tolia-Kelly 2013) at the WTC site. Trees that have endured traumatic events, for example, are cultivated and honored as authentic, living markers—and makers—of memory (see Conti and Petersen 2008; Halamish and Hermoni 2007). In 9/11 memorialization, the aesthetic deployment of trees as symbols of resilience also represents a tacit alienation from the natural world that these plants inhabit, whereby the trees become blank slates on which human meaning is imputed (see Heath-Kelly 2018, 71). But beyond their mobilization as passive symbols, the plants themselves also exert a “creative presence” (Cloke and Jones 2001, 655) that equally shapes the WTC memorial site, wherein ecologies of memory are preserved and curated. As a result, divergent forms of “slow violence”—violence that both

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predates and extends beyond the afflicted landscape—are rendered visible (see Kearney 2016; Nixon 2011). Here, time becomes a vital force, as ensuing toxic pollution creates new kinds of chronic wounds and wounding. Drawing on qualitative research at the National September 11th Memorial & Museum (NS11M&M) at the World Trade Center, including semistructured interviews with memorial and museum staff (Micieli-Voutsinas), participant observation at memorial sites (Micieli-Voutsinas), and discourse analysis of memorial coverage and public response (Micieli-Voutsinas and Cavicchi), this essay traces the interface of human and nonhuman repre­ sentation and affectation, form and practice, at the newly rebuilt WTC. Dovetailing at least two interrelated histories of trauma—one environmental, the other geopolitical—the entangled ecologies of memory at the WTC are, like trauma itself, interconnected. Although occurring in a specific geo­ graphical place and time, the trauma of 9/11 is rendered meaningful in rela­ tionship to other geographical sites and moments of rupture, past and present (see Coddington and Micieli-Voutsinas 2017 on trauma geographies). As a site of ongoing absence–presence (Micieli-Voutsinas 2017; see also Maddrell 2013; Ginn 2014), we demonstrate how more-than-human spaces of the 9/11 memorial design reinscribe more-than-representational experiences of 9/11 memory and the gendered communities they sustain vis-à-vis “affective heri­ tage” (Micieli-Voutsinas 2017, 94; see also Crang and Tolia-Kelly 2010; Doss 2010; Lorimer 2008; Waterton 2014 on affect and heritage). We begin our analysis with the most prolific of these ‘green’ design elements: the memorial trees.

Memorial trees, more-than-human survivors While the [memorial] footprints remain empty, the surrounding plaza’s design has evolved to include beautiful groves of trees, traditional affirmations of life and rebirth. These trees, like memory itself, demand the care and nurturing of those who visit and tend them. They remember life with living forms, and serve as living representations of the destruction and renewal of life in their own annual cycles. The result is a memorial that expresses both the incalculable loss of life and its consoling regeneration. (Lower Manhattan Development Corporation 2004)

As an active traumascape, the NS11M&M represents “ruins as wounds on the body politic,” which are “carefully maintained in a freshly ruined state” (Moshenska 2015, 88). Michael Arad’s memorial pools, Reflecting Absence, continually re-make the wounds of 9/11 as an absence–presence in the built landscape; a loss that is representationally absented as negative space, yet remains viscerally palpable to site visitors (Micieli-Voutsinas 2017). As such, the NS11M&M performs a type of “thanatopolitics,” a term Agamben (1998, 122) uses to interrogate the vanishing point between biopolitics and necropolitics: “the spaces and moments of everyday life” wherein the state attributes

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political value to certain lives upon their death, and when such valuation is withheld (Mbembe 2003, 11). “Marked by the sign of constant death” (Mbembe 2003, 11), the memorial environment at the NS11M&M is part of a broader understanding of national victimhood, which is “[recon]figured as a ‘natural’ body to be secured, purified, and strengthened in the face of [future] threat” (Biermann 2016, 211). Aestheticizing national wounds alongside eco­ logical regeneration, Arad’s memorial design produces place-based repre­ sentations of cultural trauma that reinforce spatial narratives of post-9/11 grievability and national security. During a visit to the Pentagon in 2010, for instance, a National 9/11 Pen­ tagon memorial staff member spoke of the Pentagon’s rebuilding process, which was swiftly completed just thirteen months following the attacks. As this memorial staff member described the rebuilding efforts, or the “Phoenix Project” as it was called: “We wanted to get rid of any lasting sign of the attacks … The mentality was: We’re strong; you can hit us but you can’t knock us down” (Micieli-Voutsinas 2010, personal communication). The Pentagon’s metaphorical ‘rise from the ashes’ symbolically functions first and foremost to counter the terrorist attack’s weakening of US military power. Second, in stressing the brevity of the Pentagon’s restoration, the above remarks aim to exemplify national strength and resilience, in addition to resecuritization. As such, accelerated rebuilding efforts reestablish military prowess in the aftermath of the attacks, symbolically preventing the “hal­ lowed grounds” from further destruction at the hands of our attackers. Such narratives of redemption vis-à-vis rebuilding not only reinforce the belief in American exceptionalism (militarily and culturally), but they also comfort rampant public fear of subsequent attack (see also Doss 2010 on 9/11; Line­ nthal 2001 on Oklahoma City). Performing as extensions of the state, rebuilding efforts—which also include site-specific memorial installations— thus assist in reestablishing military, social, and geopolitical order in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. Offering gendered “taxonomies of inclusion–exclusion, security–insecurity, and violence against or care for certain bodies” (Fluri 2014, 795), such post-9/11 ‘security-as-rebuilding’ campaigns reinforce transnational hierarchies of race and ethnicity, religion and citizenship, in the US-led war on terrorism. As the state recovers from its own loss of security (see Edkins 2003), the biopolitical bonds between it and its citizens are reaffirmed in reconstruction efforts, but at the expense of those excluded from post-9/11 discourses of national belonging. More-than-representational spaces of NS11M&M design reinforce these same scripts of ‘inclusion–exclusion, security–insecurity, and violence’ (Fluri 2014; also see Micieli-Voutsinas, forthcoming). Here, cultural trauma is triggered spatially by architectural performances, or “space stories” (Yanow 1998), encoded at the museological site, rendering history through racialized and gendered taxonomies of innocence and culpability (see Micieli-Voutsinas 2017). Such experiential understandings of place enable WTC visitors to viscerally feel, or “situate security within the homeland and a/effectively

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shroud the flesh-and-bone devastation of US military violence elsewhere” (Fluri 2014, 795). Anxiety for Arad’s design, Reflecting Absence, for example, persisted in the early stages of the 9/11 Memorial design competition (2003–2004), as first-round deliberations lamented on the original design’s lack of aesthetic ‘redemption’ (see Lacayo 2004; Herschthal 2011). Both family members and memorial jurors3 initially expressed concern over the Arad design’s pro­ pensity for necropolis, with the terrorists’ aesthetics of destruction and loss dominating the site. As a result of jurors’ concerns, the 400-oak tree “memorial grove” was imposed ex post facto onto Arad’s original memorial design. Interest in ‘greening’ memorial sites emphasizes varying degrees of ecological regeneration (see Charlesworth and Addis 2002; Cowles 2017; Sather-Wagstaff 2015) and the calming atmospheres these environs provide to would-be visitors (see Gough 1996; Veil et al. 2011). The addition of commemorative trees by landscape architect Peter Walker reinvigorated the memorial plaza with new life, where, from one view, the memorial trees are presented in orderly rows, envisioning the memorial grounds as a domestic, orderly space, abundant with life and seasonal regeneration, and, from another view, a disorderly, urban forest, random and organic. Used to commemorate both the passing and onset of life, memorial trees are an important cultural symbol of renewal. Like humans, trees undergo an organic lifecycle; it is their ability to regenerate new life over time that gives the trees their symbolic power to evoke hope for the future. Within Arad’s reimagined WTC design, the planting of trees symbolizes America’s rebirth, effectively erasing violence from the landscape and signal­ ing to its attackers the regeneration of American values onto the site. The Ground Zero “Survivor Tree,” prominently featured amidst the memorial’s 400 white oaks, has earned particular symbolic capital in the 9/11 Memorial landscape: As the dust began to settle on lower Manhattan, and rescue and recovery workers made their way through the rubble, they came upon a tree. Although this tree had snapped roots and burned branches, it was alive—it had survived. It soon became a symbol of our nation’s enduring optimism and unbreakable spirit after the September 11 attacks. (The National September 11 Memorial & Museum 2018a) Rescued from WTC rubble and nursed back to health, this “mortally woun­ ded” Callery Pear is perhaps the most famous survivor tree (Elliott 2014). Survivor trees are “trees that have endured tragedies and yet persisted” (US Forest Service 2004). The tree at Ground Zero, like the 9/11 Memorial Museum’s slurry wall, serves as a nonhuman witness to the human scale and devastation of the attacks and a symbol of the country’s unbreakable human spirit.

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Memorial trees are part of the “shifting performance of nature-culture relationships in particular places” of heritage and cultural memory (Cloke and Pawson 2008, 107). The simultaneous “materiality and performativity of trees” asks us to consider how survivor trees act as “active co-constituents in memorialization” (Cloke and Pawson 2008, 107). This dual role is particu­ larly pertinent as trees are increasingly mobilized in different ways as agents of 9/11 commemoration. Born of a congressional initiative to assist commu­ nity efforts in creating ‘green’ memorials to the events and lives lost on Sep­ tember 11, 2001, the Living Memorials Project (LMP) (2002–present) is an interactive, digital map and archive of 9/11 memorials, featuring trees and other garden elements as corner stones of their design. According to LMP, “This initiative invokes the resonating power of trees to bring people together and create lasting, living memorials to the victims of terrorism, their families, communities, and the nation” (US Forest Service 2004). No finer human embodiment of this memorial ideology exists than in former New York City architect, Ron Vega. Past Director of Design and Construction for the 9/11 Memorial Ronald Vega oversaw the selection and installation of every more-than-human ele­ ment at the 9/11 Memorial site. Vega is most well known, however, for his successful rehabilitation of the 9/11 Survivor Tree, also known as “the tree that would not be broken” and “the tree that refused to die.” As Vega explains, The trees on the memorial site all came from states where the attacks took place. So, while these trees were born before September 11th 2001, their very roots existed in a state where their unique tragedy was part of the collective 9/11 story. They’re all the same species, but their roots are all tied into the attacks. (Micieli-Voutsinas 2011, personal communication) Amidst this monoculture of white oaks stands Vega’s Survivor Tree, or, as he describes it, “the last thing alive to get out of that site” (Elliott 2014). With its incorporation into the memorial landscape, the cultural identity of the Survivor Tree has been utterly transformed. This pear tree, Pyrus call­ eryana, was originally imported from China in the early 1900s to combat fire blight and was popularized in the 1960s and 1970s as an ornamental plant (Culley and Hardiman 2007, 956). However, soon after their introduction, Callery pears began to escape from urban and residential plantings and establish wild populations throughout the country. Now identified as an invasive species, they are known for their rapid growth and proliferation. They are also known for their fragility; the tree’s habit of frequently dropping its branches can cause extensive damage on densely populated city streets. As a result, New York City had actually banned new plantings of this species. Formerly villainized for its rapid proliferation, the Callery cultivar has been xenophobically described as a “disaster” and a “curse” (Ashmore 2016;

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Millitzer 2016). But when one Callery pear was found still living amidst the debris in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, it was quickly salvaged from the wreckage by the New York City parks department and symbolically rebran­ ded as ‘naturally’ (read: nationally) belonging. Transplanted to a nearby nur­ sery, it was brought back to health and carefully tended for nearly a decade. With the wounds of 9/11 etched onto its callused bark, the tree, in concert with its newly regenerated limbs, is a palimpsest of pre- and post-9/11 worlds. Eventually, the tree was returned to the WTC site in an act of “repatriation” (Vega 2015). “The tree,” according to the NS11M&M, “stands as a living reminder of resilience, survival and rebirth” (The National September 11 Memorial & Museum 2018a). From a fragile, Chinese invasive, this tree became a symbol of national (read: natural) strength, persistence, and patriotism. Through this process of “symbolic accretion” (Dwyer 2004, 419), the 9/11 Survivor Tree takes on a paradoxical identity (see also Heath-Kelly 2018). In an online discussion of the Callery pear survivor tree, commenters debate the tree’s ecological ‘naturalness’ in the landscape, with some calling the park’s request “irrational and very irresponsible” and others celebrating the choice: “A non-native is perfect for NYC … This country is all about non-natives” (Hurtle 2013). Urban foresters are now contending with these contestations as they learn to manage a species viewed as both “heroic” and a “threat” (McMillen, Campbell, and Svendsen 2018). The tree embodies the contra­ dictions of the memorial’s narrative, symbolizing both ‘native’ (multicultural) resilience and foreign assault—a call to arms from a weak-limbed plant. Nevertheless, as a “mobile circulatory marker of place” in a broader post-9/11 “narrative economy” (Hoskins 2010, 259), the spatial reach of the Survivor Tree continues to extend outwards from the WTC site. Students at the John Bowne Agricultural High School in Flushing, Queens, annually grow new survivor saplings from the original tree. The process of cultivating the plants offers teachers an opportunity to educate the students about the attacks, but beyond their integration into the local curriculum, the trees themselves also ‘teach’ something of this history through physical interactions with the stu­ dents. Such visceral and affective relations of interspecies care are an impor­ tant medium through which collective memory of the attacks is continually remade in present time and space. In facilitating the reproduction of survivor trees, this new generation—human and nonhuman—reproduces memory of the attacks through the physical testimony of a new generation of ‘witnesses.’ As such, the tree’s genetic material and genealogy serve as proxy witness, propagating the legacy of 9/11 throughout broader human and nonhuman populations and their interrelated material geographies. Recent studies on the intergenerational transmission of trauma locate the transfusion of violent pasts on the transmuted DNA of subsequent genera­ tions in utero (Rosner 2017). In mice, past legacies of trauma actually trans­ form the species to become more adaptable to threat over time. Encoded with the histories of our ancestors, the burden of vicarious witnessing is meant to

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create a more malleable public, capable of incorporating the past into our own lived experience, transforming our collective future. The NS11M&M, for example, disseminates its own survivor saplings, donating them to other ‘wounded landscapes,’ weaving together disparate geographies of trauma into the 9/11 narrative. Recipient locations of the trees vary widely, including sites of domestic terrorism (e.g., San Bernardino, CA, and Orlando, FL); international terrorism (e.g., Madrid, Paris, and Manchester); mass shootings (e.g., Charleston, SC, and Newtown, CT); and global sites of ‘natural disaster’ (e.g., Haiti and Joplin, MO) (The National September 11 Memorial & Museum 2018b). These survivor tree implants not only legitimatize other geographic sites as cultural trauma, they also standardize the lessons collec­ tively gleaned from such divergent tragedies. The gifting of a survivor tree to a site devastated by Hurricane Sandy, for example, aligns with broader personifications of the natural environment as a kind of ‘terrorist’ to whose irrational brutality we are inexplicably subjected, endorsing an “ecophobia” that fits neatly in the Age of Terror paradigm (see Estok 2013, 2). Rather than historicize the unique, im/material manifestations of violence and loss engendered at each site—accounting for both human and nonhuman condi­ tions and capillaries—all are woven into universalizing, post-9/11 logics of resiliency and hope. Imprinting the original trauma in new generations of ‘survivors,’ the NS11M&M’s survivor tree program forms an im/material network of disparate places through direct lineage of 9/11 memory. But this is not a miraculous tale of one tree’s ecological resilience, regrowth, and proliferation. The Callery pear is actually incapable of pollinating itself. In order to reproduce, it must intermingle with other genetically distinct trees; it is self-incompatible. To propagate identical copies of the survivor tree cultivar, the NYC parks department had to clone the tree (see Vega 2015). By opting for arboreal mass-production over the messy ecologies of vegetal reproduction, the NYC parks department sought to maintain the genetic purity of the cultivar in an attempt to preserve an “imaginary lineage of [9/11] heritage” (Landzelius 2003, 195). The tree becomes a kind of prosthesis, eugenically primed for optimal affective consumption, and the ensuing practices of cutting and grafting from the original tree perpetuate the “masculinist logic of sharp-edged self-sufficiency” (Neimanis 2017, 3). The memorial ecologies of this tree thus accumulate layers of contradiction—it is fragile, yet championed as an emblem of national resilience; self-incompatible, yet exclusively propagated to represent an imperial superpower. In addition to the original Survivor Tree, many other trees were also saved from the WTC collapse. Like the “Survivor Tree,” these trees are actively pro­ pagated and disseminated to peripheral sites near the city. Aiming to weave “decentralized, yet common, threads” of place together through a silvicultural connection to Ground Zero, the Living Memorial Project has documented more than 700 green memorials, with a handful of survivor saplings dis­ seminated to several sites throughout the northeast (US Forest Service 2004).

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The continued imbrication of 9/11 survivor trees into disparate places teaches future generations to perceive these emerging memorial landscapes as a homogenous response to a “new era of vulnerability” (McMillen, Campbell, and Svendsen 2017, 17). But the trees are not merely passive agents of the creeping spatial expansion of 9/11 memory and its ahistoricized origins. The trees’ own vitality outgrows the original purpose of their planting. On one hand, they perform the role of memorial tree, embodying human desires to spatially and temporally contain—and expand—9/11 memory. The trees also deviate from the original script as unrehearsed material and emotive encoun­ ters between people and plants bring new meanings into the fray. As the Call­ ery pear morphed from highly prized ornament, to invasive pest, to patriotic “survivor,” the tree may again take on new meanings in the future. Despite efforts to control, contain, and close memorial meaning, memorial designs are open sites and circuits of affective possibility. From the urban forests of NYC schools to the living memorials of community gardens, the survivor trees create new, embodied relations of care, potentially fostering alternative ecologies of affect. Ongoing stewardship both enables therapeutic intimacy with the plants and fosters diverse human communities as people share time and labor in living memorial sites (see McMillen, Campbell, and Svendsen 2017). The practical labor of weeding and watering, planting and transplanting creates the possibility of new treescape memories outside of dominant representational schemes. For example, as the trees form relations with people outside their prescribed roles, they also interact with other plants in relations of excess. Simultaneous to the story of cloning and distributed resilience, there are other ecologies taking shape in the margins of these ‘living’ memorial land­ scapes. Though self-incompatible, the Callery pear is not sterile: in sites of arboreal diversity, it is quite capable of interbreeding with genetically distinct trees to produce future generations. Wild populations of the species have an affinity for ruderal landscapes, flourishing in sites of disturbance. ‘Rogue’ survivor trees, for example, settle in the liminal spaces of memorial land­ scapes, taking root in park boundaries, beyond the garden’s edge, in aban­ doned fields and roadside margins. The success of this nonnative plant’s crosspollination unsettles “liberal notions of the individual, the sovereign subject that disavows interdependence” (Nelson 2013, 305). While the small fruits of the Callery pear are inedible to humans, they nourish insects and introduced European songbirds, who also find themselves in these liminal landscapes (Culley and Hardiman 2007). Through the trees’ affinity for dis­ turbed soils and capacity for regrowth after destruction, they have come to represent resilience and a return to order even as they embody disorder in their unruly proliferation. The trees thus enact the “self-contradictory and necessary conditions of a nongeneric humanity” (Haraway 1992, 86). The trees are not merely living memorials, but are im/material compositions of alternative place memories, yet undisclosed. We turn now to consider such ‘counter-memorial’ becomings.

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Toxic embodiments, a “dust in the wind” The prominence of the intentionally propagated memorial trees eclipses the more spatially and temporally dispersed forms of bodily harm that followed in the tragedy’s aftermath. Illuminating these other narratives importantly entails “conceiving of violence as a dimension of living rather than as a domain of death” (Kearney 2016, 8). Paying attention to these living, ongoing manifestations of violence, this section considers forms of harm that were not as rapidly “abstracted” (Tyner, Inwood, and Alderman 2014, 902) into expli­ cit recognitions of 9/11 violence and its corresponding victims. Immediate government interventions following the collapsed Twin Towers focused on the spectacular, catastrophic destruction of the day, rather than the accretional, mundane forms of violence that ensued. State responses to monitoring, care, and, ultimately, memorialization emphasized the heroically resilient, bounded body over more insidious forms of transcorporeal contamination and vulnerability. The tragedy of 9/11 became further entrenched in the city as toxins from the WTC collapse resulted in a wide range of health issues for workers and local residents. The computers, insulation, and light bulbs encountered daily in the towers became flows of lead, asbestos, and mercury; the air itself con­ taminated. Familiar, everyday objects were suddenly an incomprehensible dust cloud of toxicity and death, creeping outwards into streets, homes, and lungs. Such a drastic breach of the taken-for-granted boundary between body and environment “forces people to notice the unexamined stuff on which they rely as the material fabric of their everyday lives” (Whatmore 2013, 45). These unseen flows of toxicity connect seemingly disparate peoples and spaces, often through gendered, classed, and racial patterns of exposure (see Nunn 2018); for a moment, the buildings’ collapse illuminated the underlying toxic precarity upon which the capitalist project depends. In the immediate period following the WTC collapse, monitoring and cleanup efforts operated on a model of containment and control. By pro­ moting a sense that the environmental damage was ‘under control,’ the gov­ ernment sought to create a more rapid transition toward feelings of hope and resilience. Both the city and national government exerted concerted efforts to suppress public knowledge about the variety of health threats, known and unknown. The White House Council on Environmental Quality pressured the Environmental Protection Agency into releasing reassuring statements regarding the safety of the air, despite insufficient data, while businesses and building owners encouraged the city to enable reoccupancy despite the Department of Environmental Protection’s recommendations (Beusse et al. 2003). Both instances of public deceit represent the state’s broader interest in defining the destruction as ‘contained’ within the space and time of the events of the day, rather than unfolding in a continual onslaught of ensuing harms. The notion that the event’s toxicity could be definitively contained and measured led to additional forms of oversight and inadequate bureaucratic

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response. With risks to public health presented as temporally bounded to the place and time of crisis, spatial practices of monitoring and addressing envir­ onmental damage equally embraced ideas of containment, with bodies treated as fundamentally discrete and isolatable from each other and their environ­ ments. While the government’s confident tone belied the indeterminate dis­ persal of chemical pollutants throughout the area and their unknown health effects, the infusion of particles—building and biological—into the city, demonstrates the ways in which “permeability (rather than closure) and transcorporeality (instead of individuality or meta-individuality) render col­ lective bodies affectable” (Alaimo 2010, 63). Rather than staying with the trouble of these unruly permeations, the state’s approach to chemical mon­ itoring and the ensuing cleanup effort were based on an isolationist, indivi­ dualized approach. The selection of locations for chemical testing, for example, relied on the individual reporting of residents who volunteered their apartments for inspection (Newman et al. 2004, 200). Out of the multitude of toxins that were released, only certain toxicants were monitored (see Lipp­ mann, Cohen, and Chen 2015), while the larger dust particles, which actually resulted in a wide variety of health issues, remained largely overlooked. During the cleanup process, for instance, collectively shared spaces of apart­ ment complexes—such as central air systems and common areas—were excluded from exposure prevention efforts; public places, such as schools, workplaces, and businesses, were also omitted (Newman et al. 2004, 201). The lived reality of residents and first responders belies this insufficient attention to bodily permeability. The health consequences of such exposure manifest as ‘slow trauma’ in the form of scarred lungs; increased cancer rates; autoimmune diseases; respiratory, gastrointestinal, and musculoskeletal ill­ nesses; and innumerable cascading mental health impacts—depression, anxi­ ety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), et cetera (Welch et al. 2015; Yip et al. 2016; Zvolensky et al. 2015). This creep of toxicity constitutes a kind of “slow violence” (see Nixon 2011) that often goes unrecognized in government compensation programs. Prioritizing the attack’s primary victims, for exam­ ple, 9/11 victims and their families found themselves in the midst of what Jack Rosenthal described as “vengeful philanthropy,” a politics of compensation— and identification—that privileges certain loss and victimization for political ends (Feinberg 2005, 70 quoted in Davies 2018). 9/11 victims were thus iden­ tified as those immediately killed or injured in the attacks, representing a new political category and emergent national symbol against a dangerous foreign adversary. Here, limiting victimization to acute violence assists the state in maintaining the discursive boundary between their violence and our victims, particularly in lieu of governmental failures to ensure public safety against the secondary threat of toxic exposure. Despite immediate efforts to collectivize ‘9/11 victims,’ a necessity for both assigning blame and generating support for military response, governmental reluctance to recognize secondary victims of the September 11th attacks denied extending compensation to those whose health conditions metastasized long after the buildings fell; it was only after

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years of hard-fought activism that cleanup workers and others received com­ pensation (see Davies 2018). And until recently, this slow violence was alto­ gether omitted from the memorial landscape, which begs the question: why is it being included now? In recent developments, the NS11M&M has revealed design plans for a new memorial component dedicated to first responders suffering from toxic exposure (Associated Press 2018; see also Pereira 2017). The newly proposed commemorative space will exist permanently on the WTC memorial plaza, in the southwestern quadrant known as the “memorial glade,” a grassy clearing near the Survivor Tree. While the design details for the proposed memorial are still in process, the incorporation of an architectural piece of WTC steel has been confirmed (a similarly themed memorial park opened in Long Island, NY, in 2013; it too contains a piece of WTC steel, as well as a survivor sapling) (see Solnik 2018).4 The incorporation of this new memorial is the direct result of decades-long advocacy, painstakingly led by those most affected, including former 9/11 Memorial Director of Design and Construction Ron Vega, whose own health suffers from his time spent on “the pile” during recovery efforts. Most famously championed by New York comedian and 9/11 Memorial board member Jon Stewart, momentum for the new memorial culminated in 2010 with the passage of the Zadroga Act, a congressional bill providing govern­ mental assistance for those suffering 9/11-related illnesses. Although the inclusion of the new memorial on the WTC site certainly mends a historic wrong, the proposed memorial problematically reifies nationalist narratives of heroisms, service, and sacrifice. According to Alice Greenwald, former Memorial Museum Director, now NS11M&M President and CEO: After the towers fell, and before the dust cloud settled, these remarkably brave men and women risked their lives, and health, as they joined the response and helped start the process of recovery. We should always remember what they endured in the aftermath of the attacks as they paved the way for this city and our country to rebuild. (Email Correspondence, May 24, 2018) Here, the courage of first responders and the sacrifices and survivals exuded by all citizens, is rhetorically mobilized to construct the aforementioned actions through normative tropes of masculinity and femininity: self-sacrifi­ cing and protective. Such narrations of heroism and sacrifice politicize human suffering in the name of nationalism, reducing their deaths and actions to statecraft. As President George W. Bush similarly evoked amidst the post-9/11 anthrax scares: We have gained new heroes, those who ran into burning buildings to save others … Those who battle their own fears to keep children calm and safe … Those who voluntarily place themselves in harm’s way to defend

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Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas and Julia Cavicchi our freedom … And tonight we join in thanking a whole new group of public servants [postal workers] who never enlisted to fight a war, but find themselves on the front lines of a battle nonetheless … We will never forget all we have lost and all we are fighting for. (Atlanta, GA, November 8, 2001)

The responders become, in other words, ‘fallen soldiers’ on the front lines of an unprecedented war. The above criticisms are not directed at the actions of those who risked and gave their lives on 9/11 in order to save others, including those whose lives— and quality of life—have been severely impacted, even curtailed, by the events. Nor do we wish to suggest that their actions should not be regar­ ded as selfless and heroic; indeed they were both. Rather, we remain cri­ tical of mobilizations of bravery, selflessness, and, for some, sacrifice, to reinscribe and reinforce sovereign power in the aftermath of the attacks, or, as in the latter case, to bolster an imperialist military agenda masqueraded as collective grief. The NS11M&M’s inclusion of this new category of victims continues to produce its own exclusions and silences. It is documented that at least fifteen undocumented workers died in the attacks on the World Trade Center (Délano and Nienass 2014). Although the US government officially recog­ nizes five of these victims, the names of the other ten victims remain absent from the 9/11 Memorial (Délano and Nienass 2014). Discursively at stake here is not only who counts as a victim, but also which narratives of vic­ timization are made to count as part of this larger ‘living memorial’ and its related national–natural body politic. Visible from New Jersey, Long Island, and the five boroughs, satellite images of the WTC dust cloud demonstrate the uncontained nature of the terrorist attacks. According to one governmental report, “400,000 people were exposed to toxins as a result of 9/11; about 90,000 are enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program” (Solnik 2018). Beyond the spatially bounded site of “Ground Zero,” recognizing “the permeable surfaces between human bodies, ecological systems, and political events” (Bosworth 2017, 21) implicates other victims relational to the collapsed towers, suffering from the less visible devastations of slow violence. Counterterrorism strategy and technologies, for example, “morph into long-term killers, creating landscapes that inflict lingering, off-camera casualties” hidden in the “temporal camouflage” (Nixon 2011, 210) of “war time” (Dudziak 2012; see also Gregory 2011). In placing the source of threat as external, the national security narrative embedded in the NS11M&M’s memorial ecosystem not only abdicates internal sources of ongoing violence, but also shrouds those geographically and geopolitically “elsewhere victims” (Fluri 2014, 795), human and nonhuman. Thus, in the liminal spaces between memory and forgetting, inclusion and exclusion, the state makes its biopolitical claims and stakes known.

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What remains: sacred fines and toxic waste at Fresh Kills Landfill The movement of human remains and WTC waste in the aftermath of the attacks further complicates the toxic entanglements underpinning these hybrid spaces of contamination and commemoration. In an effort to provide families with some material trace, or remnant, of their loved ones, small urnlike vials were filled with WTC ash, or “dust,” as popularly referred, and given to victims’ family members in October 2001 (Blais and Rasic 2011, 82). According to the NS11M&M, nearly 22,000 bone fragments and pieces of organic matter were collected from the debris at the WTC during the tenmonth recovery and cleanup efforts (see Blais and Rasic 2011). Of those 22,000 remains, approximately 13,000 (1,600 victims) have been positively iden­ tified and returned to victims’ family members (Blais and Rasic 2011, 80–86); the tons of ashen debris remaining were relocated to nearby Staten Island Landfill, Fresh Kills. Once a succulent wetland comprising rich biodiversity and ecological his­ tory, Fresh Kills would become the “biggest garbage dump on the planet” by the mid-twentieth century (Royte 2015). After years of activist efforts to close the landfill in March 2001, the arrival of WTC debris reopened the 2,600-acre site, transforming it into the somber burial grounds of these now ‘sacred remains.’ According to Martin Bellow, Director of the Bureau of Waste Dis­ posal at the time, sanitation workers had to manage both the extended col­ lection of “regular garbage” in addition to the incorporation of 9/11 remains (2012, 15–16). In this entanglement of ceremonial remains and quotidian trash, new conflicts emerged, reconfiguring the landfill’s “memory ecologies” (Hoskins 2016). As a result of the landfill’s new sacrosanct designation, 9/11 family groups sought legal recourse to the toxic municipal site, suing the city for the right to determine their loved ones’ final resting place. According to one Plaintiff whose son’s wallet and identification card were recovered from the site, “We would rather bury pulverized concrete in a respectful place, than to have our loved ones left with the garbage” (DePalma 2004). After years of legal bat­ tling, a federal district court ruled against WTC Families for a Proper Burial, Inc. claiming that microscopic debris, or “fines,” as they were collectively labeled, do not legally constitute “property rights” to the bodies of the miss­ ing, in absentia (Feuer 2008). Due to the sheer logistical imperative to dispose of the WTC debris, ‘sacred remains’ had to be unmade into anonymous ‘fines.’ But as the now sacred memories of these human victims lived on, the landfill also had to be recreated into a site of virtual sacredness, capable of the appropriate commemorative, ceremonial affects. Landfills are constructed as sites of deliberate forgetting, concealing the wastes and excesses of capitalist growth with pastoral grassy expanses “designed to blend seamlessly into an out-of-the-way landscape” (Reno 2016, 6). Amidst the simultaneous crisis of burgeoning human waste and “wasted humans” (see Bauman 2004), victims’ bodies procured a forced remembrance

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of these forgotten places of waste. This intentional obscuration is forced into sharp relief, however, when ‘sacred remains’ too become disposable. As cer­ tain deaths became sacrosanct, the manufactured profanity of Fresh Kills required a radical reframing of the landscape following the attacks. The microscopic remains would become a permanent fixture amidst city and state plans for a newly reimagined ‘green space,’ “Freshkills Park” (see DePalma 2004; Kearney 2008), with the ‘ghosts’ of 9/11 memory haunting present-day ecologies (Tsing et al. 2017). Although the decision to transform this “industrial dead zone” (Royte 2015) into a living park, more than twice the size of Central Park, predates the 2001 terrorist attacks on the WTC, the incorporation of 9/11-remains into the landfill’s regenerating ecology accurately reflects a cultural predisposition at the heart of Seeger’s iconic song: as ecological cycles replenish collective loss with new life, life goes on, and so must we. In the case of Fresh Kills, ‘sacred remains’ symbolize an emerging post-9/11 body politic at the heart of the attack’s commemoration. Here, the national body is reimagined as a “natural body” (Estok 2014, 131) that triumphantly reemerges from an ashen topography of death, destruction, and failure. In other words, from the death and destruction at Ground Zero, the land will heal and so too will the nation. But as the wounds of 9/11 are ‘remade afresh’ as a site of thanatourism, or “dark tourism” (Micieli-Voutsinas 2017, 96), the attempted domestication of the memorial’s attendant ecologies, living and more-than-living, are not so easily ordered.

Conclusion Trauma, according to Edkins (2003, xiv), constitutes a rupture within the state’s otherwise “business as usual” politics, disrupting normative scripts of order and control conferred through sovereign rule, such as political rights, security, and safety. In the aftermath of the attacks, “New York City went back to work, returning to a new normal. But that new normal meant ignoring the evidence, including the Environmental Protection Agency’s proclamations that overrode its own test results” (Solnik 2018). Such attempts to reestablish ‘normalcy’ post-9/11 continue to thwart any meaningful discussion of geopolitics, neoliberalism, and imperialism to contextualize and historicize the attacks and its ensuing memorialization. Rather, it has the adverse effect of “reinforcing to the mainstream/white US citizen-subject that he or she remains secure within the immediate US homeland by way of the displacement of contemporary war violence elsewhere—rather than such violence circulating ‘everywhere’” (Fluri 2014, 795). Between the illumination of certain victims in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks and the ongoing promotion of resilient ecological sur­ vival, a productive tension at the core of 9/11 memory and heritage emerges: a perpetual state of emergency. Here, remembrances of cultural trauma at the NS11M&M reinforce prevailing relationships of power, obfuscating other

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forms of slow violence elsewhere (Micieli-Voutsinas, forthcoming). The affective–aesthetic process of rewounding and healing at the memorial land­ scape allows the original wound to self-perpetuate, continuing to justify poli­ tical decisions and extra-territorial actions. But what is lost in this continual re-enactment of wounding and healing? Donna Haraway (2016, 97) describes the importance of “staying with the trouble in a damaged world” through the art of living and dying together in the thick present. “Staying with the trouble” does not mean continually rein­ habiting past trauma to frame the present as an ongoing catastrophe. Rather, by following the memorialized past into the present, we must remember the ways in which we are always already materially connected with these unim­ agined ‘elsewhere’ places. Davies (2018, 13) describes this as the potential of “slow observation,” whereby bearing witness to attritional violence creates a shift in attention from spectacular violence to accretional harm. Through its integration into disparate memorial ecologies, the incessant expansion of 9/11 memory engenders relational processes and memories of places. Where 9/11 memory is transplanted into disparate wounded sites, the survivor trees themselves suggest alternative, unruly futures. And where gar­ bage is construed through a process of un-naming, a landfill 9/11 memorial must unmake garbage, instilling narrative specificity into unidentifiable dust. However, the current plans for the Freshkills memorial park are not about “deliberate differentiating” (Ukeles 2002), but rather emphasize “expansive space” and the “distant horizon”—the 9/11 debris will be re-made in its own image, formed into earthen replicas of the Twin Towers (Field Operations 2006). These multiple ruderal ecologies can only emerge in the uneasy space between the distant horizon of falsely universalized ideals and the ground beneath our feet, layered with plastics, bodies, soil, and blood-soaked roots. Memorial spaces mark pasts both tragic and mundane, commemorating pro­ cesses of ongoing transformation. If 9/11 memory continues to be extended into other wounded geographies, as the sapling program suggests, it must become attuned to the embedded place-memories of their ecologies, human and nonhuman. Rather than 9/11 memory remaking these other landscapes, it must make itself vulnerable to the yet un-commemorated experiences of con­ tamination, sickness, and death that persist beyond the edge of its neatly pruned memorial ecology.

Notes 1 This chapter was originally published under the same title in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (vol. 37, issue 3) pp. 504–522. © 2019. https://doi. org/10.1177/0263775818820325. 2 Both authors contributed equally to this chapter. 3 The 9/11 Memorial jury consisted of 13 expert and non-expert judges. Several jurors had highly esteemed careers in the arts, public design, and architecture. Well-known jurors included: Maya Lin, designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washing­ ton, DC, and James E. Young, prominent Holocaust memorial scholar and

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professor. Jurists also included one family member to represent the interests of 9/11 family groups and their supporters (www.wtcsitememorial.com/about_jury_txt.htm l, January 13, 2004). 4 Similar to the survivor sapling program, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey donated architectural remnants of former WTC steel to organizations, towns, cities, and foreign governments wishing to remember 9/11. Operated from 2010 until 2016, the program donated more than 2,600 items to all fifty US states, and ten foreign nations (see Press Release, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey 2016; and Regan 2016).

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Ukeles, Mierle Laderman. 2002. “Leftovers: It’s about Time for Fresh Kills.” Cabinet 6 (Spring). http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/6/freshkills.php. US Forest Service. 2004. “Living Memorial Project: Survivor Trees.” Accessed May 28, 2018. http://usfs.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=55001e2c303e 4c029de7884081c7908d. Vega, Ron. 2015. “Survivor Tree Seedlings Link NYC, OKC.” National September 11 Memorial & Museum (blog), April 19, 2015. Accessed May 28, 2018. www.911mem orial.org/blog/survivor-tree-seedlings-link-nycokc. Veil, Shari R., Timothy L. Sellnow, and Megan Heald. 2011. “Memorializing Crisis: The Oklahoma City National Memorial as Renewal Discourse.” Journal of Applied Communication Research 39 (2): 164–183. https://doi.org/10.1080/00909882.2011. 557390. Waterton, Emma. 2014. “A More-Than-Representational Understanding of Heritage? The ‘Past’ and the Politics of Affect.” Geography Compass 8 (11): 823–833. https:// doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12182. Welch, Alice E., John P. Jasek, Kimberly Caramanica, Mariana C. Chiles, and Michael Johns. 2015. “Cigarette Smoking and 9/11-Related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder among World Trade Center Health Registry Enrollees, 2003–12.” Preventive Medicine 73: 94–99. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ypmed.2015.01.023. Whatmore, Sarah J. 2013. “Earthly Powers and Affective Environments: An Ontolo­ gical Politics of Flood Risk.” Theory, Culture and Society 30 (7–8):33–50. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0263276413480949. Yanow, Dvora. 1998. “Space Stories: Studying Museum Buildings as Organizational Spaces While Reflecting on Interpretive Methods and Their Narration.” Journal of Management Inquiry 7 (3): 215–239. https://doi.org/10.1177/105649269873004. Yip, Jennifer, Rachel Zeig-Owens, Mayris P. Webber, Andrea Kablanian, Charles B. Hall, Madeline Vossbrinck, Xiaoxue Liu, Jessica Weakley, Theresa Schwartz, Kerry J. Kelly, and David J. Prezant. 2016. “World Trade Center-Related Physical and Mental Health Burden among New York City Fire Department Emergency Medical Service Workers.” Occupational and Environmental Medicine 73 (1): 13–20. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1136/oemed-2014-102601. Zvolensky, Michael J., Samantha G. Farris, Roman Kotov, Clyde B. Schechter, Evelyn Bromet, Adam Gonzalez, Anka Vujanovic, Robert H. Pietrzak, Michael Crane, Julia Kaplan et al. 2015. “World Trade Center Disaster and Sensitization to Sub­ sequent Life Stress: A Longitudinal Study of Disaster Responders.” Preventive Medicine 75: 70–74. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ypmed.2015.03.017.

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The affect of memorializing the loss, the affect of losing the memorial Confederate war monuments in New Orleans Jocelyn Evans and Keith Gaddie

Introduction When one surveys the accomplishments of our local heroes across time from Iberville and Bienville, to Andrew Jackson, from Mahalia Jackson, to Anne Rice and Fats Domino, from Wendell Pierce, to John Besh and Jonathan Batiste, what did Robert E. Lee do to merit his distinguished position? He fought for the enslavement of a people against our national army fighting for their freedom; killed more Americans than any opposing general in history; made no attempt to defend or protect this city; and even more absurdly, he never even set foot in Louisiana. In the heart of the most progressive and creative cultural city in America, why should we continue to commemorate this legacy? (Wynton Marsalis 2014)

We build monuments to commemorate an event or an idea in place, to serve notice to all who pass by that there is something deserving their attention. Thinking and acting in space and place in turn creates political and social power challenges to the landscape and asks questions about the arrangement of power (Massey 2004, 3). In the United States, a special and enduring challenge of space and place is the memorialization and interpretation of events and icons of the American Civil War. It is a problem that engages primordial emotions of identity, race, and nation among competing local populations. Confederate monuments present a problem of competing and disturbing affect.

What is affect? Affect is “the how of emotion.” It describes “the motion of emotion” (Thien 2005, 451). Affect is “a sense of push in the world” (Thrift 2004, 64). In memorial architecture, affect “is pushing, pulling, or lifting us to feel, think, or act” (Kraftl and Adey 2008, 215). There are many arguments for taking affect seriously. Not only do we have knowledge of the use and manipulation of affect in developing the urban landscape, we now understand cities in terms of their affect—the expression given off by them (Lynch 1960).

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Furthermore, we recognize that “[d]ifferences of gender, class, race, and edu­ cational background affect perceptions of the urban landscape” (Hayden 1997, 236). Crucially, “these knowledges are not only being deployed know­ ingly, they are also being deployed politically (mainly but not only by the rich and powerful) to political ends: what might have been painted as aesthetic is increasingly instrumental” (Thrift 2004, 58). Sites of heritage in particular are “often designed to evoke affective responses” (Waterton 2014, 829). They are wrapped up in narratives of com­ munity identity and belonging. They can be inclusive or exclusive. They pro­ mote or obstruct connectivity (ibid., 830). And the assumed universality of the spatial affect creates opportunities for realized or unrealized political contestation (Crang and Tolia-Kelly 2010, 2316). When we manipulate affect in memorial architecture, we are making poli­ tical decisions with political ramifications (see Thrift 2004; Kraftl and Adey 2008). What are the activities and events chosen by the formal and informal elite, chosen by the audience or observers, as well as offered or facilitated by the site itself ? How do these combine to create a “very particular ideal” for citizenship? What is the potential affect waiting to be evoked again and again over time (see Kraftl and Adey 2008, 220)? What are the “appropriate ges­ tures” embedded in site design that manipulate affect (Day 1990, 109)? And how do these affective gestures and the implications for citizenship and civic engagement they evoke provide particular emotional pushes for different publics? These relations evoke general affective pushes contingent on the referential meaning implied by monumental architecture concerning formal and informal power relations in society. Memorial spaces make gestures about the right kind of atmosphere for public life. Confederate monuments make gestures about the mores of ‘tradi­ tional’ Southern culture and provide the political socialization of younger generations. They provide coded narrative about power structures. In this way, they are significant sites of affect with the power to inspire or injure. There are significant emotional costs and benefits for different publics in engaging with sites of memory. As Thrift notes, “it is often quite difficult to show what is at stake for the individual or groups in submitting to such institutions and embracing certain affective styles that render them deferential, obedient or humble—or independent, aggressive and arrogant” (2004, 69). Prominent of these mores are reverence for tradition, respect for elders and history, deference to tradition and authority, beneath a veneer of Southern ‘gentility.’ Memorial spaces draw on past experience and shape current experience. To understand their effect, we must be open to examining “what things ‘do’ to us” (Zembylas 2006, 309; Waterton 2014), how we encounter memorials, interact with them, and are affected by them. This phenomenon of “bodily remem­ bering” brings to heritage landscapes our previous experiences. They trigger our memories and influence our bodily encounter with the site—and thus our memories “are expressed once again and come to affect ourselves, other bodies and other representations” (Waterton and Watson 2014, 76).

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The Southern context of memorial and affect To understand affect and the meaning of memorials for various publics requires context. In the South, race is always the first context due to four centuries of slavery and segregation (see Key 1949). The revolutionary change of the Civil War and Reconstruction met immediate resistance, and the efforts to institute white-only rule of the South immediately followed the fall of the Confederacy (Blight 2001). Nowhere was this more evident than in New Orleans, Louisiana’s post­ bellum capital. New Orleans was the sixth-largest city in the United States in 1860. Union forces captured the Crescent City in late 1862. The city became a laboratory for Reconstruction policies. A convention of Louisiana delegates met in New Orleans in 1864 to draft a new constitution for readmission to the Union. Slavery was abolished. The possibility of black suffrage was extended. The city had an integrated public school system and two Freedman newspapers during this time. But as is often the case with social upheaval, resistance and violence fol­ lowed the Civil War and Reconstruction. Louisiana had adopted a severe ‘black code’ constraining black civil rights. In response, Reconstruction Republicans called the constitutional convention back on July 30, 1866, to fix this problem. Free black supporters and white conventioneers alike were set upon by Confederate rioters. Paramilitary violence also marred the 1868 election and the 1872 election, resulting in an attempted coup against the Reconstruction government. Democrats disputed the 1872 election, setting up their own government. In September 1874, the paramilitary Crescent City White League challenged the civil government. Some 5,000 members overwhelmed 3,500 police and state militia commanded by James Longstreet to seize the statehouse. After three days, Federal forces relieved the city. (This event, called The Battle of Liberty Place, was memorialized with a monument in 1891.) The White League Democrats reasserted white rule by 1875, gaining con­ trol of the state legislature and the city. Black voices were silenced in political life. And the white supremacist power structure undertook a variety of steps to cement political power, one of which was memorialization of the Confederacy through Lost Cause history. The Lost Cause Critical to the success of the Lost Cause is to control the framing of the Civil War. This extends from the framing of issues (economics, territorial expansion, trade, States’ Rights) to the role of the North as ‘aggressor’ and the very name of the conflict: “the War of the Northern Aggression.” Jef Davis characterized northern war-making as ‘uncivilized’ in his 1881 book (see also Pollard 1866). Gaines Foster (1988) argued that the Lost Cause emphasized the preserva­ tion of honor by common soldiers and generals alike, thereby implicitly

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invoking the nobility of ‘whiteness’ and extending the nobility of leadership to the ordinary Southern yeoman. Other Lost Cause features include a divine ordination of the Southern economic order, vesting the South with a superior Christianity. This literary expression offered comfort over bitter despair from a lost identity (Osterweis 1949) and tied to the need of Bourbon Democrats of the South to divide poor and working whites and blacks in order to reassert conservative rule and push back against progressivism (Key 1949). The Lost Cause needed monuments in order to fulfill its primary motives. These are psychological healing from total defeat, denial of the verdict of history, and justification of the war and the ensuing ‘correction’ of the nar­ rative of history (Gallagher and Nolan 2010). Another motive is to legitimate white supremacy and reassert black subjugation. It reframes the Civil War as a heroic effort at Southern independence, sans slavery in the conflict. Con­ federate monuments are therefore the greatest physical manifestation of the ‘Lost Cause of the Confederacy.’ The story of Lee Circle (New Orleans) The effort to build a Robert E. Lee Memorial began soon after Lee’s death in 1870. The total cost of the monument, paid for with private donations, was $36,000. An 1882 local ordinance in fact designates the monument grounds within the traffic circle as ‘Lee Place’ and the roundabout as Tivoli Circle. The Lee monument was erected in 1884, dedicated on George Washington’s

Figure 5.1 Map of New Orleans

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birthday. Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate General P. G. T. Beauregard attended the event. The position of the monument is significant. New Orleans is a port city and also a major railhead. The primary railroad station was three blocks to the lakeside of the Lee monument, the port four blocks to the riverside. Commuter rail lines passed through Tivoli Circle, the demarcation point between the predominantly Anglo white economic power center Uptown and the Central Business District. At eighty-five feet in total height, the monument commanded a view of all entering the city, exiting the city, or coming into the political and economic hub. It also placed the monument in clear view of the African American neighborhoods of Central City (see Figure 5.1).

Referential meaning of Lee Circle How do we interpret the meaning of Robert E. Lee and his ‘place’? Good­ man’s (1985) essay “How Buildings Mean” finds ‘meaning’ in public spaces using ‘referential meaning’ in built design; Confederate monuments are explicitly designed with differential reference for the different publics of the post-Reconstruction South. He identifies types of referential meaning found in built design: denotation, expression, exemplification, and mediated reference. They shape the overall meaning of physical space. Denotation Denotation is the direct message communicated by the work. It involves labeling—literal naming and describing of a work. To apply Goodman’s philosophy of art, we ask three questions: What is the direct message com­ municated by the memorial? What is written to explain the memorial’s intention? Aside from text, how might the memorial be read literally? The original monument at Lee Circle included a white column topped with a pedestal for a full-figure bronze statue of Lee. The column sits on a con­ crete base above grade by several minor steps and then four major steps. According to archival records and depictions of the monument on early twentieth-century postcards, the circle included park benches surrounding the statue (see Figure 5.2). There are four radial approaches to the round­ about. A commemorative plaque attached to the monument suggests that it is dedicated to Lee, provides the dates of his life, states that he was the Commander in Chief of the Confederate States of America from 1861 to 1865, and lists the Julia Jackson Chapter No. 4 of the Children of the Confederacy as the sponsor of the memorial. This sponsoring entity is an auxiliary organization of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). The UDC and its counterpart, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), were largely responsible for memorialization of the Confederate cause across the South following the Civil War.

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Figure 5.2 Postcard view of Lee Circle in the early twentieth century

Exemplification and expression A straightforward reading of the space deems Lee as significant to the people of New Orleans, worthy of honoring in everyday life. Other features of the space are used by the commissioned artist to convey the idea of the memorial. Exemplification involves not the label applied to the work but the labels that could be applied to it. How are form, space, and material used to symbolize? What features merit attention? What symbolic or metaphorical attributes characterize the object? The base is a circular mound, around which is seating for visitors to rest and contemplate. Mounds are sacred sites for worship or burial. As a war memorial, this characterization casts the site as a place for remembrance of lives lost and valor admired. White steps from four access points invite visi­ tors from every direction to ascend the monument. A sixty-foot white marble column in the center of the circular base supports the eight-foot base and sixteen-foot statue, drawing the observer’s eye skyward. The white marble Doric column recalls the era of Homer and the birth of Greek civilization. As depicted in archival illustrations of the memorial, all elements of the space except for the statue of Lee are white—the color of purity. The statue is cast in bronze; bronze and brass are materials typically symbolizing judgment. The use of form, space, and material draws the eye to the statue of Lee, in military uniform, standing with arms crossed, gazing northward, with one foot rested slightly in front of the other—exercising judgment. The location adds to its referential meaning. Lee is the tallest structure in the landscape, bordered by the library and the Shriner’s temple; it is in the center of town with public benches to sit and pay homage. Slats on the

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pedestal’s four sides look like windows, giving the impression of a lighthouse. The memorial calls attention to the bronze Lee for whom the space is named. It shapes the physical space horizontally and vertically as a dominant feature of the cityscape. Lee’s statue stands to the four corners of the world; his gaze looks to the north; Lee is the pillar of society—eternal, solid, immovable, unbreakable, and immortal. The built environment can express metaphorical meaning through a chain of “elementary referential links” (Goodman 1985, 648). The Lee Memorial exemplifies an obelisk. It symbolizes one way of life, a testament to the civi­ lization. As metaphor, it speaks of the eternal power of the sun god Ra. The Roman Emperor Trajan (53–117 AD) and Napoleon I both used obelisks to bespeak the power of their respective empires. The Vatican (an Egyptian Obelisk) and also Washington, DC (the Washington Monument) use obelisks as similar foci. The Washington Monument was started in 1848; completed in 1884, it stood at 555 feet—the tallest monument in the world. Construction on the Lee Monument too concluded in 1884, as testament to the power of the Con­ federacy in unifying around a common cause in opposition to the Northern Union regime. The pose of Lee with arms crossed reinforces the oppositional nature of the monument’s meaning—power through resistance rather than valorous public service. As an obelisk reflects absolute and eternal power, the memorial presents Lee as the human manifestation of the continuation of Southern resistance to cultural and political change. The plaque at the memorial describes the South as the Confederate States of America and Lee as its Commander in Chief, expressing the South as a separate self-governing federation. In American politics, “Commander in Chief” is reserved for the president as military head of state. Though Lee was the commander of the Confederate armies, he was not the president of the Confederacy. Calling him Commander in Chief of the Confederate States of America confers significant honor—much like Washington’s as leader of the Continental Army. Consider how the meaning might be different if the memorial described the significant act or historical period as the rebellion or insurgency of Southern states against the United States of America. Consider how the meaning would be different if it described Lee as the leader of such a rebellion. With such a different contextualization through denotation, Lee becomes traitor rather than war hero. Mediated reference Finally, Goodman calls attention to mediated reference. What are the exter­ nal circumstances surrounding the monument? What has happened since its installation? Has this changed the meaning of the space? How so? The Lee Monument was part of the Redemption, reclaiming the South following Reconstruction. Veterans’ groups and their children raised money to build statues in town squares throughout the South. The monument was

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erected just before the opening of the World’s Cotton Exhibition (now known as the World’s Fair) and was centrally located to its events. Confederate Mem­ orial Hall in New Orleans is less than one city block from the Lee Monu­ ment. Established in 1891 by philanthropist Frank T. Howard, it is the second-largest Confederate museum; Jefferson Davis’s exhumed body lay in state there in 1893, before permanent interment in Richmond. Over the next century, the Lee Memorial witnessed numerous celebrations, memorials, and protests often associated with the Confederacy and white supremacy (see Figure 5.3). And the statue and circle were even prominently featured in the 2005 Dukes of Hazzard movie shot in New Orleans. The competing rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013 and radical right rhetoric in 2015 made Confederate monuments, including Lee Circle, flashpoints for political conflict, demonstrations, and identity con­ testation. In some cities, local officials removed monuments in response. Images widely disseminated by news media and through social networks of the deconstruction of these monuments now figure in the public imagination about the referential meaning of the memorial sites (see Fausset 2017 as an example). In terms of affect, the memorial provides a rhetorically coherent message, one that resonates uniquely for different publics. The site embodies complex memories, contested meanings, and coded power relations. The events that have occurred, the proximate commemorative museum, and the national debate over the value of these heritage sites in local communities across the South coalesce to influence the referential meaning of the space. For white descendants of veterans of the Civil War, the monument and commemorative remarks at its unveiling presented Lee as the valorous

Figure 5.3 Celebration of Robert E. Lee’s one hundredth birthday

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military general. The monument holds deep significance as a reminder of sacrifice through war. Lee is the ultimate statesman, a true picture of mascu­ linity, and a moral Christian. Lee’s pose is significant for understanding the affect of the space. His posture is that of a victor. The South remains victor­ ious even in loss of the Civil War. It maintains its social mores and cultural traditions. In fact, as articulated by descendants of the region, “the South will rise again.” Lee stands guard as protector, resisting further encroachment by the federal government on state power, and as defender of the South’s cultural heritage. He also clearly stood for white supremacy—a referential meaning mitigated by the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. The current public debate surrounding Confederate monuments not only threatens these markers of white supremacist history and heritage, but also reveals the ongoing loss of consensus over communal and national identities. Such racial tension is only made more palpable by media coverage of police brutality and ensuing Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter protest movements. There are numerous memorial affects for African Americans in New Orleans, Louisiana. For black descendants of former slaves, Lee presents as slave-master. He stands watch over the (Southern) plantation, guarding against runaway slaves, with the potential of inflicting physical violence on a whim. He is surveying the landscape, at rest while he benefits from the labor of others. He is an icon representing an oppressive way of life. In this way, the space is a traumatic reminder of the atrocity of slavery and the terrible sacri­ fice of lives as human chattel in the service of an agrarian economy. This reality of the South meant loss even in victory for African Americans freed by the Civil War. Litigation concerning the suppression of African American civil rights, such as the right to vote, continues to this day. While the sons and daughters of the Confederacy proudly claim their lineage and celebrate it through voluntary organizations and public celebrations, African American descendants of slaves often have very limited knowledge of their ancestry due to poor records and loss of personal identity. The current public debate sur­ rounding Confederate monuments represents a legitimate reckoning with the place of contested historical markers in the public square. For blacks and whites, the fight over monuments reveals lingering vestiges of racism. To the extent that communities are unwilling to remove or at least contextualize Confederate iconography, they are embracing the racism of their progenitors. Though we largely draw upon archival materials to demonstrate the public meaning of the Lee Monument as a heritage site, this space holds rich inter­ pretive value as an archetype of memorial architecture commemorating the Civil War. It can be viewed as a type of site, a place carrying a type of public meaning. In this way, we are suggesting that the emotional lives of Con­ federate memorials, their “affective atmospheres” (Anderson 2009), draw on the cultural registers of racial supremacy enforced through formal and infor­ mal institutions of the community. The centrality of these sites and the dog­ matism of their accompanying Lost Cause narrative historically have engendered public and private devotion for whites in the South. It is no

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wonder that these sites have become flashpoints for political protest and con­ testation of state power, triggering deep sentiments nurtured and reinforced over multiple generations concerning race relations throughout the region and nation. The affective atmosphere of the place is inseparable from the conflicting interpretations of the war it aims to memorialize. Thus the case of Confederate monuments challenges us to consider the implications of two separate affective realities woven together across social geographies of race and the ensuing power struggle to dominate the memorial landscape. It further highlights the complex relational quality of affect in memorial architecture; these sites of heritage beckon us to engage with them as we make sense of our past and draw meaning for our future.

Evolving landscapes and multiple publics After tracing affect in memorial spaces and considering the spatial politics of affect in the setting of Lee Square, we consider the evolution of the landscape in response to the national debate over the fate of Confederate monuments throughout the South. Sites of heritage carry layered meaning. What was at Lee Square carried meaning; what is at Lee Square carries meaning; and what is to be of Lee Square will also carry meaning. This landscape is evolving even as we write this chapter. Here we pause to reflect on the multiple publics facing this monument and public square, and ways in which it carries affect for each separately. Central to the affective register in architecture is the emotional push of the place, whether it be fear, mourning, pride, or comfort. However, there could be multiple and divergent “pushes.” To the extent that group identity shapes the collective push of a place due to power dynamics at work in the built environment, there are multiple yet authentic affects. Or, as Davidson and Bondi observe of personal geographies, “our emotions matter. They affect the way we see (hear and touch …?) the substance of our past, present and future” (2004, 373). They create “connective tissues” of emo­ tional geography for master-turned-subordinate-turned-symbolic victor and slave-turned-freeperson-turned-second-class citizen. Several disciplines note the shift to a “therapeutic” culture—one in which emotions increasingly guide political discourse, understandings of the self, and interpretation of the world around us (Nolan 1998). Consider implications of a therapeutic culture for the legitimacy of competing arguments concerning the future of public spaces once devoted to Confederate memorialization. Though some have argued for preserving the monuments and contextualizing them with historical markers, many oppose the approach because of the emotional affect of the structures as icons to a system of racial slavery and oppression. A key argument in debate over the fate of Confederate memorials in town centers across the Deep South is that these monuments have receded into the urban landscape. There are no longer civic ceremonies and parades orche­ strated around these sites because, in a desegregated political atmosphere,

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they no longer capture the sentiment and consensual allegiance of the majority of white society in the South. An additional argument for preserving these monuments is to retain their historical value, especially those relegated to the periphery of contemporary public and communal life. At the time of the removal of the Lee Monument, Fuller noted that those advocating the preservation of Confederate memorials view the spaces as an ingredient of “historical and cultural legacy that needs to be maintained and protected.” From the vantage point of a historian, he noted, “We’re talking largely about these concrete symbols. But we as citizens project our own historical values onto them” (Mele 2017). Though emotional injuries are hard to see and spatial affects difficult to demonstrate, at stake are competing racial histories and their corresponding emotional afterlives. African Americans experience a space of white dom­ inance through the institution of slavery and subsequent segregation. Whites experience a space of uncontested local power and state autonomy—identity preservation at work since the Civil War. But maintenance of these markers belies a silent endorsement of power systems of a bygone era. Similarly, in a contemporary context marked by the rise of neo-Nazi radicalism, political appeals to ‘white rights,’ and civil unrest over the treatment of African American youth by law enforcement across major US cities, the presence of these markers infuse coded power relations into the urban landscape. What we see at play in debate over Confederate memorials is a power struggle over affective heritage. Our buildings are physical manifestations of our values. They are as mutable as our values. As Gieryn suggests, “buildings invoke endless narratives, not always consonant with those heard earlier as people and powers were enlisted and aligned to move dreams towards reality” (2002, 65, quoted in Kraftl and Adey 2008, 226). Part of the problem is that America is still young. Unlike the cities of Europe, cities in the United States have just now faced public contestation over memorial spaces to former political and ideological regimes. Never before have we torn down our community idols. In this way, we can understand the issue as a very nat­ ural moment of contestation and change in memorial architecture for a community and nation attempting to redefine itself. New Orleans illustrates the role of public debate in shaping heritage nar­ ratives. Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s comments on the statue’s removal reveal agency that can be exerted to shape memorial spaces: The removal of these statues sends a clear and unequivocal message to the people of New Orleans and the nation: New Orleans celebrates our diversity, inclusion and tolerance … This is not about politics, blame or retaliation. This is not a naïve quest to solve all our problems at once. This is about showing the whole world that we as a city and as a people are able to acknowledge, understand, reconcile—and most importantly—choose a better future. (Mele 2017)

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The primacy of the city in managing artifacts of heritage sites also comes to the fore. Contestation over and rapid removal of the Lee Monument generated so much local, regional, and national attention that the city moved the statue to an undisclosed location, ignoring public inquiries into its whereabouts. The mayor only revealed the storage site in a 60 Minutes feature without specific details concerning the location. Secrecy surround­ ing the monument’s placement reveals the power of the city over shaping the landscape and articulating a position on the issue, but it also reveals the limited ability of the mayor to stake claim to represent fully the people of New Orleans and their competing historical narratives. Mayor Landrieu rhetorically justified the removal as a demonstration of the ability of the people of New Orleans “to acknowledge, understand, reconcile—and … choose” a new, more inclusive narrative. However, the persuasiveness of that message is also undermined by indefinite, secretive plans for moving forward with the statue. Public monuments need public plans—since monumental architecture carries affect, cities choosing to alter the land­ scape must consider the impact of change on diverse publics. According to Lenhardt, “[s]imply to remove the statues without a plan for community engagement and discourse would be a mistake, a real missed opportunity” (Mele 2017). The built environment holds symbolic meaning. It also creates opportu­ nities for affect through habitation. Monumental sites can be engineered to “inflect the affective register” in a specific way, but they must be inhabited to have force. Those who use the space, circulate around the space, orient themselves through reference to the space constitute a key ingredient in the process of affect. A monument serves to “stabilize affect, to generate the possibility of precircumscribed situations, and to engender certain forms of practice, through the design and the planning … including aspects such as form and atmosphere” (Kraftl and Adey 2008, 228). They are designed and initially used to create an affect and reinforce that affect through future use. Inhabitants are afforded different degrees of power and serve a vital role in stabilizing the affect of the place. The use of heritage sites for civic celebration provides political elites with opportunities to become not only users of the space but powerful conduits for the “channeling of particular affective capa­ cities of inhabitation” (ibid.). These events reinforce place attachment, heri­ tage narratives, power relations, and community identity. The Lee Monument served as a critical marker, stage, compass, and habitat. Removal of the statue leaves open questions about the site’s future. The column still stands a year later. The circle still bears General Lee’s name. Without the statue, is all that remains the story? Built structures are evidence of permanence and change in the landscape. To have affective force, they must be retained and inhabited. Monuments must be kept in place and made part of the flow of everyday life to actua­ lize affect. The column still denotes reverence and awe as a timeless symbol; the circle directs that respect to Lee. But the column has been decapitated.

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White power has been toppled in material form, but it is less clear that it has been radically undermined in political form. If the column is not removed, then what remains is an obelisk—a circle surrounding a marker of power—just like Trajan’s Column or Napoleon’s Column. If the column is removed, then we are left with a named circle—one among countless refer­ ences to civic leaders of previous generations. Lee Monument in New Orleans, Louisiana, illustrates the evolution of place attachment and detachment in an urban landscape and the accompanying shift in affective atmosphere at the heritage site. What will become of this site and hundreds of others like it throughout the region? We anticipate that communities will address these sites differently, in ways that reflect their racial diversity, local histories, and openness to change.

Conclusion Memorial architecture in public space alters our environment physically. It carries affect, sometimes contested meaning, and often mediated reference. Controversy over the Lee Memorial provides a valuable case for appreciating the role of affect in architecture. It illustrates the possibility of two separate affective realities across social space. What do we take away from this power struggle to dominate memorial landscape? It represents more than simply taking down or leaving up com­ memorative statuary. It represents clashing worldviews and targeted crusades. It reflects the therapeutic turn noted by scholars of affective architectures, in which “performance of emotion” becomes “an index of credibility” (Thrift 2004, 66; see also Thompson et al. 2001; and Nolan 1998). It represents a broader change in the notion of space in the public consciousness. It would be a mistake to simply see the debate in terms of contestation over public space grounded only in a shared local concern over the community’s physical land­ scape of memory markers as reflections of common identity. In a global communication age, media and technology combine to circulate narratives and digital mapping that broaden the debate to national contestation of competing memory agendas. They raise consciousness concerning the con­ nectedness of communities through memorialization. They reveal the coordi­ nated efforts across all Southern communities to raise mass-produced monuments to memorialize the Confederate cause. They reveal the sources of sponsorship for these memorials and the historical periods of en masse installation of monuments. The networks of the past, including those of the UDC and SCV are now evident through the big data and raised conscious­ ness of the present. Thrift summarizes this change in the notion of space. “Space is no longer seen as a nested hierarchy moving from ‘global’ to ‘local.’ This absurd scale-dependent notion is replaced by the notion that what counts is connectivity” (Thrift 2004, 59). Not all monuments dedicated to the Confederate cause have been con­ tested. The four monuments removed in New Orleans were not the corpus of

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heritage sites dedicated to the Confederacy. Just as important as what is removed is what is left behind. This chapter opens a window on the complex relational quality of affect in monumental architecture and provides insight on affect in Confederate memorials in public space.

References Anderson, Ben. 2009. “Affective Atmospheres.” Emotion, Space and Society 2 (2): 77–81. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2009.08.005. Blight, David W. 2001. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Crang, Mike, and Divya P. Tolia-Kelly. 2010. “Nation, Race, and Affect: Senses and Sensibilities at National Heritage Sites.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 42 (10): 2315–2331. Davidson, Joyce, and Liz Bondi. 2004. “Spatialising Affect; Affecting Space: An Introduction.” Gender, Place and Culture 11 (3): 373–374. Davis, Jefferson. 1881. The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. New York: D. Appleton. Day, Christopher. 1990. Places of the Soul. London: Aquarian/Thorsons. Fausset, Richard. 2017. “Tempers Flare Over Removal of Confederate Statues in New Orleans.” New York Times, May 7, 2017. Foster, Gaines M. 1988. Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865–1913. New York: Oxford University Press. Gallagher, Gary W., and Alan T. Nolan, eds. 2010. The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gieryn, Thomas F. 2002. “What Buildings Do.” Theory and Society 31 (1): 35–74. Goodman, Nelson. 1985. “How Buildings Mean.” Critical Inquiry 11 (4): 642–653. Hayden, Dolores. 1997. The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Key, V. O., Jr. 1949. Southern Politics in State and Nation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Kraftl, Peter, and Peter Adey. 2008. “Architecture/Affect/Inhabitation: Geographies of Being-In Buildings.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 98 (1): 213–231. Landrieu, Mitch. 2017. “Transcript of the Statement of Mayor Mitch Landrieu.” May 23, 2017, New Orleans. Lynch, Kevin. 1960. The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Massey, Doreen. 2004. “The Political Challenge of Relational Space: Introduction to the Vega Symposium.” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 86 (1): 3. Mele, Christopher. 2017. “New Orleans Begins Removing Confederate Monuments, Under Police Guard.” New York Times, April 24, 2017. www.nytimes.com/2017/04/ 24/us/new-orleans-confederate-statue.html. Nolan, James L., Jr. 1998. The Therapeutic State: Justifying Government at Century’s End. New York: New York University Press. Osterweis, Rollin G. 1949. Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Pollard, Edward Alfred. 1866. The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates. New York: E. B. Treat.

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Thien, Deborah. 2005. “After or beyond Feeling? A Consideration of Affect and Emotion in Geography.” Area 37 (4): 450–454. Thompson, William Forde, E. Glenn Schellenberg, and Gabriela Husain. 2001. “Arousal, Mood, and the Mozart Affect.” Psychological Science 12 (3): 248–251. Thrift, Nigel. 2004. “Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect.” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 86 (1): 57–78. Waterton, Emma. 2014. “A More-Than-Representational Understanding of Heritage? The ‘Past’ and the Politics of Affect.” Geography Compass 8 (11): 823–833. Waterton, Emma, and Steve Watson. 2014. The Semiotics of Heritage Tourism. Bristol: Channel View Publications. Zembylas, Michalinos. 2006. “Witnessing in the Classroom: The Ethics and Politics of Affect.” Educational Theory 56 (3): 305–324.

Part II

Embedded geographies Negotiating the affective in (extra)ordinary landscapes

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Memorializing Lincoln’s life where he died Colleen Prior, Aysha Preston, David McKenzie, Sarah Jencks and Kenneth Foote

Introduction President Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth in Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC, on April 14, 1865. Lincoln was carried across Tenth Street to the Petersen House, a local boarding house, where he died early the next morning. Ever since, Ford’s Theatre and the Petersen House have been sites of public memory. They are now among Washington’s major visitor destinations, as conveyed in Figure 6.1, and maintained as important national historic sites by the US National Park Service (NPS) and the non-profit Ford’s Theatre Society (FTS). Visitors come by the thousands to see where Lincoln was assassinated even though, like the White House, nothing remains of the original building apart

Figure 6.1 Visitors lining up to enter Ford’s Theatre, the gable-roofed building in the right center of this photograph. Visitors now enter through a new lobby and visitor facility

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from its outer walls (O’Brien 2011). Many are fascinated, some are dis­ appointed, and the occasional visitor even expresses a sense of betrayal that so little is left of the original theater. But such emotions are perhaps a reason these walls remain at all as part of Washington’s cityscape. The Petersen House is far more intact but, like Ford’s Theatre, its rise as a major visitor destination was not a straightforward process. Either or both buildings might have been lost to Washington’s growth long ago if they hadn’t been so closely tied to Lincoln’s legacy and the history of the Civil War. What tourists see and feel today is the result of debates over memory, meaning, and emotion that extend back to 1865. We argue that the affective meanings of places, like Ford’s Theatre and the Petersen House, are important in understanding their transformations into major visitor destinations. These changes did not occur all at once, nor did they occur without conflict and controversy. Indeed, similar events sometimes lead to different outcomes. Nothing remains of the buildings where Presidents Garfield (1881) and McKinley (1901) were shot, whereas the Lincoln and Kennedy assassination sites have become important attractions. Ford’s Thea­ tre and the Petersen House might have faded away like those assassination sites, but their connection with Lincoln and the Civil War eventually led to their preservation. They provide examples of how memory becomes embo­ died in particular places and how affect and emotion can sometimes play important roles in the preservation and restoration of historical sites. Our point is that both buildings provide good examples of the ways in which affect and emotion influence the preservation and commemoration of particular places, people, and events. In this respect our argument is rooted in recent research on embodied experience, “more-than-representational spaces,” and intangible cultural heritage (Thrift 2004; Anderson and Harrison 2010; Smith et al. 2009; Lorimer 2008; Bondi 2007; Thien 2007). Our focus on one of the themes highlighted in the introduction to this book is the embodied experiences of individuals and communities faced by tragedy. The emotional, political, and social dynamics of these memoryscapes and traumascapes is a growing area of research, particularly issues related to the politics of place and debates over contested sites of memory. As we note in the following sec­ tions, the emotional dimensions of Ford’s Theatre and the Petersen House have changed through time and have influenced what visitors see today.

Methodology We address these issues by drawing upon archival sources, including news­ papers, published NPS reports, brochures and publicity materials developed for NPS and FTS, as well as a wide range of secondary sources. Some infor­ mation came from visitor studies and surveys conducted by the NPS and FTS. Additional sources were gathered by former FTS intern Alli HartleyKong to assist in the publication of Brian Anderson’s (2014) book on Ford’s Theatre. We also drew upon our varied professional experiences in

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contextualizing the history of Ford’s Theatre and the Petersen House. The writing team included a public historian (McKenzie), a religious studies scholar and museum professional (Prior), an anthropologist and museum professional (Preston), a public historian and educator (Jencks), and a historical geographer (Foote). All except Foote have worked at FTS or are currently members of its professional staff.

The immediate aftermath: shrine or mark of shame? The affective meanings of Ford’s Theatre and the Petersen House have always been complicated. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination several questions arose about whether the buildings should be returned to use as a theater and boarding house, transformed into shrines to Lincoln, or demol­ ished as sites of a shameful act of political violence. In the first months after the assassination all of these questions came into play. As valuable properties, the owners of both sought to return them to use as quickly as possible, what Foote terms “rectification” as mentioned below. Although the Petersens were able to continue using their property as a board­ ing house soon after the assassination, the same was not true of John T. Ford. His theater, shuttered after the shooting in April, was only allowed to reopen in July at the end of the investigation into the assassination. But Ford’s effort to sell or reopen his theater over the summer of 1865 was unsuccessful. Ford suggested creating a memorial to Lincoln in the building, but this plan never got off the ground, largely due to the inability of outside organizations to raise sufficient funds (see Bogar 2013). He then attempted to reopen the theater three days after the execution of four of Booth’s co-conspirators. But public emotion was too strongly against the theater being used as a place of enter­ tainment again. One letter warned Ford that he “must not think of opening tomorrow night. I can assure you that it will not be tolerated.” Both to prevent a riot and what he saw as an inappropriate use of the building, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton seized it, arguing that popular opinion held that “its desecration as a place of theatrical exhibition would be a national reproach and an outrage against humanity.” Ford rented the building to the War Department for a year as it was converted into an office building. Stanton secured Congressional funding for this pedestrian bureaucratic purpose by arguing that it was fitting “to have the spot hallowed by his blood consecrated to the preservation of the memorials to those who, like himself, suffered as martyrs in the national cause” (The New York Times 1866). The memorials to which he referred were not carved in marble, but rather in paper: the service records of Union veterans, used to help them secure pensions. The difficulties Ford faced in reopening his theater are not uncommon after similar events. After assassinations and similar crimes, there is a very fine line between honoring the victims and calling attention to the assassin and the assassin’s cause. Would the theater become a shrine to Lincoln, or a constant reminder of Booth’s extremism and his actions? Any effort to honor Lincoln

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at the theater would almost necessarily have drawn attention to Booth’s strong Confederate sympathies and evoked the pain of his assassination. Additionally, some sites of tragedy are more readily transformed into memorials than others. There can be pushback when memorials are proposed for highly secular, profane sites like theaters, restaurants, shops, or shopping arcades. Such locations are rarely employed to honor heroes or martyrs; instead, tributes are placed at the grave, home, or somewhere associated with a hero’s work and accomplishments. Lincoln’s tomb, completed in 1874 in Springfield, Illinois, was one of the first major memorials in his honor. Finally, it is important to remember that Lincoln’s reputation as one of America’s greatest presidents was an assessment that was still decades away. From the perspective of the 1860s, Lincoln was one of the most vilified pre­ sidents in US history. He had been a candidate of the upstart Republican Party and won office in 1860 largely because the Democratic Party split over slavery. Once he was elected, the country was immediately dragged into an unpopular and destructive war that Lincoln refused to end through compromise. Foote (2003, 7–35) uses the terms sanctification, obliteration, and rectifica­ tion to describe these different responses to violence. Each of these responses arises from quite different emotions. Sanctification often derives from a strong impulse to honor a hero and leader with some sort of physical or living memorial, such as the massive Lincoln Memorial dedicated on the National Mall in 1922. Obliteration stems from almost the opposite inclination—that is, to remove and efface evidence of particularly shocking and shameful events, much the way Ford’s Theatre was gradually stripped to its outer walls. Rectification falls somewhere in between these extremes—an event not important enough to memorialize, but not shameful enough to destroy. The site is repaired, restored, and reused, much the way the Petersen House was put back to use as a boarding house and the way John Ford tried to reopen his theater unsuccessfully, as noted above. The conflict between sanctification and effacement arose immediately as souvenir hunters descended to strip the theater before its conversion into offices. The Surgeon General and the War Department were the first of the building’s new occupants. But in 1893 the building became the site of another tragedy as its floors collapsed during the building’s remodeling. Twenty-two workers died and sixty-eight others were injured. The interior was rebuilt after the disaster (Olszewski 1963, 61–65). During these first decades after the assassination, many different emotions shaped the fate of Ford’s Theatre and the Petersen House. The buildings were too shameful to commemorate yet too important to obliterate. That some local residents saw the buildings as haunted seems to speak to this point. The buildings were held in tension between remembering and forgetting (Washington [1942] 2018, 92–95). Yet from 1865 onward the buildings con­ tinued to attract visitors interested in Lincoln, the assassination, and the Civil War. Greater public recognition started to build in the 1890s as Lincoln’s legacy grew and as the Civil War began to be reinterpreted.

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The Petersen House as shrine In contrast to the rapid changes made to the theater building, the house at 516 10th Street remained a home for the better part of twenty years following Lincoln’s death there. After the Petersen family left in the late 1860s, the family of Louis Schade lived there while he operated a newspaper press out of the ground floor. The Schades found life in the house difficult because tourists and curiosity seekers knocked on their door at all hours, seeking souvenirs and a peek of the death room. In 1884, the Petersens’ son, Fred, told a reporter, “[a]fter the death, many came to see the room in which he died, and these took anything they could lay their hands on. They cut the furniture slyly, took paper from the walls, snipped the curtains, stole the spoons, and even carried away the mustard-plasters we used that night” (The Cincinnati Enquirer 1884). This situation began to change in the 1890s for several reasons. One of the most important was the creation of the Memorial Association of the District of Columbia in 1892 by a group of prominent citizens. The organization’s statement of purpose included the following: The rapid growth of the city, and the transformation of residence streets into business centres, are already obliterating many of our historic build­ ings … . We especially wish to purchase the house on 10th street in which President Lincoln died. It is the only building at the Capital distinctly associated with him. We wish to restore it to the condition that it then was, both externally and internally, and to make it a perpetual shrine of patriotic pilgrimage for the millions that venerate his memory. (Memorial Association of the District of Columbia 1892) But the creation of the Memorial Association speaks to other changes occurring in the commemoration of Lincoln, the memory of the Civil War, and the rise of national commemorative traditions in the late nineteenth cen­ tury. During the war, Lincoln was one of the most vilified presidents in US history. Refusing to compromise with the South over slavery, he led the nation into its most destructive war. His reputation as one of the greatest presidents emerged only gradually from the late nineteenth century onward. As many historians have noted, by the 1890s Lincoln was beginning to be depicted in heroic, mythical terms in biography, history, literature, and the arts (Basler 1935; Foner 2008; Peterson 1994). The 1890s were also a decade during which the Civil War began to be reinterpreted (Blight 2001, 2011). Rather than continuing to be viewed as a conflict that divided the country, the war was viewed increasingly in heroic terms as a struggle that tested—and strengthened—the nation, even if this meant overlooking slavery and the rise of Jim Crow America (Foote 2003, 50–51). Finally, this was a period following the national centennial when a number of historical traditions were emerging— museums, expositions, national parks, and shrines—that celebrated white,

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Anglo-American identity in the face of massive immigration from southern and eastern Europe as well as the continued disenfranchisement of African, Native, Hispanic, and Asian Americans. The development of the Petersen House as a shrine to Lincoln was a nat­ ural outcome of this process. At the Memorial Association’s behest, Osborn H. Oldroyd moved his enormous collection of memorabilia from the Lincoln family home in Springfield, Illinois, into the Petersen House, where the col­ lection was opened to the public in 1893. Oldroyd used his own funds and contributions from private subscribers to pay the rent until Congress finally appropriated the money to purchase the house in 1896. During the 1890s, articles appeared and were reprinted in newspapers across the country, lauding the Memorial Association and arguing for preserving the house where Lincoln died as a patriotic obligation (The Winona Clipper 1892; The Times-Picayune 1893; Buffalo Morning Express and Illustrated Buffalo Express 1893). Over the following twenty years, the Petersen House gained additional prominence as home to the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), the association of Union Civil War veterans. It was also during these years that efforts to create a national memorial for Lincoln finally came to fruition, with enabling legislation passed in 1911 and the monument finally dedicated in 1922.

The push to reconstruct the theater The 1920s also saw renewed interest in Ford’s Theatre. Congressman Henry Rathbone, whose parents attended Ford’s Theatre as guests of the Lincolns on the night of the assassination, emerged as a leading advocate for restoring Ford’s Theatre to its original appearance or, barring that, shifting its use from federal building to publicly accessible museum. The debate continued for almost four decades, but eventually, the expectations of tourists visiting the house and the theater helped change the terms of debate from whether to how to restore. Rathbone advocated almost continually for Ford’s Theatre to become a memorial. He gained a congressional appropriation to purchase Oldroyd’s collection in 1926 and move it into an expanded Lincoln Museum on the first floor of Ford’s Theatre (Bennett 1928). Not everyone agreed. For some, like Representative Charles Underhill, creating a museum was a step too close to revering Booth. Countering him, Ulysses S. Grant III, grandson of the Civil War general, suggested, “[i]t already occupies such an important place in history and is so associated in the public mind with Mr. Lincoln” that a full restoration of the theater to its 1865 appearance “would most suitably enshrine the collection” (Los Angeles Times 1929). Eventually, the relocated Lincoln Museum inside Ford’s Theatre evoked the space’s original use, but did not replicate it. Lines along the floor traced the

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stage and Presidential Box, while footprints showed Booth’s escape route. A diorama with a recorded voice narrated the events of the night of the assassination. Demonstrating the importance of gathering in even the unrestored space where Lincoln was assassinated, during the 1940s and 1950s, the National Park Service and the Lincoln Group of the District of Columbia held an annual joint memorial service at the Lincoln Museum on the Sunday closest to the day of the assassination (The Washington Post 1951). The use of Ford’s Theatre as a public space commemorating Lincoln was the opening wedge toward a full restoration. It became clear that visitors wanted more. Starting in 1946, Senator Milton Young of North Dakota annually tried to secure funding for a historic structures report, including a cost estimate for a full restoration. He said, “[a]ll we want is a place for people to visit so they could see the building as it was in 1865” (The New York Times 1953). This seemed to respond to popular opinion; the site’s chief custodian said, “[p]eople are terribly disappointed when they don’t find the stage just as it was on the night of April 14, 1865” (The New York Times 1955). The Park Service was not convinced. A preliminary report submitted to Congress in 1955 suggested building a “large scale diorama” but not a full restoration: “We believe that it is better to retain or preserve intact a ves­ tige of that which is real and historic than to build new structures, the nature of which may be misunderstood by the general public” (Sampson 1955). After all, the lack of a restored space apparently didn’t dissuade more than 200,000 people every year from visiting (The Washington Post 1960). Even after seed money for a report was finally designated in 1959, The Baltimore Sun agreed with that initial position. While dismissing the argu­ ment that it would be a monument to Booth, the Sun reasoned that since the original was gone, the federal government shouldn’t be “pawning off as an historic edifice of 1865 an ersatz structure mostly built a century later” (The Sun 1960). Nonetheless, the study proceeded and, when published in 1963, recom­ mended a full restoration. At the time, some suggested placing the Oldroyd collection in the restored theater, while others suggested it might be moved to an adjacent, custom-built museum (The Washington Post 1954). Eventually, those plans fused: a new museum would be located in the basement. The plans were already in motion when President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. While the National Park Service was already working to upgrade its facilities for its fiftieth anniversary in 1966, Congress’s funding bill for Washington’s Kennedy Center included the money needed to restore Ford’s Theatre (The Washington Post 1964b). The terms of debate then shifted. What purpose should the restored space serve? Some thought keeping it more akin to a museum would be appropriate. The longtime site manager suggested, “[w]e view it as a national memorial to

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Lincoln and as such, the use of it would call for a certain restraint” (The Washington Post 1964a). Others suggested evoking the historical events more directly through details like “simulated flickering light of gas chandeliers” and a sound-and-light show, a “fitting and dignified way to portray the tragic event to present-day visitors” (The Sun 1964). Others believed that more needed to be done to emphasize Lincoln’s life and legacy, rather than his death. In 1964, executives from the Actors’ Equity Association—and later, lobbyist Frankie Hewitt—approached the Secretary of the Interior. The Actors’ Equity group and Hewitt both, separately, sug­ gested that staging plays in the space would be a more appropriate way to honor Lincoln. Like the then-planned Kennedy Center, it would be a living memorial, unlike the marble temple two miles away on the National Mall. The secretary agreed (Aarons 1964; Zolotow 1966) and eventually the Ford’s Theatre Society would develop the theater into both an active playhouse and a national historic site.

Ford’s Theatre reopens The theater’s grand reopening was held on January 30, 1968. The interior of the theater was recreated in a near-exact copy of the original theater with a replica of the set which had been on stage in April 1865. Renowned actress Helen Hayes delivered lines of dialogue from Our American Cousin—the same play that was staged the night of the assassination. She was the first performer on the stage in 103 years and represented renewed productions at Ford’s Theatre (Anderson 2014). Televised and hosted by First Lady Lady Bird Johnson, this event was the beginning of over fifty years of live theater on the Ford’s Theatre stage. By the early 1970s, the theater was producing popular musicals (Anderson 2014). Today, Ford’s Theatre is a centerpiece of Washington, DC, cultural life, with the Society producing plays and musicals that celebrate the legacy of Abraham Lincoln and explore the American experience. Its annual pro­ duction of A Christmas Carol has played nearly every season since 1979. In addition to classic favorites, Ford’s Theatre often features new or rela­ tively unknown shows, most notably Come from Away, which ran for five weeks in 2016 before opening on Broadway. Come from Away was sym­ bolically significant because of comparisons between the Lincoln assassi­ nation and the attacks of September 11, 2001, in terms of their popular reactions. The presentation of plays has made the theater both ordinary and extraordinary for different audiences. Locals in the Washington metropolitan area treat Ford’s Theatre as little different from the region’s other theaters, deciding to attend shows on the same bases as they would for other theaters. Yet, because it is the site of Lincoln’s assassination, Ford’s attracts large numbers of tourists to its productions—tourists who often pay little attention to what play they are seeing and more to where they are seeing it.

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Continuing changes and challenges of meaning and emotion Since reopening as a historic site, Ford’s Theatre has been a popular destina­ tion for history buffs as well as school groups studying the Civil War. The theater has tried different approaches to telling the story of the Lincoln assassination. In the early 1970s, the National Park Service produced a sound-and-light show telling the story of the assassination. This was eventually replaced by hourly talks by park rangers (Anderson 2014). The site currently reveals the recreated space in a manner reminiscent of its 1865 appearance. Site visitors can get a feel for the time period and the layout of the theater. Ford’s Theatre is relatively small and evokes a sense of age and time within its walls. As of the time of this article, the Petersen House exhibits artifacts that would have been in a nineteenth-century boarding house and recreates the room where Lincoln died, based on a photograph taken soon after Lincoln’s body was removed. Throughout the Ford’s Theatre site, visitors are presented with a constant mix of the old and the new. In the Ford’s Theatre Museum, and across the street in the Aftermath Exhibits at the Center for Education and Leadership, exhibitions retell the story of the assassination and the Civil War using fonts and colors evoking the nineteenth century, but also including more modern interpretive tools like video walls and touch-screen monitors. The Ford’s Theatre Museum’s content is broad, beginning with information about President Lincoln’s arrival in Washington under threat of assassination and ending with artifacts related to the assassination. The small museum space, where visitors are often asked to complete their visit in forty-five minutes, currently houses a text-heavy exhibition focusing on the Civil War. Over the years, the exhibi­ tions have teetered between two highly complex subjects—Lincoln’s pre­ sidency and Lincoln’s assassination. Neither approach has been wholly successful, and the staff struggle to tell the story of the assassination without letting it overshadow Lincoln’s legacy or glorifying the act of assassination as a focus of macabre fascination. In its current form, the basement museum provides context for the unlikely historical event that occurred upstairs in Ford’s Theatre—Lincoln’s assassi­ nation. While the basement museum and Aftermath Exhibits provide key information, visitors can easily lose interest or become overwhelmed by the amount of text presented in the softly lit galleries. With the exception of Booth’s derringer (gun), which is displayed in one corner of the basement museum, artifacts are not used to drive the story as they are in some muse­ ums. Given these challenges, the museum space is preparing to undergo yet another redesign. The site’s 2018 interpretive plan, which will serve as the basis for future exhibitions and educational programming, aims to balance the task of educating the public about the events of the assassination with contextualizing the event as an act of racially motivated political violence rooted in the Civil War era with resonance today, rather than a sensational true-crime story. As of this writing, Ford’s Theatre Society and the National

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Park Service are in the process of planning how the interpretive plan will be executed in the visitor experience. The most effective methods of interpretation at the historic site are inter­ personal exchanges between Ford’s Theatre staff and visitors. In the theater, National Park Service rangers and volunteers share a range of narratives related to the assassination. These “ranger talks” are informal twenty-five-minute pre­ sentations in the physical space which vary drastically based on the storyteller. As rangers follow the general facts of the night of the assassination, they focus on related topics of personal interest along with the interests of the visitors. During the spring months, which is the historic site’s busiest time of year, a forty-minute two-person play entitled One Destiny takes center stage twice daily for visitors. One Destiny is set in 1865 and features two characters pre­ sent when Lincoln was shot. Without re-enacting the actual assassination itself, the actors portray various characters who were present the night of the assassination and the day leading up to it. The play effectively evokes empa­ thy and interest in the audiences. For many, it is the first time that the space feels “real” and activated—showing a desire not just to hear about an event in the (reconstructed) space where it took place, but to feel it. Visitors have similar reactions with high levels of interest and intrigue in Ford’s Investigation: Detective McDevitt, an actor-led walking tour around Washington evoking the intensity and drama of the investigation into the assassination conspiracy. Visitors travel around the city as they uncover clue after clue to reveal who may have been involved in the assassination plot. This program encourages audiences to use their critical thinking skills as they uncover a mystery in “real-time.” These methods of interpretation, with per­ sonal involvement and interaction, resonate strongly with Ford’s visitors. Instead of asking the visitors to remember everything related to the Civil War, as the museum exhibition suggests, they allow visitors to leave the site with an experience that is not easily forgotten. The 2018 site-wide interpretive plan emphasizes emotional outcomes for visitors to subtly push them to draw parallels between the Lincoln assassination and other acts of racist political violence, rather than being able to come away reciting (and likely quickly forgetting) all the facts of the Lincoln presidency and assassination.

Into the future Interest in that legacy is one of the driving forces behind visits to the site. Ford’s Theatre has become a must-see destination for out-of-town student groups and families. The site is listed as a top destination for visitors to the nation’s capital. Its convenient location, just blocks off the National Mall, makes Ford’s Theatre accessible to travelers—resulting in crowds that locals do their best to avoid. Throughout March and April, thousands of students line up every day on either side of 10th Street to enter the buildings, with souvenir vendors fol­ lowing in their tracks. Downtown workers, as well as Ford’s Theatre staff,

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squeeze past with a polite “excuse me” to access their offices. The spring is the most exciting and challenging time at Ford’s Theatre as staff anticipate large crowds and strategize to best serve them. There are several other historic sites across Washington that focus on Pre­ sident Lincoln and the Civil War. Yet, unlike other sites around Washington, where Lincoln lived and worked, Ford’s Theatre seems oddly alive. It is a place where Lincoln came to wind down from the stresses of the presidency. It is a place where he engaged with the public and enjoyed theater. This feeling continues as tourists purchase tickets to see Ford’s productions in “the same place” Lincoln would have enjoyed them. Regardless of the long and con­ stantly changing architectural history of Ford’s—from the mundane and the macabre to the extraordinary—the space continues to have meaning. Visitors to Ford’s Theatre are primarily out-of-town tourists, with locals attending theater performances. The neighborhoods surrounding the thea­ ter—and the greater Washington metro area—are experiencing rapid gentri­ fication, which, in addition to the site’s interpretation, impacts Ford’s Theatre visitorship. According to company data, people of color make up a small percentage of visitors to Ford’s Theatre, and of those visitors many are visit­ ing internationally. In order to reflect local audiences, Ford’s Theatre often produces plays and musicals that center the stories of people of color and feature ethnically diverse casts, and creates educational programming geared towards local communities. As Ford’s Theatre staff broaden the voices that tell the stories on site, they must juggle the site both as a tourist destination and a community gathering space where all are welcomed. Ford’s Theatre shows how people identify with spaces and how spaces evoke different emotions over time. Regardless of its “reconstructed” status, the theater takes on the quality of the numinous. Being present in the place where Lincoln died is a powerful connection to a figure that has meant much to many people. Being in that space reminds us that, mythic though he may have become, Abraham Lincoln was human. For some, the site is quite per­ sonal, prompting some volunteers to dress occasionally in period costumes for the enjoyment and interpretation of visitors, while other visitors feel dis­ connected from the space and the other stories told and interpreted there. There is no doubt that many visitors will continue to come to Ford’s Theatre to feel a connection with Lincoln, a man who is now mythologized as one of America’s greatest presidents. Over 150 years after Lincoln’s assassination, the National Park Service, Ford’s Theatre Society, and the public at large are still debating how to best serve the public when telling the story of the assassination and Lincoln’s legacy in this complex site of mourning. Shaping a historic site of national importance is challenging. It is generally agreed that the theater should not merely be a shrine. The staff at Ford’s understands that Lincoln was a complicated, evolving, extraordinary person. How do we demythologize Lin­ coln, and what does that mean for the building? Does the theater, as the architectural manifestation of his mythic status, need to change in order to

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re-complicate the story of Lincoln so that we can learn from the questions that his complicated story poses? How do we disrupt exhibition objects like Booth’s derringer, redirecting its affective pull to titillate some and glorify political violence for others, particularly for those with contemporary political sympathies? This is a conundrum that Ford’s Theatre has confronted as it defines its role in shaping Lincoln’s legacy. For the first hundred years after the assassination, the question was simply whether to restore. Since the 1968 reopening, questions of how the space relates to visitors with differing viewpoints have remained, and will remain, open.

References Aarons, Leroy F. 1964. “Live Ford Theater Performances Discussed with Equity Officials.” The Washington Post, December 11, 1964. Anderson, Ben, and Paul Harrison. 2010. “The Promise of Non-representational Theories.” In Taking-Place: Non-representational Theories and Geography, edited by Ben Anderson and Paul Harrison, 1–34. Farnham: Ashgate. Anderson, Brian. 2014. Images of America: Ford’s Theatre. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing. Basler, Roy P. 1935. The Lincoln Legend: A Study of Changing Conceptions. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Bennett, James O’Donnell. 1928. “Ford’s, Where Lincoln Fell, to Be Shrine.” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 15, 1928. Blight, David W. 2001. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Blight, David W. 2011. American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Bogar, Thomas A. 2013. Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination: The Untold Story of the Actors and Stagehands at Ford’s Theatre. Washington, DC: Regnery History. Bondi, Liz. 2007. “The Place of Emotions in Research: From Partitioning Emotion and Reason to the Emotional Dynamics of Research Relationships.” In Emotional Geographies, edited by Joyce Davidson, Liz Bondi, and Mick Smith, 231–246. Aldershot: Ashgate. Buffalo Morning Express and Illustrated Buffalo Express. 1893. Buffalo, NY, February 2, 1893. Accessed June 8, 2018. www.newspapers.com/clip/20791290/buffalo_m orning_express_and_illustrated/. The Cincinnati Enquirer. 1884. “Lincoln’s Assassination.” Cincinnati, OH, April 19, 1884. Accessed June 8, 2018. www.newspapers.com/clip/20786129/the_cincinnati_ enquirer/. Foner, Eric, ed. 2008. Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World. New York: W. W. Norton. Foote, Kenneth E. 2003. Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy. Rev. ed. Austin: University of Texas Press. Lorimer, Hayden. 2008. “Cultural Geography: Non-representational Conditions and Concerns.” Progress in Human Geography 32 (4): 551–559. Los Angeles Times. 1929. “Lincoln Shrine Bill Opposed: Ford’s Theater Perpetuation Proposal Under Fire; Underhill Condemns It as Memorial to Assassin; Ulysses S. Grant III Gives Answer to Attack.” February 11, 1929.

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Memorial Association of the District of Columbia. 1892. Words of Lincoln. Pamphlet. From the Indiana State Library, Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection. Accessed July 3, 2018. https://archive.org/details/memorialassociat00memo. The New York Times. 1866. “The Records of the War Ford’s Theatre to Be the Depository.” January 18, 1866. The New York Times. 1953. “Mover to Restore Ford’s Theatre Hit: Nephew of President Grant Believes It Might Glorify Assassin of Lincoln,” June 29, 1953. The New York Times. 1955. “Lincoln Museum Seeking Realism: Restoration of Ford’s Theatre Where President Was Slain Depends on Congress.” February 6, 1955. O’Brien, William P. 2011. “Ford’s Theatre and the White House.” White House History 30 (Fall). www.whitehousehistory.org/fords-theater-and-the-white-house. Olszewski, George J. 1963. Historic Structures Report: Restoration of Ford’s Theatre. Washington, DC: National Park Service. Peterson, Merrill D. 1994. Lincoln in American Memory. New York: Oxford University Press. Sampson, Paul. 1955. “Park Service Files Ford Theater Plan.” The Washington Post, July 15, 1955. Smith, Mick, Joyce Davidson, Laura Cameron, and Liz Bondi. 2009. “Introduction: Geography and Emotion—Emerging Constellations.” In Emotion, Place and Culture, edited by Mick Smith, Joyce Davidson, Laura Cameron, and Liz Bondi, 1–18. Farnham: Ashgate. The Sun. 1960. “Do Not Restore.” October 17, 1960. The Sun. 1964. “Ford’s Being Restored as On Murder Night.” September 6, 1964. Thien, Deborah. 2007. “Intimate Distances: Considering Questions of ‘Us.’” In Emo­ tional Geographies, edited by Joyce Davidson, Liz Bondi, and Mick Smith, 191–204. Aldershot: Ashgate. Thrift, Nigel. 2004. “Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect.” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 86 (1): 57–78. The Times-Picayune. 1893. “A Laudable Undertaking.” New Orleans, LA, January 31, 1893. Accessed June 8, 2018. www.newspapers.com/clip/20791180/the_timespicayune/. US Congress. 1911. A Bill for the Purchase of the Oldroyd Collection of Lincoln Relics, and for Other Purposes. H. Res. 29, 62d Congress, 1st Session, Introduced in House April 4, 1911. https://archive.org/stream/billforpurchaseo5646unit#page/n0/mode/2up. Washington, John E. (1942) 2018. They Knew Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press. www.newspapers.com/clip/20658023/1910_0602_commission_formed_to_consider/. The Washington Post. 1951. “86th Year of Lincoln Death Noted in Prayer and Stories.” April 16, 1951. The Washington Post. 1954. “Ford Theater Repair Urged.” February 13, 1954. The Washington Post. 1960. “Ford’s Theater Fund Assured.” May 5, 1960. The Washington Post. 1964a. “Proposal to Restore Ford Theater Gains.” April 14, 1964. The Washington Post. 1964b. “Senate Votes JFK Center Fund of $18 Million, Tenant Aid.” June 24, 1964. The Winona Clipper. 1892. “To Preserve Historical Landmarks.” Winona, KS, May 12, 1892. Accessed June 8, 2018. www.newspapers.com/clip/20790872/the_winona_clipper/. Zolotow, Sam. 1966. “Restored Ford Theater to Be Dedicated April 14: Date Is 102d Anniversary of Lincoln’s Assassination in Washington House.” The New York Times, September 26, 1966.

7

Body in the Forbidden City Embodied sensibilities and lived experience in the affective architecture Peng Liu

Introduction This chapter explores the space of the Forbidden City, Beijing, as “not given but produced” (Rose, Degen, and Basdas 2010, 334) by bodily actions conducted within and “produced through human practice” (J. Anderson 2004, 255). The investigation focuses on the interrelationship between space and body in response to affective approaches in the contemporary study of the sociological body as well as a more-than-representational approach in apprehending architectural space. As Waterton sums up with regard to contemporary social theorists on heritage spaces, the focus is on “shifting from static ‘site’ or ‘artefact’ to [questioning] engagement, experience and performance … [and understanding] heritage as a complex and embodied process of meaning- and sense-making … [thus] recogniz[ing] the spaces as agents or co-participants/ producers of a heritage experience” (2014, 824). The current trend explicitly points out that there is an intimate interaction, a mutual impact, between space and body to re-think heritage spaces. Hence, the various spatial designs of the Forbidden City are acknowledged as highly functional, narrative, and provocative in cultural and political terms. The subtle details and historical residuals built up over centuries endow the space with cultural power to move bodies in the way the space expects. Meanwhile, the body, which carries embodied sensibilities and lived experience as simultaneously part nature and part culture in sociological terms, is capable of affecting and being affected while situated in a cultural/social space. Therefore, bodily actions engaging with the space are key in addressing their intimate interaction and mutual impact in order to re-think both the space of the Forbidden City and the body within. This chapter argues that the body co-produces affect with the space and that the body’s own subjectivity is key in this co-production. This research has found that changes to the sociological body in turn change how the heritage space affects its visitors. I bring my own body into that heritage space in contemporary time, a space already full of historical residuals and inscribed with cultural meaning, to examine how my body interacts with it, where the bodily movement in the space reflects my body’s subjectivity, not only as an

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inherited Confucian embodied being, but specifically as a New China-era body who was born in and grew up during the New China period, which is established in 1949, and now lives in Australia. My own subjectivity is a core theoretical and analytical aspect in this discussion. Particularly, my body was brought up during the 1980s and 1990s, while Confucianism was suppressed, and consequently, after its resumption in recent years, I see the discontinued Confucianism in a familiar yet strange way which leaves me with an enor­ mous imaginative space to fill in the blank spaces where my body cannot access the cultural meaning of the site.

The Forbidden City The Forbidden City, built from 1406 to 1420, is located in Beijing as the former Imperial Palace for the Ming and Qing dynasties. It was the head­ quarters of the nation as well as the everyday living space for twenty-four emperors for over 400 years. The structures of the buildings in the space were built from various timbers using traditional techniques embedded with the Imperial codes that have been passed down for generations. During the Revolution of 1911, the image of Empress Dowager Long Yu “weeping in acquiescence while unwillingly announcing” the Last Emperor Pu Yi’s abdi­ cation became the representation of this historical turning point in China from Imperial society to modern society (S. Zhou 2006, 1). Thus ended the Forbidden City’s 491-year history as the centre of ruling power and royalty. From 1913 to 1914, the government of the day shifted all the treasures from Shen Yang Palace and Re He Palace to the Forbidden City and made it into a museum which opened its gates to the public on National Day on October 10, 1914. The Forbidden City had changed its role from political headquarters to tourist destination. As noted by Blackman, traditional social theorists have prioritized dis­ course, symbolic representation, and signification as the keys in studying subjectification (2012, 4)—that is, the relation between humans and the world. The study of the Forbidden City has been no exception and is largely based on history and material studies, particularly the physical features and cultural symbols of the city. For example, the twelve different styles of architecture with major buildings laid out on the axis lines of the seventy-two-hectare land reflects the idea of being magnificent in Chinese royal architecture (Yu 2002, 1). Textual (S. Zhou 2006), symbolic (Wang 2010), and iconographic (Zheng 2008) approaches are the main topics in the Forbidden City studies. In my research, however, I have emphasized the interrelationship between body and space—specifically, how the design of the layout of the city influ­ ences certain bodily movement within the space to create effects to facilitate an inhabitation/event, such as political control over bodies in Imperial time and various embodied walking encounters in contemporary time (Liu 2018). Such an approach can extend current quantitative field studies on the For­ bidden City into conceptual understandings engaging with contemporary

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thought, such as the more-than-representational approach (Thrift 2004) focusing on how the so-called senses of “the now” can conceptualize the heritage space in terms of “body, practice and performativity” (Waterton 2014, 823), which may in turn provide new understandings of the space. According to Kraftl and Adey, in contemporary literature, “spaces are made in an ongoing, contingent sense, in styles that are not only symbolic, but more than representational, haptic, performative, embodied, material, and affec­ tual” (Kraftl and Adey 2008, 214). Of particular relevance to the chapter is how the more-than-representational approach to the space of the Forbidden City can allow me to explore the heritage site via my New China-era body. This approach refers to the affect reflected in bodily movement in the space realizing the interrelationship and mutual impact between body and space in contemporary time. Furthermore, embracing rich literature from contemporary geography, built spaces are narratives that “communicate values, beliefs, and feelings using vocabularies of construction materials and design elements” (Yanow 1998, 215). The construction and design of the Forbidden City provoke certain bodily sensations, and such lived bodily experience gained from the interaction between body and the space, which is absent in the official historical records of the Forbidden City, becomes the key that allows me to approach and investigate the space as an “affective heritage” (Micieli-Voutsinas 2017, 94). Moreover, Perez de Vega describes the encounter between body and space in these terms: “the body … as a collection of force fields, or vectors … affects a space through its changing movement within it … [and] allows the body to perform as an extension of the space and the space as an extension of the body’s action” (2010, 400). In Kraftl and Adey’s terms, the encounters of body and a space can be seen as a “performative relationship … [whereby] architectural design [is] imbued with styles of bodily doing, because of the push that the particular relationship between a body and that building could bring about: an affect” (2008, 216–17). Therefore, affect theory and its rela­ tion to my own subjectivity as a core theoretical and analytical aspect are significant to the research which is discussed below.

My own subjectivity and its relationship to affect theory We, as well as being individuals (Foucault 1998), are all embodied beings, acted upon by institutions (Foucault 1991),1 as representations of class, gender, race, and so on, interacting with space through bodily movement. In other words, the investigation on the interrelationship between body and space is to see “how potentialities of the body and the spatiality of movement unfold” (Ravn 2017, 58) in the space of the Forbidden City, and how affect emerges during the encounter between the various embodied beings and the Imperial space. My body is acted upon by multiple institutions that determine the heritage experience in the space. In particular, Confucianism, the national ideology regulating the Imperial society for centuries, is inherited from my

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Chinese ancestors and deeply rooted in my body, and it guides my body in the space through cultural expectation—so much so that I see myself as a body forged from traditional, Imperial, and oriental philosophies. However, as I was born in and grew up during the New China period, my body is also imbued with a strong revolutionary sense—a New China-era body of modern, patriotic, and socialist values. This is a profound cultural change that, in effect, sets up two ideological systems for comprehending the world in paral­ lel, or at times paradoxical, terms. Moreover, after almost two decades of living in Australia, I have developed an enhanced understanding of crosscultural and multi-cultural values which, in turn, further sensitizes my body to cultural multiplicity. Therefore, when I return to this heritage space after first visiting, I find that my own rather complex subjectivity determines my bodily movement in the space and that the space exerts a specific impact on my body. My own bodily experience of wandering/walking in the living area of this space with almost countless courtyards demonstrates the affective encounter between my sociological body and the heritage space. Body studies are seen as an important part of sociology as they involve every sociological concern and debate, such as culture and identity, power, communication, subjectivity, performance, representation, disability, and gender. According to Shilling, sociological studies on the body have used two main theoretical approaches since the 1980s. Drawing on Foucault, some approaches “identify the governmental management of the body as setting key parameters to the overarching external environment in which social action occurs” while other approaches “identify the body as central to the internal environment of social action … [with a focus on the] ‘body’s own experience of its embodiment’ in various social contexts …” (Shilling 2008, 2), drawing on resources from phenomenology by philosophers such as MerleauPonty. Contemporary terms like “bodily integrity” and the concept of bodysubject, which regard the body as constantly interacting with the changing environment rather than being fixed and stable, have been widely discussed. As I have summed up elsewhere, the body is reconciled from a dualistic point of view, seen as either “a biological phenomenon in naturalistic terms or an infinitely malleable form in social constructionist terms” (Liu 2018, 144). Moreover, theorists identify the body as “simultaneously part of nature and part of culture” (Turner 1996, 197) and “simultaneously a social and biolo­ gical entity which is in a constant state of becoming” (Shilling 1993, 27). Apart from being a biological entity, which is equally important but not the focus of this chapter, our cultural body is historically inherited and culturally embodied (Douglas 2005; Mauss 2005; Shilling 1993; Turner 1996). In brief, the body’s cultural embodiment is “a highly complex and indeterminate state” (Shildrick 2010, 13). The sociological body has provided the theoretical foundation to allow me to utilize my own body’s subjectivity in relation to space, which articulates the scholarly approach of my body towards the space. At the same time, affective theory allows me to access the present moment of my body interacting with/in the space, which helps me to re-think my own

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body’s historical inheritance, whereby my personal feeling and affect become the keys to investigating the interrelationship between my body and the heritage space. In the current moment, affect theory is developing rapidly in many fields of humanities research. Affect theory explicitly investigates the registers of bodily experience that were overlooked and once seen as the “contemporary ‘absent present’” (Blackman 2012, 4) in social theory. Affect has been var­ iously described by philosophers and theorists as non-representational (Blackman and Venn 2010), “collective” (Seigworth and Gregg 2010, 9), inorganic, immaterial, pre-personal, “a sense of push in the world” (Thrift 2004, 64). Although there is no universal definition, affect generally refers to the “differential relations between bodies/things” (Williams 2010, 249). Of particular relevance to the investigation in this chapter, affect emerges from relations between bodies and things (B. Anderson 2006), and the “emotions, feelings, sensations and more [bodily movement] are what Ander­ son calls the expressions of affects; they are the result of the encounter between objects and bodies” (Adey 2008, 439–40; emphasis in original). Acknowledging the claim of the multiplicity of affects (Rose, Degen, and Basdas 2010, 339), affect is thereby understood as the “capacity to relate or engage” (Adey 2008, 440) the interaction between the body and the space in the Forbidden City investigation. Drawing from a similar source, Kraftl and Adey describe affect in architectural studies as “the capacity of a building to allow inhabitation to take place [which is the bodily connection with archi­ tecture]—and to create meaningful effects—[that] constantly emerges through ongoing, dynamic encounters …” (2008, 214). Walking through the courtyards of the Forbidden City is a particularly provocative bodily experience, a type of affect expressed through bodily movement. Put otherwise, the research situates my body in the heritage space as a linkage between the sociological body and the affective space, which is realized through examining my bodily movement in the space. The examina­ tion reflects the meeting point between my New China-era body, which is a fully realized culturally embodied being before walking into the space, and the heritage space where the affective encounter is going to take place during the walking event. It is my bodily movement, which is the interaction between my body and the space, that co-produces affect. First of all, apart from being caught up by cultural representations such as traditional patterns, my body interacts and engages with the space through bodily movement in terms of looking for the residuals of the actions left by previous bodies in the space, such as the bodies of the eunuchs, the Red Guards of New China, and Western contemporary visitors, et cetera. These residuals have been a constitutive part of producing and re-producing the space continually over a long period of time prior to my body entering. In this sense, my body is exposed to the space-in-making that in turn causes my body to want to know about the past, which is a type of affect. Secondly, my bodily movements in the space are the combined actions of borrowing from

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daily life and creating new actions in the space. The space provokes certain bodily sensations so much so that new bodily actions are formed to cope with the journey of walking through the space. The new bodily actions, which include walking, squatting, bending over, touching, and so forth, are the expressions of affect emerging from the cultural/political encounter between my New China-era body and the heritage space. Thirdly, the lived interaction between my body and the space is an iterative process whereby the affect is the realization of the impact of the space upon my body as both historically inherited with New China identity and shaped by my migrant cross-cultural experience. My subjectivity determines the affect co-produced with the heri­ tage space. In other words, the changes on my sociological body cause the changes of the affect that my body co-produces with the space. And, at the same time, the residuals of my bodily movement left in the space become a part of the space for the next body to enter, perceive, and interact with. The heritage space is in a state of constant making, which makes it affective. Furthermore, Thrift notes that affect can be conceived “as a set of embodied practices that produce visible conducts as an outer lining” (Thrift 2004, 60); in other words, the embodied activity in the space of the Forbidden City which can be visually perceived is a type of affect. Therefore, the affective turn provides an additional lens for understanding the sociological body, particularly in order to see the body situated in a social and cultural environment, such as the body walking in an architectural space.

Walking as a method I use my body walking in the Forbidden City as a research method. Walking, as an embodied act (Lorimer 2012), has been theorized as a method for understanding the world (Ingold 2004; Wylie 2005; Pink et al. 2010) and is recognized as an embodied way of knowing (Wylie 2005; Pink 2007). Walking in the Forbidden City is therefore understood to be reflective of changing social forms and norms (Edensor 2000, 81–106) and expressive of diverse political/cultural meanings (Lorimer and Lund 2008, 185–200). I also include other bodily activities such as touching and squatting as part of walking. This ongoing fieldwork has been conducted annually during winter in December and January since 2010. Each visit takes two to three full days spent at the site. By using my own body as a vehicle, the investigation demonstrates the embodied encounters of my body in terms of how it is being manipulated and restrained while walking through the space that generates a specific affect.

Confucian embodied society Along with the remarkable economic boom in recent decades, Confucianism has regained its popularity in Chinese studies in China after almost a century of its abolishment and is seen as a very important part of its intangible national cultural heritage. The political purpose behind the return of

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Confucianism, along with large numbers of state-funded Confucius institutes established across the world, is to increase China’s cultural presence in the world alongside its economic success. During this resurgence, Confucianism and its values are being reviewed in relation to issues in recent years which, in turn, makes me reconsider my own bodily experience in the Forbidden City with a reflexive awareness of Confucianism. The space of the Forbidden City—including its layout, designs, and regulations—is all inscribed with Confucian values and cultural meaning, which makes it an ideal site for provoking memories, analysing understandings of the Chinese body, and re-interpreting the space in contemporary thought. As I wander in the space, the awareness of its history causes a paradoxical affect on my body by imagining a social relationship with the Imperial Con­ fucian body, for example, which is physically absent but culturally present, resulting in my feeling that the space is at once familiar yet strange, welcom­ ing but exclusionary at the same time. That is to say, my own relationship to the site has changed over time as my sociological body has changed. For example, what my sociological body experiences within the Forbidden City is different from the experiences of Western tourists sharing the space as my own body is a New China-era body, an embodiment of the simultaneous insider/outsider. My body has been further transformed by globalization and the experience of migration. In turn, this diasporic embodiment changes my experiences of walking, meandering, and touching, as my body searches for ‘authentic’ Imperial Confucian experience. As Shouse notes, “[f]eelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social, and affects are prepersonal” (Shouse 2005; emphasis in original). My particular feeling in the space is the sensation provoked in response to my life experiences of being a Confucian embodied being who was brought up in New China and lives in Australia. The sensation provoked in the space is my feeling towards it, which is very much mixed and personal. My emotions, however, are the various outward displays of my feelings, mobilized in social interaction with others—which can be authentic or fake, or affected by political purpose, for example; but this is not the focus of the chapter. Affect, expressed in feeling and bodily movement, is always prior to consciousness (Massumi 2002) and is “the body’s way of preparing itself for action in a given circumstance by adding a quantitative dimension of intensity to the quality of an experience” (Shouse 2005).

Embodied sensibilities and contemporary lived experience in the courtyard of the Forbidden City The ever-changing space According to Day, the built environment is always in forms and shapes that “create the appropriate gestures: of welcome, of privacy, of activity, of repose” (C. Day 1990, 109) for bodies to perceive and behave. Apart from the

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material form of the Forbidden City, which has remained largely unchanged over the centuries, the initial gesture of the space is formed through its layout design for specific purposes, such as stabilizing the Imperial social structure. The norms of buildings and their surrounding spaces were differentiated in order to match their masters’ social statuses. Various social/spatial etiquette was applied in courtyards within the city to consolidate this hierarchy; for example, the differentiations of water vats in iron, bronze, and gilded bronze reflect the hierarchical organization of the space. The gilded bronze represents the highest standing of the masters in the courtyard. Significantly, the varying conditions of the day also contribute to the over­ all experience, meaning, and intensity of the space, including the weather conditions, time of day, and size of the crowd. These conditions also affect how the body perceives and behaves in the space, and further impact on the interrelationships between body and space. As a case in point, the shadows of fantasy animal figures on the roof representing social hierarchy can be seen from the ground, and their moving shadows create and convey varying experiences of the space and architecture at different times of the day (Figure 7.1). As Ingold notes, “[w]e see in sunlight whose shades and colours reveal more about the composition and textures of the ground surface than about the shapes of objects, we hear these textures in the rain from the sounds of drops falling on diverse materials, and we touch and smell in the keen wind that—piercing the body—opens it up and sharpens its haptic and olfactory responses” (2010, 131). The sensorial experience of time or weather changing

Figure 7.1 The quantity and cultural meaning of each fantasy animal figure on the roof are as much part of the architecture as their moving shadows

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provokes various sensations that reflect the affect in the space. As Ingold further notes, the implication is that “as the weather changes we do not see different things, but we do see the same things differently” (2005, 102). Therefore, the intended gesture of the space can be amplified or weakened by the ever-changing conditions, affecting the perceptions and behaviours of the body towards the space, and correspondingly the interrelationships between body and space. There is a mutual impact between the space and the body, compounded by the ever-changing conditions of the day, manifesting as an interaction realized through a series of bodily actions and reactions within that space. The space impacts on bodies and affects the bodily actions; in turn, the subsequent bodily actions are conducted in response to the impact of the space upon the body. This constant interaction contributes to the intensity of the space, such as the feeling of cultural inclusion and exclusion of the space upon the body within. Such architecture is “constantly being transformed by use” (Amin and Thrift 2002, 49). The bodily movement is the constant conversation/interaction which forms the accumulated relationship between the space and culturally embodied beings. As seen in Figure 7.2, my body touches the wall to understand the space through sensory means, which is evocative of how the space is both personally

Figure 7.2 My hand touching cracked bricks exposed to the below-zero outdoor tem­ perature during a winter visit. The body heat travels from my finger to the brick and warms the material while simultaneously cooling my fingertips. Retracting my hand, my body walks away with some sandy granules on my fingertips, while leaving my fingerprints on the brick

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and experientially sensed—and constantly changing and evolving as a result. Therefore, the interaction between the body and the space increases the intensity in the space by provoking sensations, where the space of the For­ bidden City is the collective of all the relationships between its physical layout and each individual body participating within. The ever-changing body Space is ever-changing in terms of the intensity added by the constant bodily actions conducted within it. As Llewellyn notes, architectural spaces are not simply “‘consumed’—they are ‘reproduced’ by individuals living therein according to their everyday lives” (2004, 230). In the case of the Forbidden City, the actions actualized in the space by bodies of emperors, officials, ser­ vants, and bodyguards disciplined under the Imperial code are different from actions conducted by the vast number of capitalist tourists in today’s time. Historically, Imperial bodies would receive comprehensive training on bodily movement and language regarding their social positions before entering or working in the space. They are lifelong participants in the space in that their behaviours and interactions are anticipated, which in turn consolidates cer­ tain affects over a long period of time (Liu 2018). However, today’s tourists are temporary spectators rather than lifelong participants in the space. They are one-time entry tourists and multi-cultural/social beings who bring foreign content into the space. In particular, their sensorial experiences in the space are largely drawn from elsewhere outside of the Imperial context, and their bodily actions are derived from their current daily lives. Therefore, their experience of, and the affect encountered in, the space is different from the Imperial body. In the case of stereotypical tourists, for example, their “moves serve no other purpose than to carry [themselves] and [their] equipment—that is to say, the mind and body—from one stationary locus of observation to another” (Ingold 2010, 134), which minimizes the encounter with the affect. In contrast, engaging with the space entails unpacking the bodily move­ ment while walking through it. By allowing the body to be exposed to and thereafter convinced by the space, new bodily actions can be created. In other words, by engaging with the space, the body changes itself, not biologically but by creating new bodily actions as an extension of its daily life outside of the space, in order to be able to encounter the affect in the space. The body possessed by the space is ever-changing too. Thrift’s concept of more-than-representational understandings of archi­ tecture in particular has been essential in my own research. However, the example of the Forbidden City challenges the limits of this theory. As a case in point, Kraftl and Adey propose that the function of buildings is to act as “an attempt to stabilize affect, to generate the possibility of precircumscribed situations, and to engender certain forms of practice, through the design and the planning of buildings” (2008, 228). Instead, in my research, I have found that such a proposal, which is already a difficult task for the architect/

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designer to achieve in the first place, seems almost impossible to apply in a changing space. The original function of the buildings would be significantly compromised over time. The initial material structure/gesture of buildings can be modified and re-structured to fit different purposes over centuries of dif­ ferent political eras, such as in the case studies discussed in Katie Day’s book Faith on the Avenue: Religion on a City Street (2014), where a church is restructured and turned into a local council. With the change of the structure, the bodily actions conducted in that space also have to change in order to accommodate the new environment. And correspondingly, the affect changes, expressed as the relationship between the body and the space. Given that the body is a culturally embodied and historically inherited being which is in a constant state of becoming, the experiences of bodies would be vastly different when entering and interacting with the space across time. Every body walks into the space with a different social and cultural background and acts/reacts differently, which inevitably updates that space for the next body to perceive and react. That is to say, apart from experiencing the initial design of the space, which is specific, material, visual, and stable, while wandering in the space, our bodies also experience the space set up by other bodies through their previous interaction with/within the space, which is collective, immaterial, non-visual, and ever-changing. Despite the initial ges­ ture of the space, which is always subject to being amplified or weakened by the varying conditions of the space, our bodies, as historically inherited and culturally embodied beings, can always have their say through bodily actions in the space, and be a part of the collective interrelationship between body and space, for the next body to experience and participate in. As Ben Anderson notes, “any encounter contains reference to past encounters, and encounters are made through accumulated relations, dispositions and habits” (2014, 82). This is a type of affect that exists in the collective place, namely, heritage space.

Experiencing the affective space upon my body The space forms “a particular atmosphere, [sets up] a specific mood, [offers] a certain feeling” (Allen 2006, 445) and, in turn, affects how my body experi­ ences that space through both corporeal and sensory encounters. Being aware of the Imperial culture and the history, I brought my body into the courtyards of the living areas in the Forbidden City where the building code is consistent with the hierarchy of the city. Through constant movement interacting with the space, my body is interested in, and constantly tracing, the historical residuals. My body was brought up during the 1980s, after New China was established and while Confucianism was suppressed, and consequently, after its resumption in recent years, I see the discontinued Confucianism in a familiar yet strange way which leaves me with an enormous imaginative space to fill in the blank spaces where my body cannot access the cultural meaning of the site. The suppression of Confucianism during the 1980s and 1990s was

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largely due to the opening-up policy in China initiated in 1978 which shifted the focus of the nation to economic pragmatism driven by trade, mass pro­ duction, and technology. The nation has benefited substantially from the economic boom while Confucianism as cultural identity had been absent. The hundreds of tourists visiting the Forbidden City each year are in the space to celebrate the success of the economy, of being able to afford a holiday, for instance, rather than commemorate their cultural identity. I brought my body filled with life experience, equipped with history, knowledge, and self-con­ sciousness, into the courtyards to continue its experience within the space, to produce ideas that reinforce the physical and cultural experience, and to create understandings about the space of my very own. This insider/outsider subjectivity both allows and disallows my ability to ‘know’ the site and ‘feel’ its authenticity, as reflected in my particular bodily approach to the space. For example, my body sees the space as uncompleted and even fragmented, resulting in my body always being interested in certain spots in the space, such as overlooked corners and cracks on the walls. The irresistible interest in the seemingly ‘unimportant’ bits and pieces of the space reflects my sub­ jectivity as both an insider and outsider, who is attracted by the cultural understanding while simultaneously being enticed to look for something beyond the visual representation. Therefore, this positioning allows my body to interact with the space unexpectedly, such as when touching the texture beneath the peeling paint and the thickness of the wall through the cracks. My body wants to see the ‘underneath’ of the space, where the affect is hidden. Through this unfolding process, new bodily actions are created as the particular affective encounters between my body and the space occur. My body’s engagement with the space “throw[s] up almost limitless possibilities of relationality, which can be expressed in almost infinite ways and can engender almost limitless forms and exemplars of affect” (Kraftl and Adey 2008, 215). The space is affective, particularly in the frequently appearing windows, along with the large number of doorways that catches my attention, providing choices for the wandering bodies. The large number of windows and door­ ways differentiated by patterns and colours reflects the complexity of the social hierarchy and the sophistication of the design of the space. My body has to select one doorway to walk or see through, only to face dozens more again (Figure 7.3). The design of the windows and doorways disciplines my bodily movement in the space, thereby creating an affect. Every bodily movement, such as lifting one foot to cross the doorsill, climbing stairs to gain a closer look, and so forth, is anticipated by and expected in the space. The windows and doorways in the courtyards function as visual clues to offer the body a sense of security in the space, but they are, at the same time, paradoxically complicit in disorienting the body and challenging its shortterm memory and sense of direction within that space. The body experiences “the always rather anxious impression of ‘going deeper and deeper’ into a limitless world” (Bachelard 1994, 185) in this enormous space, with countless courtyards, similar but not exactly the same. These complex physical layouts

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Figure 7.3 Seemingly endless doorways guiding the body through various courtyards. The ground is evenly covered with a thin layer of fresh snow which clearly shows a walking path in the middle made by tourists’ footprints. However, there seldom are footprints found in corners or at dead ends. This becomes the evidence that our eyesight might have been to many other areas of the space where our bodies did not go

were designed to showcase the centralized Imperial society and culture. However, such complex design would not confuse Imperial bodies, as they would know every detail of the space after spending days and nights in the space. The residuals left by those bodies are part of the space that my body keeps looking for and seeking to interact with. For contemporary bodies, the layouts create a sense of endless wandering to the extent that “if we do not know where we are going, we no longer know where we are” (Bachelard 1994, 185). Being lost at some point becomes part of the contemporary bodily experience in the courtyards of the living areas. However, this experience was not designed for Imperial bodies. One of the purposes of the initial design of the space and its intended gesture is to discipline bodies, like “unwritten code of conduct” (Kraftl and Adey 2008, 224), in order to protect the Imperial code. In this sense, being explicit and consistent in emphasizing the Imperial code, rather than confusing the bodies or making them feel lost in the space, is what the space is built for. Therefore, the bodily experience of being lost can presumably only occur to contemporary visitors. The initial “unwritten code of conduct” of the space has been rewritten by the participation of contemporary bodies as tourists. The space is therefore reproduced in a very particular way. The space is changing as it is “not only a medium but also an outcome of action, producing and being produced through human practice”

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(J. Anderson 2004, 255). Such bodily experience has made me realize that my contemporary body cannot fully access the Imperial body’s intimate knowl­ edge of the space. However, my own subjectivity as a New China-era body with Confucian inheritance shows that my body is still under its cultural influence, as both a cultural insider and tourist. By wandering around without a specific destination in mind, I start to pay more attention to the shifting of my body’s action and reaction from one room to another, thereby highlighting the subtlety of the dialogue between the physical body and the cultural body and the space. Kraftl and Adey note that “architecture can be a form of code-making, or control, and that certain visual clues are used to symbolize something other than the immediate time and place of the building” (2008, 214). My body, by unfolding its movement, is gradually convinced by the space and affected in the way that the space expects in the contemporary set up—maintaining its cultural code, instead of the Imperial code, on my body. My body is no longer disciplined by the Imperial code; however, the rich cultural residuals accumulated in the space over centuries are still there, which provokes sensations and affects my feelings. One courtyard is called the Palace of Eternal Spring where there is a semiopen veranda down both sides of the courtyard, with a wall blocking the view on one side and the other side facing the centre yard. Chinese paintings painted on the wall and beams become the feature of the veranda which manipulates my body unexpectedly. The veranda is approximately a hundred metres long and contains an approximately twenty-metre-long special section consisting of eighteen panels of narrative paintings painted on the wall. The paintings provide many details of depicted scenes that sometimes require my body to lower itself to take a close look at various scenarios. In order to view a part of the painting up close, my body inevitably loses sense of the rest of the space which is out of my line of sight; as a result, my body has to physi­ cally walk along the length of the veranda in order to see the paintings in their entirety. Therefore, bodily engagement is involved, alongside visual impact. Moreover, not only are multiple scenes presented one after another to make up narrative scenes as a visual representation, but there are scenarios involving every figure and object in association with their surroundings in various events, which creates dynamic and subtle narratives to attract and engage the viewers visually. The details in the gestures of every figure, as well as other objects, were deliberately drawn to guide viewers physically through the veranda. As one of the paintings’ distinctive visual phenomena, for instance, viewers, regardless of how they view the paintings, realize that there are some figures facing, pointing, or gesturing towards the same direction in which the viewers are moving, which in turn creates the illusion of moving together with the figures. When viewers are so thoroughly engaged with the atmosphere of the work, their initial intention of making a complete circle of the veranda becomes secondary. Instead, they enjoy visually following the figures, while

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physically moving back and forth, lowering the body or raising the head to catch details, and automatically interacting with the gestures of the figures and objects. The viewers’ walking, as determined by the paintings, results in physically walking a distance that is always much longer than the length of the section on the veranda. The range of bodily participation—such as walk­ ing alongside and backwards, stooping to see, and swivelling the head back— is key to the interaction between viewers and the painting, and acts to con­ solidate the cultural and artistic impact upon the viewers. The more bodily actions are conducted as directed by the space, the stronger the engagement between them becomes. While the body is unfolding its movement and inter­ acting with the space, new bodily actions besides those borrowed directly from contemporary daily life can be created. This reflects the encounter of affect. Therefore, instead of having a fixed point of view, the involvement of walking causes a constantly changing viewpoint while looking, which rein­ forces the sense of moving together with the figures. The paintings in the veranda are designed so that they not only attract viewers by the fixed pic­ torial effect but also engage them to physically walk alongside and even have a bodily affect by controlling their walking pace. Unfolding bodily movement is the key to encountering the affect in the space. Therefore, the space of the Forbidden City, as a composite of “multi-sensual sites, alive with intense and often lingering sounds, smells, and sights” (Waterton 2014, 830), impacts upon bodily movement. On one hand, the space has an enormous capacity to move the body around and to interact with the body through its physical design and cultural inscriptions. On the other hand, the body is capable of moving physically and able to be moved culturally. The mutual relationship between the body and the space of the Forbidden City is foregrounded when the body encounters the space, in terms of stretching the body’s physical entity and realizing its cultural embodiment, whilst at the same time reflecting the varied states of the space being produced by human practice in contemporary time. My visits to the space were conducted after the transition in the role of the Forbidden City had been completed, from the platform of the rigid Imperial system to a showcase of its own history to the public, which poses the ques­ tion of how my body interacts with the space through the intimate experience during the current period. Waterton’s concept of more-than-representational understandings of heritage and heritage architecture has been especially useful in understanding the experience of walking down particular spaces within the Forbidden City, particularly when negotiating the main passage­ way in the pavilion. As Waterton points out, the “narratives of heritage are mediated in affective worlds that shape [our] reception, tapping into everyday emotional resonances and circulations of feelings of inclusion and exclusion” (2014, 824). My everyday emotions, feelings, and memories are narratives, too, that are in resonance with the experience in the heritage space, to be displayed, provoked, and recalled whenever a sense of cultural belonging arises.

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My contemporary experience with the space—which is an experience without internal survival pressures, as those of the Imperial body of the eunuch as royal servant, or external political force, such as that of the body of the Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution—is nonetheless always asso­ ciated with the eagerness of my body in wanting to know the past. These two types of bodies as case studies are elaborated elsewhere as engaging with the space in terms of their political and cultural positions during different periods (Liu 2018). For example, the Imperial body of the eunuch lived in and saw the space as contemporary rather than heritage. Eunuchs were culturally engaged with the Imperial space as well as politically restrained and regulated by the space on a daily basis and became a part of the space as a non-threatening insider, marked beyond access to its power structure. Nevertheless, they were an extension of the Imperial space. By contrast, the body of the Red Guard came to the space as a revolutionary during the Cultural Revolution and saw the space as a political target. Red Guards criticized the space as representing the Four Olds: old thought, old culture, old custom, and old habit, which resulted in their aggressive bodily actions in the space. The tension between the body of the Red Guard and the space was high, especially given that the Red Guards’ behaviour in the space was politically motivated. They were in opposition to the Imperial space. My body regards this space as heritage in contemporary China. My bodily movement unfolds as the means to affect and be affected by the space, to understand what the space has been through, and to trace the residuals left by the previous actions of other bodies. My body always wants to know the past. In resonance with Waterton’s words, “each heritage place, landscape, site or experience—are simultaneously two: past and present, else where and else when …” (2014, 828; emphasis in original). My con­ temporary body is exposed to a substantial amount of information in this digital age, resulting in a body programmed with multiple virtual perspec­ tives and proactive in its imagination, which would be activated when it interacts with the world. Under such exposure, my body is no longer sin­ gular and fixed, but rather a collection of variables, flexible according to the various demands from the outer world. The relation of my body to the space and its cultural history is therefore always in terms of multiplicity, such as wanting to know the past, both real and imagined. My body is not only able to involuntarily adjust itself to the ambience of the space in the most appropriate way and shift itself accordingly whenever the space chan­ ges in subtle ways but also presents itself as a composite body at the same time. My body is capricious in wanting to know the past while living in the contemporary period. When the body changes, the way of interacting with the space changes, which in turn produces/reproduces the space. The space is a collective site that offers the body a collective memory of the space itself, which in effect changes the Forbidden City from a site of contemporary space then to a heritage space now.

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Conclusion This investigation on the interrelationship between the space of the Forbidden City and the body has been carried out with a focus on examining bodily movement and experience in the space. The investigation reflects con­ temporary concerns in regard to the sociological body and the affective approach to understanding architectural space. Conducting a walking journey within the space, which is more than merely transporting my body from one geographical spot to another, has never been an easy task. The investigation has involved many factors, such as the design of the space as historically inherited, culturally inscribed, and politically orientated; the body as a culturally embodied being; and the interaction between the space and the body. This chapter demonstrates the particular affective resonances and chal­ lenges presented in a heritage architectural space. It argues that the body co­ produces affect with the space and that the body’s own subjectivity is key in this co-production. A particular affect is therefore produced between my New China-era body and the heritage space, and actualized through my bodily movement. While the relationship of the co-production between the space and my body unfolds in my bodily movement, nevertheless this movement is nei­ ther like that of the Imperial bodies restrained by the Imperial code, nor the Red Guards motivated by political purpose. But rather, my movement reflects the eagerness of my body in wanting to know something of the space that my body seems to have missed, which is the specific affect that now has been realized in co-producing with the space. In the case of my New China-era body, I find that the space offers my body the simultaneous experience of being culturally included and excluded, imagining the past while being in the present, exploring the traditional cultural code while being disciplined by contemporary authority, that leaves my body regarding the space as familiar in memory, yet strange in actuality. As discussed, all these bodily experiences were not actualized upon the Imperial bodies through the initial design, but rather offered to contemporary visitors several centuries later. Therefore, the chapter posits that the heritage space cannot be seen exclusively in terms of how and for whom it was designed but should be understood as being produced and reproduced by bodily movements taking place within it on a daily basis over a period of time. In other words, there is a mutual impact between bodies and the space. Changes to the sociological body’s subjectivity in turn change how the heri­ tage space affects visitors. The gains achieved through my contemporary bodily experience and the affect realized in the space reflect the mutual impact, the interrelationship between my body and the space, to the extent that my bodily experience is translated into and expressed through my bodily movement that becomes a residual of the space, which will be in turn perceived and experienced by others as a part of the space. The space is re-produced by my bodily movement. Therefore, this argument leads to the conclusion that as the sociological body itself is ever-changing, the space is in a state of constant

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transformation, which in turn causes changes to how the space affects site visitors. The interlocking of the ever-changing body and ever-changing space through interaction is an iterative process that makes the heritage space affective.

Funding This work was supported by the Faculty Research Grant of the Macau University of Science and Technology.

Note 1 According to Deleuze in his book Foucault, body discipline “cannot be identified with any one institution or apparatus … precisely because it is a type of power, a technology, that traverses every kind of apparatus or institution, linking them, prolonging them, and making them converge and function in a new way” (1988, 23).

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Colonial unknowing and affective uncertainty Sewers and eels in Troy, New York Julia Cavicchi

The Poesten Kill accumulates Troy’s many histories. Its waters run over ironore tailings from the long-defunct factories of the American steel industry, tangled matts of fishing lines, and burrowing eels. Buried pipes run perpendi­ cular under the Poesten Kill, carrying the city’s sewage beneath the stream towards a wastewater treatment plant a few miles south. Like this post­ industrial stream, sewers are often abjected as forgotten places; they are hidden from view, banned from everyday concern, and neglected by political powers. But through becoming comfortable with feeling uncertain in these places, we might learn to read how their histories are already remembered in diverse bodies and life ways. The land between the Poesten Kill and the Wynants Kill was a Mohican village and burial ground. The Poesten Kill flows into the waters known as the Hudson River; Mahicannituck, the river that flows both ways. The long reach of the tidal pull extends as far north into the Hudson River Estuary as these little tributaries. This is the homeland of the Muh-he-con-neok—the People of the Waters That Are Never Still—who were displaced and forced to relocate many times, before eventually building a community in Wisconsin as the Stockbridge-Munsee Community Band of Mohicans. The landscape remembers many histories of this crossroads where the sewer traverses the stream. On the Hudson, the history of Dutch colonization is memorialized in the “Kill” of every creek’s neo-toponym. The affective ecol­ ogies of colonial infrastructures carry these histories into the present. Just as place names bear the mark of these histories, the unfolding relations between human, fish, and river bodies re-member these infrastructural inheritances. The construction of the sewer system in Troy was considered a monumental achievement at the time. Some of the oldest working cast-iron pipes in the United States are still buried beneath the city. And these same sewer lines have been overflowing human waste and toxins into the Hudson since the early nineteenth century. I first came to the Poesten Kill to check a fyke net for glass eels, conducting field work as part of a citizen science1 project for counting glass eels as they arrive along the eastern seaboard from their migration from the Sargasso Sea. American eels are born as willow leaves called leptocephali a year away in the Sargasso Sea. They drift, float, and

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swim hundreds of miles to tributaries along the North American eastern coastline, sniffing their way to streams. Each May, they swarm upstream in a fishy flood until all eels are safely swallowed into water bodies or heron bellies or suitcases to be smuggled in the world’s most lucrative international wildlife trafficking industry. The lucky ones, a decade or two later, will live to return to the Sargasso where they spawn and die, renewing the cycle again. This same, catadromous lifecycle has continued every generation since the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates rubbed shoulders millions of years ago. Under the pretenses of citizen science, this project collects volunteers to study eels as an abstractable population. But many come to the Poesten Kill not to ascertain a species count but instead are drawn in by the unknowability of this intransigently mysterious fish. At the net, I was caught by the sensa­ tion of not feeling those tiny weightless ghosts as they slip between my fingers and become a tally on the page. How do we find ourselves in their uncanny ecologies? How do we learn to read the forgotten histories that eels remember? The discarded memory of this city’s aquatic ecologies is a reminder of other discards—the effluence of the bodies and histories that are badly contained ‘elsewhere.’ Here, my focus with memory is “not on the link between poetics and politics, but rather on the way form affects political agents” (Vermeulen et al. 2012, 232). The watery bodies (see Neimanis 2017) of sewers, streams, and fish embed memory into place and enliven affective ecologies. Ideologies and imaginations become written into infrastructures (see Anand, Gupta, and Appel 2018), which in turn create new affective experiences. Both collective memories of past place wounds (see Schacter, Welker, and Hoskins 2016; Krupar 2011) and nonhuman practices of migration and memory (Lorimer 2006) animate these places. Vulnerable nonhuman bodies retain histories that have been forgotten in cultural memory. We can begin to study discarded histories through “reading and sensing those memories that are stored in the bodies of other animals, as in our own” (Weil 2017, 402). It is through the fluid entanglements of these bodies that future politics are made. Their watery virtualities “form a material milieu that facilitates the becoming of others” (Neimanis and Chandler 2013). As water bodies pour into each other, they are followed by embodied memories. Learning to read the memories of nonhuman others helps us to consider the affective ecologies and political possibilities of seemingly forgotten places. Through the sewer system, historical contingencies continue to shape spa­ tial imaginaries. The sewer carries past dreams of grid-able (see Myers 2017) water and manageable waste; they transform private effluence into publicly manageable substance (see Reno 2015). Troy was one of the first cities in the United States to install a piped sewer system. In 1815, “city councils, sanitary engineers, and health groups agreed, although not without dissent, that watercarriage systems of sewerage provided the most benefit and the lowest costs compared to other disposal options” (Burian et al. 2000; emphasis added).

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There was an ongoing debate for several years over the decision between the combined and separated systems. Yet while neighboring cities such as Lenox, Massachusetts, opted for separated sewer systems, the cities in New York’s capital region opted for a combined system for its economic efficiency. But what seemed to be cost-saving at the time ended up costing those city governments millions in the long term. Remembering the contingency of this imposition goes against the current of the mainstream narrative of colonial inevitability. The politics of a specific point in time become embedded in the city’s infrastructure. Choices forgotten in everyday urban life but remembered in the city’s subterranean subconscious. In a combined sewer system, stormwater and wastewater flow through the same pipes to the wastewater treatment plant. But when it rains, the system is overwhelmed and untreated waste overflows directly into the Hudson River. Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) are a nationwide problem; 772 commu­ nities currently struggle to contend with the raw human and industrial waste, toxic materials, and debris that flood their waterways (US EPA 2017). These are the forgotten places of urban ecology—the underground water worlds of sewers and postindustrial streams that languish in near ubiquitous obscurity to everyday urban politics. The river is a “forgotten place” that is “not outside history” but rather abandoned by neoliberal reorganization (Ruth Wilson Gilmore quoted in Wiggin 2017). The South Troy neighbor­ hood surrounding the Poesten Kill was home to the ironworkers and collar seamstresses who, alongside the river’s mill-churning waters, powered the industrial revolution. As industry moved elsewhere, governmental neglect left this floodplain neighborhood polluted and vulnerable to climate change. With the “industrial amnesia” (Nadir and Peppermint 2015) of these histories and their still-unfolding ecological effects, the waters that run through and under the Poesten Kill seem to “defy remembrance” (Wiggin 2017). It is only through overflowing, in ‘flashy’ events of malfunction, that they might become sense-able again. This continuous state of rupture is normalized in the form of legally per­ missible levels of contamination. Troy holds a State Pollution Discharge Elimination System permit which authorizes specific amounts of sewage to be discharged into the Hudson. The overflow of the system becomes a new form of normalized contamination, now federally regulated, state enforced, and increasingly managed by local authorities. Managerial programs and forms of expertise exert new discourses of mastery, the ‘colonial unknowing’ of diverse human-river relations. But the unruly ecologies shape the uncertain futures these infrastructures herald. In this perpetual state of disrepair, the sewer is both a ruin and a “lived process” (Mah 2010, 399). Understanding CSOs requires a care for this subterranean architecture, not merely as an aesthetic post-industrial ruin, but learning to read the working memories held within the sewers themselves. Noticing the overflows of a seemingly ordered system forces us to reconsider how conventional wastewater systems are enrolled in ordering urban space.

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While the sewer languishes in obscurity for some, it is cared for and lived in by human and nonhuman others. Its ecologies are held in the embodied memory of maintenance workers, citizen scientists, eels. The apparent amnesia of urban waste is not only a product of the invisible network of underground pipes but also the unseen labor that sustains this system—sanitation workers’ ongoing care for this system through main­ tenance. The exact locations of sewer lines and pipe connections are held in the memories of retired sanitation workers; speculation at the “remote outside chance that somewhere beneath some of the oldest parts of our City, a func­ tioning wooden water main remains” (City of Albany 2013). The Albany sanitation office holds a minor museum of sewer infrastructure; old photo­ graphs of sewer construction line the hallways, maps of rivers becoming piped plaster the walls, a glass case proudly displays a wooden pipe recently exca­ vated from the sewer system, discovered to be a centuries-old relic of Dutch infrastructure. Sewer line construction often becomes accidental archeological excavation. Even for the wastewater workers, the sewers are a space of mystery. Maintaining unknowability in the urban subterranean is also a political struggle for the privacy and sanctity of indigenous sites. The Mohican Tribal Historic Preservation Manager in Troy, Bonney Hartley, navigates the tension between federally recognized sites of memory and Mohican understanding of the landscape. Her position was created to promote the fulfillment of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, a position in ten­ sion between nationally recognized historic sites and the collectively held memory of Mohican places. An element of this work is the protection of the exact locations of sacred sites in Troy from public knowledge to protect them from the ongoing threat of looting. Mohican ancestral burial sites are now entangled with urban infrastructures—parking lots, sewer lines, fill soil. The Wastewater Treatment Plant itself sits on the land of a Mohican village. The land between the Poesten Kill and the Wynants Kill was all part of this vil­ lage. The exact location of burial grounds and other sites remains crucially nondisclosed. The use of partial refusal as a research method addresses how limits are set on what knowledge is made available to the academy (Tuck and Yang 2014) through the politics of refusing the colonial conquest of knowledge. Following these other buried memories illustrates how “every landscape coordination blocks out other coordinations” (Tsing 2017). The specific form of knowledge of this sewer state is also the active “colonial unknowing” of indigenous his­ tories and futures (Vimalassery et al. 2016). A failure of memory is not merely a relic of industrial ruins but rather the specific, disciplined forgetting designed into urban infrastructure. The concept of “colonial agnosia” (Vimalassery et al. 2016) addresses a failure to recognize, sense, and story certain histories. Industrial amnesia is one part of the active exclusions of colonial knowledge. In the resulting discourses of mastery around streams and eels, knowing serves as a way to fix elusive subjects into manageable populations.

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Yet there is a crucial difference between spaces that defy remembrance and the explicit refusal of illumination. How do we counteract these forgotten stories without re-inscribing universalizing myths of harmonious reconnec­ tion? Perhaps the response to amnesia isn’t remembering but rather explicit uncertainty. What might happen “if environmental activists and scholars stopped advocating for education and explored, if only temporarily, ignor­ ance” (Seymour 2018, 77)? Beyond learning to read the dreams of modernity and the ways those dreams go feral, there remain creations that have “now mutated and become meaningless to us—but not necessarily meaningless per se” (Knittel and Driscoll 2017, 380). Instead of seeking the mastery of new knowledge as the antidote to colonialism, perhaps it is time to learn to prac­ tice “reading illegibility, reading impasse, reading the incitement that comes after grief” (Vimalassery et al. 2016). Colonialism as both past event and ongoing structure necessitates this refusal to forget. Reading more-than­ human memory is as much about what has been eroded out of their histories as it is about sedimented archives and multispecies entanglements. Passivity, repetition, and reproduction are also forms of memory—the working memory of watery ethics must be thought in tandem to the sedimented memory of geological Anthropocene (see Szerszynski 2018). In 2018, a memorial service held in the Dutch Church in London comme­ morated the Dutch eel traders who risked their lives to shuttle fish across the North Sea. But we must also learn to respond to the inheritances we did not choose (see H. Davis 2015). The ripple effects of Dutch colonialism on indi­ genous eeling practices in the Mahicannituck must also be memorialized as part of this story. My own eleventh great-grandfather was a Dutchman who lived on Matine­ cock land in the Hudson Valley. It is likely that these first settler colonialists relied on indigenous knowledge about the specific ecologies of fish in order to survive (see Todd 2018). The proverbial eel on the table at the first Thanks­ giving dinner (Prosek 2010) is a reminder that the Dutch relied on indigenous knowledge about eel to settle onto the land. For thousands of years, stone weirs for harvesting eels peppered the Hudson and its tributaries. In the nine­ teenth century, the US Geological Survey actively destroyed Algonquin eel weirs in the Hudson. According to one 1894 Bureau of American Ethnology report, “[s]tone fish weirs yet remain in some New York streams, though many have been destroyed” (quoted in Lutins 1992). But many stone weirs still haunt the eastern seaboard, locatable as faint traces in rivers, visible on satellite view maps, traces of their presence held in passing notes in kayaking guides. The long, dull edge of the open question of eel extinction includes the struggle for survival of indigenous relations with eels—the struggle for tribal rights to fish in Maine’s glass eel industry and the resurgence of indigenous interest in traditional eeling methods in Canada (see A. Davis et al. 2004). Buried aquatic ecologies maintain unknowability; thinking with water bodies teaches us that we are all “bodies … repeating other bodies, always (unknowably) differently” (Neimanis and Chandler 2013).

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There always remain “gaps that exist between the intended effects of infrastructural projects and the way those intentions play out in actual practice” (Harvey and Knox 2015, 5). Sewers are a “feral technology” (Tsing, Stoetzer, and Gan 2016) where the dreams embedded into colonial infrastructures meet unruly ecologies in unexpected ways. Noticing these gaps is a way to hold space for the relentlessly double negative of ‘undoing the disavowal’ of colo­ niality. Rather than replacing disavowal with guilt and shame, commitment to curiosity without certainty is useful. In the Hudson River citizen science project, we had specific obligations to the net: to check for the arrival of our glass eels, to count each body, and to release them upstream. Yearly, eelers return to this decade-old project from a sense of accountability for the count and a desire to herald the arrival of this impractical journey. Committing myself to these responsibilities helped me to notice the slow, accretional damage that the Poesten Kill held. As Barbadian poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite (1999, 34) writes, “being dedicated to water is a being in flux.” Brathwaite replaces dialectics—and its terrestrial obsession for fixity and certainty—with a tidalectics that is dedicated to a multiplicity of readings. At the Poesten Kill, I began to learn to read how the legacies of the sewer are remembered in fishy bodies. These forgotten places are also “fish places” that are “bound up with legal-ethical responsibilities to and with fish, and train our eyes and our minds to thinking of what it means to live up to and embody our legal-ethical duties and obligations to the fish we share water­ ways with” (Todd 2018, 71). Macarena Gómez-Barris (2017, 12) describes the process of learning to see such places otherwise as one of developing “sub­ merged perspectives,” asking: “How can we con-fuse the normative bound­ aries of academic study by wading into what lies below the surface of late capitalism?” From the inverted perspectives of eels and sewers, it becomes possible to re-imagine political commitments. Eels have always been something of an enigmatic species—no one knows how they are born, how these tiny specks of fish know to migrate from the Sargasso Sea to different coastlines, how their bodies are shaped by the waters they travel through, or how they remember to return to the sea twenty years later to spawn and die. And whether, even, eels do die, since that completion of the return journey hadn’t been documented. But now, caught in the midst of highly lucrative transnational commodity chains, poaching, para­ sites, hydroelectric dams, disorienting climate changing ocean currents, and contaminated rivers, eel survivability, too, is an open question. Eels “make us reconsider geography … [they] fold the map of the world along different creases” (Malay 2019). Eels pleat the traces of the places they have lived into their ear bones; scientists read these ossified memory-like tree rings to learn something of the seas and rivers they inhabit. With these barely traceable far-flung journeys, eels present us with an unpredictable future. They exist somewhere on the “dull edge of extinction,” “slow unravelling of inti­ mately entangled ways of life that begins long before the death of the last

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individual and continues to ripple forward long afterward” (van Dooren 2014, 12). Whether eels are thriving, endangered, or doomed remains a contested question. Our fyke net waits for eels to arrive just above the spot where the sewer crosses the stream. Volunteers at the net share their own memories of impos­ sible eel stories: glass eels swarming ashore to wriggle over waterfalls; eels lost in pea fields, devouring a farmer’s crop; eels caught in butterfly nets; eels electroshocked; eels paralyzed with clove oil; eels tumbling out of abandoned cars dredged from the belly of the Hudson. More than fecal pathogens, CSOs pour innumerable emerging con­ taminants into these waters. My own body percolates caffeine molecules that the wastewater treatment plant is not equipped to filter out anyway. Anti­ depressants, antihistamines, nicotine, opioids, synthetic hormones tumble out of human bodies and into the river. Eels collect this complex slew of chemi­ cals in their bodies, with yet unknown effects. Recent studies have begun to show that cocaine changes eel tissue, gills, skeletons, confuses them on their journeys, and could ultimately threaten eel survival (see Gay, Ferrandino, del Mónaco, et al. 2016; Capaldo, Gay, and Laforgia 2019). Other toxins accumulate in eels—mercury carried from coal power plants, cadmium from battery factories, radioactive isotopes from a nuclear power plant, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). General Electric dumped an estimated 1.3 million pounds of PCBs into the Hudson (Revkin 2009). Though some PCBs have been removed from this water body, dredged from the river bottom, they are still held in the water bodies of eels, bioaccumulating up the food chain and passed on between fish intergenerationally. More recent arrivals to the Hudson River valley, including Karen refugees and Chinese Americans, tend to know less about the river’s history (NYS Department of Health 2016). They connect to the environment of their new homes by fishing in the river and cooking fish but cannot read the invisible contamination held in the fish’s bodies. Public health documents commu­ nicating this message in multilingual translations circulate slowly amidst the slow violence of ingested toxins. These contaminations further signify the infrastructural agnosia of how flows of waste affect flows of water. PCB contamination further north in New York, in the St. Lawrence River, carries out a “toxic trespass” not only across bodies of water and political boundaries but also into the indigenous bodies of Mohawk people in Akwesasne, along the St. Lawrence River (see Hoover 2017). But amidst controversies about responsibility and justice for the ongoing violence of past harms, ecologies themselves continue to complicate these concerns. *** But glass eels arrive from the Sargasso with empty bellies; the babies we count have not yet ingested the storied contaminations of the Hudson. The eels themselves remember other times, inherited from their ancestors. The memory of wild streambeds is held in their bodies’ desire to burrow below, to nestle into the low, small dark spaces of the city’s underwater worlds.

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Only now, this body memory leads them into the new secret spaces of underground infrastructures. Historically, glass eels have slipped into the subterranean quiet of buried pipes only to grow so large that they cannot escape their chosen hiding place. Troy is riddled with stories of eels clogging sewer pipes, pipe organs, gunpowder mills, or the water lines to power stations, sending entire cities into darkness (see Gooley 2017). The sewers are haunted by eels who remember wild streams. The pipes are busy not only conveying waste to haunt downstream wetlands, bivalve colo­ nies, and toxic algal blooms, but also harboring complex ecologies of their own. The microbial communities that lurk in sewer systems offer an uncanny mirror of the human microbiome in the city above (Cai, Ju, and Zhang 2014; also see Helmreich 2009). Brown rats with complex social lives (Byers et al. 2019) enliven pipes with pups. Eagles hover outside wastewater treatment plants to hunt the fish that gather at the outfall. Eels teach us to remember the eroded histories that everyday urban rhythms forget. Our attention at the net to the haunting of glass eels is a partial refusal of this erasure. Glass eels become “specters that collapse time, rendering empire’s foundational past impossible to erase from the national present” (Tuck and Ree 2013, 654). Mohican tribal member Ste­ phen Kent Comer explains this felt absence: “when I came to this area thirty years ago, I was amazed to find virtually nothing about my people in their native land. It was as though we were a ghost people” (quoted in LaMonica 2019, 110). If the sewers are a living ruin, eels show us that “the ruins look back” (Mary Ann Caws quoted in Boon, Butler, and Jefferies 2018, 85). The sewer’s toxic legacies haunt the Hudson. But the eels, in turn, haunt these infrastructural ruins. In the midst of industrial amnesia and colonial agnosia, eels remember through the bioaccumulation of toxins in their exceptionally fatty bodies. But each year, new generations arrive from the belly of the Sargasso Sea. Their stories continue to spawn outwards from the net as we learn to wade into uncertainty.

Note 1 The Hudson River Eel Project is run by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation Hudson River Estuary Program and the Hudson River National Estuarine Research Reserve.

References Anand, Nikhil, Akhil Gupta, Hannah Appel. 2018. The Promise of Infrastructure. Durham: Duke University Press. Boon, Sonja, Lesley Butler, and Daze Jefferies. 2018. Autoethnography and Feminist Theory at the Water’s Edge: Unsettled Islands. Cham, CH: Palgrave Pivot. Brathwaite, Kamau. 1999. ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey. New York: We Press.

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Burian, Steven J., Stephan J. Nix, Robert E. Pitt, and S. Rocky Durrans. 2000. “Urban Wastewater Management in the United States: Past, Present, and Future.” Journal of Urban Technology 7 (3): 33–62. Byers, Kaylee A., Michael J. Lee, David M. Patrick, and Chelsea G. Himsworth. 2019. “Rats about Town: A Systematic Review of Rat Movement in Urban Ecosystems.” Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 7. https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2019.00013. Cai, Lin, Feng Ju, and Tong Zhang. 2014. “Tracking Human Sewage Microbiome in a Municipal Wastewater Treatment Plant.” Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology 98 (7): 3317–3326. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-013-5402-z. Capaldo, Anna, Flaminia Gay, and Vincenza Laforgia. 2019. “Changes in the Gills of the European Eel (Anguilla anguilla) after Chronic Exposure to Environmental Cocaine Concentration.” Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety 169: 112–119. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoenv.2018.11.010. City of Albany. 2013. “FAQs.” Accessed November 20, 2019. www.albanyny.gov/Gov ernment/Departments/WaterAndWaterSupply/FAQs.aspx. Davis, Anthony, John Wagner, Kerry Prosper, and Mary Jane Paulette. 2004. “The Paq’tnkek Mi’kmaq and Ka’t (American Eel): A Case Study of Cultural Relations, Meanings, and Prospects.” The Canadian Journal of Native Studies 24 (2): 357–388. Davis, Heather. 2015. “Toxic Progeny: The Plastisphere and Other Queer Futures.” PhiloSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 5 (2): 231–250. Gay, Flaminia, Ida Ferrandino, Antonio del Mónaco, Mariapina Cerulo, Giovanni Battista Capasso, and Anna Capaldo. 2016. “Histological and Hormonal Changes in the European Eel (Anguilla anguilla) after Exposure to Environmental Cocaine Concentration.” Journal of Fish Diseases 39 (3): 295–308. https://doi.org/10.1111/ jfd.12362. Gómez-Barris, Macarena. 2017. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gooley, Lawrence P. 2017. “A North Country Eel Story That Will Leave You Squirming.” The Adirondack Almanack. www.adirondackalmanack.com/2017/07/a -story-that-will-leave-you-squirming.html. Harvey, Penny, and Hannah Knox. 2015. Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise. New York: Cornell University Press. Helmreich, Stefan. 2009. Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hoover, Elizabeth. 2017. The River Is in Us: Fighting Toxics in a Mohawk Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Knittel, Susanne C., and Kári Driscoll. 2017. “Introduction: Memory after Humanism.” Parallax 23 (4): 379–383. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2017.1374507. Krupar, Shiloh R. 2011. “Alien Still Life: Distilling the Toxic Logics of the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (2): 268–290. https://doi.org/10.1068/d12809. LaMonica, Lisa. 2019. Kinderhook. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing. Lorimer, Hayden. 2006. “Herding Memories of Humans and Animals.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24 (4): 497–518. https://doi.org/10.1068/d381t. Lutins, Allen. 1992. “Prehistoric Fishweirs in Eastern North America.” MA thesis, State University of New York. Retrieved from www.lutins.org/thesis/. Mah, Alice. 2010. “Memory, Uncertainty and Industrial Ruination: Walker Riverside, Newcastle upon Tyne.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34 (2): 398–413.

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Malay, Michael. 2019. “Nightfishing.” The Willowherb Review 1. www.thewillo wherbreview.com/night-fishing-michael-malay/. Myers, Natasha. 2017. “Protocols for an Ungrid-able Ecology: Kinesthetic Attune­ ments for a More-than-natural History of a Black Oak Savannah.” In Naturally Postnatural, Catalyst: Jennifer Willet, edited by Ted Hiebert, 105–126. Victoria, BC: Noxious Sector Press. Nadir, Leila Christine, and Cary Peppermint. 2015. “Edible Ecologies and Industrial Food.” Paper presented at the ASLE Biennial Conference, Moscow, ID. Neimanis, Astrida. 2017. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Neimanis, Astrida, and Mielle Chandler. 2013. “Water and Gestationality: What Flows beneath Ethics.” In Thinking with Water, edited by Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis, 61–83. Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queen’s University Press. NYS Department of Health. 2016. Hudson River Fish Advisory Outreach Project (No. Project Update 2009–2016; p. 16). www.health.ny.gov/environmental/outdoors/fish/ hudson_river/docs/2016_hudson_report.pdf. Prosek, James. 2010. Eels: An Exploration, from New Zealand to the Sargasso, of the World’s Most Mysterious Fish. New York: Harper. Reno, Joshua. 2015. “Waste and Waste Management.” Annual Review of Anthropology 44 (1): 557–572. Revkin, Andrew. 2009. “Dredging of Pollutants Begins in Hudson.” New York Times (May 15, 2019). www.nytimes.com/2009/05/16/science/earth/16dredge.html. Schacter, Daniel L., Michael Welker, and Andrew Hoskins. 2016. “Memory Ecologies.” Memory Studies 9 (3): 348–357. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698016645274. Seymour, Nicole. 2018. Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Szerszynski, Bronislaw. 2018. “Drift as a Planetary Phenomenon.” A Journal of the Performing Arts 23 (7): 136–144. Todd, Zoe. 2018. “Refracting the State Through Human-Fish Relations: Fishing, Indigenous Legal Orders and Colonialism in North/Western Canada.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 7 (1): 60–75. Tsing, Anna. 2017. The Buck, the Bull, and the Dream of the Stag: Some unex­ pected weeds of the Anthropocene. Suomen Antropological: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 42(1): 3–21. Tsing, Anna, Bettina Stoetzer, and Elaine Gan. 2016. Feral Technologies: Making and Unmaking Multispecies Dumps. Presented at the Anthropocene Curriculum, Berlin, Germany. Retrieved from http://elainegan.com/files/gan-feralhkwSyllabus2016.pdf. Tuck, Eve, and C. Ree. 2013. “A Glossary of Haunting.” In Handbook of Autoethnography, edited by Stacy Holman Jones, Tony E. Adams, and Carolyn Ellis, 639–658. London: Routledge. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2014. “R-Words: Refusing Research.” In Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities, edited by Django Paris and Maisha T. Winn, 223–247. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. US EPA. 2017. “What are Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs)? [Overviews & Factsheets].” Accessed November 20, 2019, from Region 1: EPA New England website: www3. epa.gov/region1/eco/uep/cso.html. van Dooren, Thom. 2014. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Vermeulen, Pieter, Stef Craps, Richard Crownshaw, Ortwin de Graef, Andreas Huys­ sen, Vivian Liska, and David Miller. 2012. “Dispersal and Redemption: The Future Dynamics of Memory Studies—A Roundtable.” Memory Studies 5 (2): 223–239. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698011428302. Vimalassery, Manu, Juliana Hu Pegues, and Alyosha Goldstein. 2016. “Introduction: On Colonial Unknowing.” Theory & Event 19 (4). Weil, Karl. 2017. “Matters of Memory and Creaturely Concerns: A Response to Pieter Vermeulen.” Parallax 23 (4): 398–402. Wiggin, Bethany. 2017. “Forgotten Places and Radical Hope on Philadelphia’s Tidal Schuylkill River.” Open Rivers: Rethinking the Mississippi 6. www.schuylkillcorps. org/files/original/d1b44178fd0fc8d4d330eb5bac5d6d41.pdf.

9

Lamenting the dead The affective afterlife of poets’ graves Paul Gilchrist

Introduction: literary pilgrims and poetic remains A solitary man stood at the rear of St John the Baptist churchyard in Newcastleupon-Tyne. A sheet of paper bearing some verse was clasped in his right hand, and he stood adjacent to a tabular monument, reading the lines quietly to him­ self. Closing his eyes and with a solemn nod of the head, he ended the recita­ tion. The man possessed an air of serene detachment from the comings and goings of the town beyond the churchyard walls. Slowly, his head bent upward toward the sky, and he opened his eyes. They squinted with concentration, becoming transfixed to a middle-distance. His composure was threatened by the blaring of drivers desperately trying to gee-up their sleepy-looking horses as their carts trundled slowly up Westgate Street, passing the churchyard, yet the man was unmoved. Moments passed. Then suddenly a small leather-bound notebook and a pencil were quickly drawn from his inner pocket and he began to make feverish scribblings onto the virgin pages. Robert Gilchrist (1797–1844) often came to the churchyard. It was a space to think, to read, and to write. Interred here were the bones of Newcastle­ upon-Tyne’s dead poets: Edward Chicken (1698–1746), John Cunningham (1729–1773), and his old friend Thomas Thompson (1773–1816). Gilchrist was a sailmaker by trade but also a labouring-class poet, part of a local ‘bardic circle’ operating in the early part of the nineteenth century that would be a vanguard to a shining generation of mid-Victorian versifiers and music hall entertainers (P. Gilchrist 2016). Yet, Gilchrist was at St John’s churchyard in 1820 (Allan 1891, 19) to compose a piece to the memory of John Cun­ ningham, a Dublin-born playwright, poet, and actor who had lived and died in the town (see below). This is how Gilchrist’s poem, “Written at the tomb of Cunningham, in St John’s Church-Yard, Newcastle,” presents his encounter with the memorial: Here sleeps, sons of genius, a spirit undaunted! What availed all his merits so blushing and fair, Consigned to the earth, with his honours untainted, The subject of praise which he never must hear—

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Gilchrist’s tribute poem in itself is unremarkable but is part of a nineteenthcentury culture of literary tourism and graveside pilgrimage (Matthews 2009; Westover 2012). The origins of these practices emerged in the mid-eighteenth century with travellers and tourists seeking locations associated with the lives of authors and the real or fictional places mentioned in their texts. Visitors sought to achieve “a sense of physical closeness and emotional association” with authors (MacLeod, Shelley, and Morrison 2018, 390). Though texts could afford a physical encounter with sites mentioned in an author’s work, and a writer’s house might still exist as a possible tourist attraction, the grave itself was a crucial destination—a melancholy place to reflect upon the absence of a literary life (Brown 2016; Watson 2006). Samantha Matthews notes that “the intimate scale of most poets’ graves gives the site a con­ centrated significance and single focus not shared with the spatial and sym­ bolic diffuseness of writers’ houses” (Matthews 2009, 25). Burial places are then not just one option on a dark tourism itinerary. The materiality of the space, its assemblage and form, shapes its capacities to affect (Edensor 2011). This is not a haphazard occurrence: the memory and legacy of dead poets is kept alive through how their final resting places are designed and managed, with friends, peers and patrons guiding semiotic meanings by choosing and caring for a memorial and selecting an appropriate epitaph. What I contend in this chapter is that poets’ graves have an “affective afterlife.” I will show that burial places bear the qualities of an “architectural atmosphere” that orchestrate the experience of mourners and visitors, affect­ ing bodies, moods, and spaces in ways that mediate people’s perceptions in space and time (Böhme 2017; Micieli-Voutsinas 2017). There are materialities to be deciphered through careful observation of the form and aesthetic media and messages designed to resonate—materialities that shape the bodily and psychological experience of place. There has been an extensive consideration of how military cemeteries have contributed to national imaginaries and visi­ tor engagement as sites of memory (see, for instance, Fuchs 2004; Gough 2004; Morris 1997). The British military cemetery is a paradigmatic example of a tightly designed space that contains architectural objects—the Cross of Sacrifice and Stone of Remembrance—conferring a religious significance while the marbled uniformity of headstones signals wartime camaraderie (Mosse 1990, 83–84). But the cemeteries and churchyards mentioned in this chapter, with their monuments and memorials to dead poets, follow less pre­ scribed plotlines and contain a sculptural cacophony of motifs, shapes, and forms that convey different types of personal and communal significance. Several human geographers have argued that experiencing place can activate

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a diffuse range of feelings, emotions, and affects (Anderson 2009; Duff 2010; Pile 2010). These happenings are an undeniable part of the experience of going to burial places, though each is distinct. Proximity to funerary monu­ ments and memorials affords moments of personal intensity which can acti­ vate feelings of loss, grief, despair. Graveyards are a conduit for feeling, transmitting varying transpersonal and interpersonal intensities and echoic resonations of sentiment that lend each site a peculiar aura and ‘sense of place’ (Anderson 2009). Cemeteries are a site of public memory, but the deep sense of loss activated can mean they are also a “theatre of pain,” materi­ alising traumatic feelings and a range of emotions which are released in col­ lective moments of remembrance (Tolia-Kelly 2017). Here, the emotional display of being moved, whether genuine or feigned, is a social phenomenon. Affect is a non-conscious intensity that corresponds to a change in the state of the body that augments or diminishes a capacity to act (Anderson 2009). The visceral experience of visiting places of death can rouse a variety of corporeal responses: a strengthened heartbeat, quicker rate of breathing, a feeling of leaden limbs, nausea, changes in posture, even a compulsion to silence occa­ sionally interrupted by nonsensical stuttering vocalisations (Bowring 2017). These affects influence our consciousness and cognition of the site by heigh­ tening an awareness of a chasm that resides between the living and the dead. For the purposes of this chapter, the distinctions between feeling, emotion, and affect are more fluid and co-constitutive than briefly presented here; as will be discussed, it is more important to consider the power of burial places to interpolate by considering how they generate intense, emotion-laden, and affective episodes (Bowring 2017).

Methodology My account has been constructed through an interpretive process influenced by Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project to the degree that it combines the poetic and the found with a “pondering” of sources and experiences to make sense of place, space, and time (Buck-Morss 1993, 240–41). It is a “small story” that seeks to make sense of poetic remains and a latent intangible heritage waiting to be rediscovered, recovered, and retold (Lorimer 2003). I have not provided an exhaustive account of the possible affective entangle­ ments of all burial sites where authors have been laid to rest, neither have I sought to scale-up from the particular to the general, from the unique archi­ tectural atmospheres of the spaces and materials encountered, to build a new theorisation of affect that dwells on what occurs in burial grounds. Emphasis is placed instead on the unique and revelatory, foregrounding my specific encounters, connections, and processes of communing. The chapter draws on multiple sources and experiences generated from nearly a decade of research in Newcastle. It employs evidence gleaned from archives and libraries, cita­ tions from an array of historical sources, poetic fragments, contextual com­ mentary of socio-historical phenomena, as well as notes taken from visits to

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cemeteries and churchyards, and fictionalised reconstruction. Vignettes are offered as a means to view the complex temporalities and relations between affect, place, and the past. These aspects are pronounced in this essay as it is composed from research into my own genealogical journey and biographical and literary recovery of an ancestor, the Robert Gilchrist mentioned above— my three-times-great-grandfather—and so is part of my making sense of a life held in common, and a life with which I seek to commune. The “affective afterlives” of poets’ graves considered here, though taken from selected his­ torical cases from a provincial English city, which to an international reader may seem troublingly parochial, nevertheless speak to a wider historical practice of a biographer, constantly searching for their quarry, and vitally alert to prospects of encounters between the living and the dead. As the his­ torian Richard Holmes writes, the search for biographical traces can “become a kind of pursuit, a tracking of the physical trail of someone’s path through the past, a following of footsteps” (1986, 27). The roads taken in writing a biography and in preparing this essay have taken me through the cemetery gates. In the following sections I reflect upon three burial sites in Newcastleupon-Tyne and consider the “affective afterlives” of poets’ graves, revealing points of connection, changing materialities, presences, absences, and affects.

Encountering memorials Cunningham’s memorial is located near the east window of St John’s Church—a great stone slab mounted on four supporting pillars lying half-buried in the soil beneath. The epitaph upon it, though now partly obliterated, reads: Here lie the Remains of JOHN CUNNINGHAM Of his excellence As a Pastoral Poet His works will remain a monument for ages After this temporary Tribute of Esteem Is in dust forgotten. He died in Newcastle Sep. 18, 1773, Aged 44. Born in Dublin, Cunningham started life as a playwright and, following the success of his 1746 farce Love in a Mist, he headed to England in the hope of making it as an actor. With limited success, he began to compose more ser­ ious pieces, prologues, epilogues, and elegies, publishing Poems, Chiefly Pas­ toral (1766) and Poetical Works (1781). Described as a “versatile and entertaining miscellaneous poet” (Goodridge 2001, 271), Cunningham com­ posed pieces that would influence a range of late eighteenth- and early nine­ teenth-century poets, with his best efforts considered to be his landscape poetry (Bataille 2004). An early contributor of poetical pieces to the New­ castle Chronicle newspaper, Cunningham gained the friendship of its editor and proprietor, Mr Slack, who erected the memorial to Cunningham upon his death (Newcastle Chronicle, March 9, 1774). The inscription at the end of the original tabular memorial stone, “He gathered the Essence of Simplicity and ranged it in Pastoral Verse,” was written by another Novocastrian poet,

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Ralph Carr, who was later also buried with Cunningham. A contemporary noted the affective power of the memorial: “The sentiment was so placed as to catch the eye of the passing stranger, who never failed to enquire who was interred there, and would drop a sigh to the memory of poor Cunningham” (Hodgson 1921, 88). The original ledger stone survived until 1887 when a new stone was unveiled, financed by public subscription (Morgan 2004, 34). Words read at the unveiling of the new memorial noted that he was never a first-rate poet, but Cunningham was championed as a “great man” of “genius” who carried “the vigour of his epoch,” something of which was present in local poets of the day (Newcastle Courant, December 16, 1887). Poets have occasionally stepped through the churchyard gates to venerate Cunningham. They have engaged with the space in quite personal ways through a variety of commemorative practices that establish new meanings and connections. Through these encounters Cunningham’s grave memorial becomes possessed with an “affective afterlife.” It is haunted both by the universality of corporeal death and the singularity of a dead poet. We might think of the site, following Emma Waterton, as possessing a “density of feeling” as the valued material presence of the past—the grave marker— generates emotional responses from visitors and the atmosphere of the site haunts and permeates the visitors’ bodies. Yet, the focus on the person laid to rest can also ignite “feelings of affinity” where points of connection (or estrangement) can work on the body to produce novel responses and potentialities (Waterton 2014, 824). The general visitor may feel a sense of melancholy, perhaps parochial pride, but a fellow writer can feel elated and energised by the proximity to ‘genius.’ When poets of the “graveyard school” in English literature—a pre-Romantic genre characterised by churchyard visits and gloomy meditations on mortality—encountered burial places, they were provoked to pen new compositions, with the dead acting as a source of poetic revelation (Parisot 2013, 81). Paul Westover’s study of literary pilgrimage examines William Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres (1809), which observed a feverish national culture of visits to the graves of the illustrious dead, with Britons travelling around the country to meditate at the last known resting place of deceased cultural heroes. A special value was placed on the intimacy afforded by viewing their graves, first-hand knowledge of the location lending visitors a unique sense of cultural authority (Westover 2012). A number of laments to the passing of Cunningham were published in the immediate wake of news of his death. Robert Fergusson (1750–1774), the Scottish poet, wrote “A Poem to the Memory of John Cunningham,” a pas­ toral elegy, likely inspired by lines “Written by Mr Cunningham about Three Weeks before his Death” that were reprinted in many periodicals. Cunning­ ham’s death also generated a number of anonymous poetic outpourings, some of which imagined the graveyard scene. The last stanza from “On the Death of Mr. Cunningham,” published in the Newcastle Chronicle (October 2, 1773), reflects:

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‘H.W.’ wrote “On the Death of a Late Pastoral Poet” (Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, September 6, 1774), the last stanza offering these thoughts: But why stand we silently here? To his tomb move we gentle along; And deck his soft sod with a tear, Who was peerless in elegant song. The clichéd sentiments and well-worn imagery of these compositions make us sceptical of a physical co-presence at Cunningham’s burial place. The emo­ tional contrivances are examples of a representational repertoire afforded by the “graveyard school” (Parisot 2013; Trowbridge 2017), affecting a sensuous disposition that is not necessarily shaped through a material encounter with place. A decade on from Cunningham’s passing, poems began to emerge that, like Gilchrist, underlined the bearing of place on composition. ‘Clio’ offered “Extempore, on seeing Mr Cunningham’s Monument in St John’s Church yard, Newcastle” (Newcastle Chronicle, November 1, 1783). The first verse reads: Here, gentle Spirit! let me stay, And view this monument of stone; This frail memorial of a day, Whose letters make thy exit known. In 1802 the entertainer and writer George Saville Carey (1743–1807), penned “Verses on Visiting the Tomb of Cunningham.” It begins: Sweet Bard, while here, with fond respect, I kneel before thy lonely grave, Dear victim of the world’s neglect, A wand’ring stranger’s tear receive.And ends: Unto thy dust, sweet bard, adieu! Thy hallow’d shrine I slowly leave; Yet oft, at eve, shall Mem’ry view, The sub-beam ling’ring on thy grave. Like Gilchrist’s effort, these compositions are not so much a lament for Cunningham, the man, as cultural responses to the meaning of death for the poet. The texts work with place (the churchyard) and artefact (the memorial),

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to reassert an enduring poetic sensibility through celebrating the life and contribution of a fellow poet. A surface reading of these texts can lull us into believing that the laments are authentically reverent. Though, as Samantha Matthews contends, when we take into account literary visitors to the church­ yard or cemetery, the “pose of humility” is deceptive (Matthews 2009, 25). Their communication with the dead can be motivated by a more profane desire to be, and be seen as, a writer. The real intent on visiting was to forge a bond with the deceased through imbibing some of the ‘aura’ of a departed literary ‘genius.’ Proximity to the body of a known writer, she shows, afforded a poetic subjectivity born from the affective encounter—the grave acting as a locus for an exchange between the living and the dead that makes it a site of potentiality. Dedicatory and memorial verse, literary scholar Brian Maidment argues, was used with this double focus of positioning writers into a commu­ nity of readers, whilst also signalling the presence of a thriving local literary community (Maidment 1992, 161). Though, as Matthews observes, other affec­ tive responses could register: dwelling on the finality of social death might unsettle creative enterprise, as “[t]he body’s presence demonstrates the absence of the vital creative author, and the grave, with its sometimes disappointingly prosaic inscription, stony memorial and fixed place within a landscape of death, defines the writer as dead and finished” (Matthews 2009, 26). Nevertheless, writers have continued to be drawn to the burial sites of their forebears. Newcastle-born poet Keith Armstrong composed “For ‘Cuny’” in 2008. The verse moves from the graveyard to share biographical connections between both poets. Armstrong identifies with Cunningham as a character of the streets who used his talent to escape his roots. There is a shared affinity, we learn, through their love of drink, the stage, and the town and local environment. But Armstrong also honours Cunningham as a fellow traveller and entertainer, employing a regional stereotype of Novocastrians as ‘Geor­ dies,’ affable and exuberant characters known for their sociability and “common touch” (Colls 1977; Lancaster 2001). I’m with you, ‘Cuny’ in this Newcastle Company of Comedians; I’m in your clouds of drunken ways; I twitch with you in my poetic nervousness along Westgate Road. And the girls left their petals for you like I hope they do for me in the light of the silver moon, thinking of your pen scratching stars into the dark sky. The tangible grave of Cunningham thus supports other affective afterlives, in this instance an intangible heritage of poetry and Geordie humour. The grave

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becomes a point of connection between the writers but also to an imaginary of a local literary culture that continues to flourish—an unbroken tradition of Tyneside writing, both humorous and serious, that extends from the mid-eighteenth century to today (Beal 2000).

Monuments and the afterlife of the poet A Grecian-style archway welcomes the visitor to Jesmond Old Cemetery. An uneven path winds through the space, leading me further inside. Tombstones radiate in all directions. Crosses, urns, columns, slabs, and obelisks valiantly contend with the forces of nature, many pockmarked by rain and wind, stran­ gled with ivy, or submerged by bramble. Stop to look closer and you can see spiders, lichen, and moss gradually encroaching on name and date, threatening a new oblivion. Words give measure to worth and measure too an age where life was shorter, recording lives that fledged yet never took flight. There are no wails of mourners here—they have long departed. The only voices to be heard are songbirds as they flit through the thin light of a spring afternoon. But still I hold out an ear for echoes from the past. I’m without a map and lost, hoping to spy the distinct outline I copied beforehand of the tombstone of a dead poet, but amongst the sea of tombs it’s becoming a lost cause. As the caretakers assemble to lock the cemetery gates, I spot the gravestone of J. P. Robson and approach it with haste. Foregoing genuflection, I opt to quickly record the stone, taking notes and photos, and feel compelled to gently pass my hand over the front, fingering the textures of what remains. No words are spoken. Jesmond Old Cemetery was established in 1835 to accommodate the dead of Newcastle’s growing population (Morgan 2004) (Figure 9.1). It is home to prominent Victorian men and women who made the city. A variety of

Figure 9.1 Jesmond Old Cemetery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, United Kingdom

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professions and livelihoods are remembered, with inventors, retailers, brew­ ers, engineers, and architects, among others, buried here. Cemetery tours, guidebooks, and online sources prolong a public memory of the celebrated and famed, marked as holding pedagogical value and worthy of visitation (Morgan 2000, 2004). But the cemetery is marked by divisions in terms of the care exercised toward the memorials. Public monies have supported the restoration of the grand tomb of a former mayor, though there are many graves of unheroic everyday folk in a poorer state of repair. As Helen Nicholson notes, graveyards contain the bodies of people whose lives were composed of “small gestures and quotidian acts” (2013, 84). Their lives are not immortalised through great poetry or grand monuments, but they contributed no less significantly through unremarkable habits and routines of life. Two labouring-class poets, now considered amongst the finest Geordie poets and songwriters (Harker 1981, 2017), were buried in the cemetery during the 1870s and have intriguing memorials that employ symbolic and iconographic aesthetic elements to preserve a poetic legacy. J. P. Robson (1808–1870) (Allan 1891, 345–48) has a gravestone by George Burn (1833–1883), a local sculptor of some repute who made his name memorialising a number of regional heroes (Ayris et al. 1996, 18–19; Lawson 1873, 376) (Figure 9.2). Robson is represented almost as caricature on the gravestone in neo-classical pose, a bearded bard seated with lyre. The lantern spire of St Nicholas’s cathedral is positioned on the left, which firmly locates Robson as a Tynesi­ der. It is mentioned that the stone was erected by public subscription, and an inscription written by Robson’s contemporary Joseph McGill once read (Allan 1891, 347): Tho’ dead, in lamenting thee Still be it mine To honour thy name, sweetest Bard of the Tyne. The gravestone is now weathered and worn, traces of time’s passage, with only a few words of McGill’s verse now remaining on the inscription. It just about survives as a cultural presence of a “bardic community.” The weathering adds a further reflective, melancholic quality; its deterioration invites a lament for the impermanence of cultural memory (Bowring 2017, 143–48). Robson’s grave was visited by his contemporary Joe Wilson (1841–1875), one of the most prolific Geordie songwriters, who is also buried in the graveyard (Harker 2017). His is a monument in the form of a broken column, a popular memorial device in Victorian cemeteries to signify a life cut short. It was erected by Thomas Allan, publisher of Tyneside Songs and Readings, still an important collection of regional poetic and lyrical output (Harker 1981), with an inscription by Wilson that he used to describe the purpose of his life:

Figure 9.2 Detail from the tombstone of J. P. Robson

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It’s been me aim t’hev a place I’th’ hearts o’ the Tyneside people, Wi’ writin’ bits o’hyemly sangs Aw think they’ll sing. The sentiments expressed on the memorials to both Robson and Wilson speak to legacy and shape reception. You feel their passing is more-than­ personal; theirs is a communal loss. When I re-visited the cemetery in July 2018, Wilson’s grave bore pebbles, a custom performed by family members who have visited the grave to indicate respect for the deceased and an offering made by literary pilgrims (Kjærsgaard and Venbrux 2016). These were placed by his Canadian great-grandchildren (Harker 2017, 153–54). The placing of objects is an act that demonstrates closeness and a feeling of intimacy (Brown 2016). But what if there is no memorial? As I show in the next section, a place without memorial is important too in the affective afterlife of literary pilgrimage, bringing different feelings and intensities entangled in dynamic complex temporalities (Amin and Thrift 2002, 28).

Absence and communion Robert Gilchrist died at home on July 11, 1844. He was laid to rest at Ballast Hills burial ground a few days later (Allan 1891, 176) (Figure 9.3). I visited the site on the 174th anniversary of his death, an act I had put off for several years as I searched for biographical traces of his life in local archives. ‘Sing me a song. Sing me a song’, I softly chanted as I wandered hesitatingly around Ballast Hills. Nothing appeared to materialise from the incantation. No spirit to guide me to his final resting place. The only grave markers were

Figure 9.3 Ballast Hills burial ground, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, United Kingdom

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toppled-over water bottles, as disposable and discarded as the paupers under­ neath. My feet followed a broken flagstone pathway. Milky green lichens spread over the surface. Words fought for attention; golden grass seedheads filling inscriptions that have not yet been eroded. Some epitaphs stared at the sky, but most names were known only to the curious worm. This is a place that frustrates the historian. It does not expect or welcome visitors. Situated to the east of the city centre, Ballast Hills burial ground served the needs of Newcastle as it rapidly urbanised. Seventeenth-century plague vic­ tims were interred here, and the number of burials expanded following the influx of Scottish and overseas workers. It was formalised in 1785 when it was enclosed by a wall and set charges for burials. Many of the interred were poor or religious non-conformists, unable or unwilling to be put to rest in Anglican or Catholic grounds (Butler 2014). The lack of space at alternative cemeteries meant that Ballast Hills began to become severely overcrowded. By the 1820s it was considered inadequate, contemporary reports highlighting the remains of the deceased were sometimes prematurely disturbed by new burials (MacKenzie 1827, 408–14). By 1854 the graveyard had fallen out of use as alternative grounds were established (Morgan 2004). In 1930 the burial stones on the site were removed, many being laid down as flagging for paths, and the entire site was turned into a public recreation area. Natural weathering means many of the inscriptions are becoming illegible. However, the monumental inscriptions were recorded when the cemetery was converted into a park. Given Gilchrist’s reputed religious identification as a Glassite, a Scottish dis­ senting Christian sect, it is likely that the family forewent any graveside memorial, or at least used a modest one (see Sayer 2011). Over time and with the majority of his remaining family locating to East London in the 1850s, Gilchrist’s gravesite fell from public knowledge, leaving only his house in Shieldfield Green standing as a monument to his memory, this eventually succumbing to a programme of urban renewal in 1959. Ballast Hills invites reflection upon transience and impermanence. The removal and re-placing of headstones confirms there are no guarantees of an infinite posthumous locational marker. Despite my meanderings through the site and around its perimeter path, no physical reminder to the memory of my poet ancestor can be found. Nothing. The lack of a grave marker signals a “representational elusiveness” (Kerler 2013, 85 quoted in Micieli-Voutsinas 2017, 94). It provokes traumatic feelings, not on the scale of national tragedy, but a visceral sense of dislocation and estrangement that seems to arrest my ability to connect with and make meaning of the place. It’s the feeling of being cheated. But you get a sense that the paupers and dissenters buried here have been cheated too. The lack of memorial is testament to a lack of public value to their existence. The site is in the process of erasure, not threatened by the encroaching hand of urban regeneration, but through a combination of weathering and institutionalised forgetting. For the historian, constantly on the search for traces, Ballast Hills is a disappointment. The song collector Thomas Allan was disappointed too. Preparations for the biographical entries

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in his Tyneside Songs and Readings led to Allan commissioning a search for the final resting places of Tyneside’s poets and singers, including Gilchrist. Allan was acutely distressed by the lack of appropriate memorial to Tyne­ side’s bardic community and its members. The archive was fragmentary and incomplete, frustrating an “unreachable totality” desired by a collector (Rella 1987, 33), but graves provided a tangible endpoint to the biographic trail (Allan 1891, 43–44, 87, 561). Allan recognised, as had William Godwin, that finding the dead mattered. There is a temptation to rue melancholically upon what remains hidden, Gilchrist’s hidden remains. But, as Pierre Nora contends, memory is “in per­ manent evolution, subject to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of the distortions to which it is subject, vulnerable in various ways to appropriation and manipulation, and capable of lying dormant for long periods only to be suddenly reawakened” (1996, 3). Other affordances spring to mind and, on reflection, the affective episode of visiting Ballast Hills has strengthened my efforts to place Gilchrist back into the public realm by communicating his life, works, and times, and educating others on the lost, humble poets of the past. Graves offer a form of compensation of what has been lost—a place to visit, to return to, and commune. In the digital age, however, new potentialities arise to reconnect poet and place. Websites can host biographic and bibliographic information (http://bardoftyneside.info), and social media can be employed to build interest and find receptive audi­ ences. If memory is in permanent evolution, then the digital afterlife becomes a powerful tool in the process of reawakening (Crawford 2017).

Conclusion The poets’ graves visited in Tyneside possess an “affective afterlife,” but the feelings have not been uniform. Pleasure, elation, humility, respect, frustra­ tion, and dissatisfaction have been registered in my visits and through my searches. These feelings have undeniably been shaped by my professional interest in writing a biography as well as personal connections to North-East England and the desire to commune with an ancestor. Complex temporal­ ities—the knotty relations between past, present, and future—have featured, both in my genealogical quest and in understanding the bonds of kinship felt by a community of writers on Tyneside. Commemorative practices, through pilgrimage, offerings, readings, haptic encounters, and solemn contemplation, have generated special moments of connection (Brown 2016). Cunningham’s grave, in Newcastle’s half-remembered “poets’ corner,” is where both Robert Gilchrist and Paul Gilchrist became “scribbling pilgrims,” “active, creative beings, empowered at the grave by its evidence of their own creative life” (Matthews 2009, 35). Cultural geographers have shown how spectres haunt places (see Holloway and Kneale 2008; Wylie 2009), and work is beginning to emerge that deciphers the practices of remembrance and embodied ways in which sites of death and

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dying are now becoming important to an evolving dark tourism economy (Micieli-Voutsinas 2017). However, the literary pilgrim or grave-visitor is an awkward consumer for the heritage and tourism industry (MacLeod, Shelley, and Morrison 2018, 396), and their affective lines of flight are multiple (Amin and Thrift 2002, 28). This was as true for the poets and writers who visited the graves of Keats and Shelley in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome as it is for literary pilgrims in our own time (see Matthews 2009). Lived experiences vary with subjectivity, motivation, and imaginings, as well as bodily and sensory encounters with space. Affects are produced in moments of proximity for some, yet for others the grave visit brings a delayed gratification, for when the visitor heads home and returns to the texts that excited them to visit in the first place, the encounter with place is reworked into their imaginative reconstructions of their reading (MacLeod, Shelley, and Morrison 2018). The grave may be a prized destination, the physical remains offering authenticity and totality, but its concentrated significance heaps pressure on the memorial to meet expecta­ tions. It is here that the material form is significant. As I have shown, the aesthetic choices determining the material properties of the memorial as well as the sentiment expressed through epitaphs shape response; they contribute to the “affective afterlife” both for a surviving literary community and curious literary pilgrims. The materiality of the grave changes too—and with it the feelings generated. The threat of decay provides scope for Gothic reflections on mortality; fragments of poem and song signal a dynamic vernacular culture that may emotionally resonate through the ages (for example, through resus­ citation when they are read or performed once more, eliciting delight in their recovery), but absence of grave-markers altogether is psychologically and politically troublesome, feeding a sense of being cheated and injustice that everyday lives and humble writers are vulnerable to being forgotten. Yet, vis­ iting has also posed an existential challenge. The words of Paul Westover (2012, 70–71) offer a fitting conclusion: … the fate of the dead matters to us because we are the dead who just happen to be living at the moment. To the dead man, as a living man, the fate of the body is no small thing. Thus, our (touristic) will to find the dead is in part a desire to find ourselves, and it is a sign of how greatly the finding of presence matters. Reading the dead and visiting their graves reminds us that we exist on a level with them … . We are all passing, ghostly as well as material.

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Tolia-Kelly, Divya P. 2017. “Race and Affect at the Museum: The Museum as a Theatre of Pain.” In Heritage, Affect and Emotion: Politics, Practices and Infrastructures, edited by Divya P. Tolia-Kelly, Emma Waterton, and Steve Watson, 33–46. London: Routledge. Trowbridge, Serena. 2017. “Past, Present, and Future in the Gothic Graveyard.” In The Gothic and Death, edited by Carol Margaret Davison, 21–33. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Waterton, Emma. 2014. “A More-Than-Representational Understanding of Heritage? The ‘Past’ and the Politics of Affect.” Geography Compass 8 (11): 823–833. Watson, Nicola J. 2006. The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Westover, Paul. 2012. Necromanticism: Travelling to Meet the Dead, 1750–1860. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wylie, John. 2009. “Landscape, Absence and the Geographies of Love.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34 (3): 275–289.

10 Placing affective architectures in landscapes of public pedagogy at the university Chris W. Post

Five years ago, I finally realized how married my own educational foci indeed were. I have an undergraduate degree in Secondary Education and graduate degrees in Geography. For many years, it seemed their relation was utilitarian at best, focused mostly on the fact that I teach more than I research at a state university’s regional campus. Then, that proverbial light lit above my head. I had been entrenched thinking about the formal ways by which we experience education. As my own thoughts were coming around, a similar turn occurred in the world of pedagogical theory, where more and more scholars were writing about public pedagogy—the multitude of forums within which we as citizens learn. Many of these forums are popular: music, art, architecture, museums, memorial spaces, journalism, theater, film, and an ongoing list of possible stimuli. These places, spaces, media, and structures constantly expose us to new ideas, thereby forming our actions, beliefs, and identities. As educators, we manage these stimuli and ideas for our students. However, we are not avail­ able to all people always as they participate in these pedagogical spaces. And we should not be. As scholars and professionals, we give our students and the public a series of tools with which they can understand our world and improve on what has been built before them. How these spaces of public pedagogy are built has a profound impact on what and how we learn. It helps to form our identity as individuals and as a collective. From my perspective as an expert on commemorative spaces, ingrained in all of this is the notion of an affective architecture—a space that brings about not only new knowledge but also, to borrow from Ben Ander­ son, an emotional “atmosphere” in the space which produces a change in the world and “enable[s] us to reflect on affective experience as occurring beyond, around, and alongside the formation of subjectivity” (Anderson 2009, 77). By producing landscapes that attempt to create some visceral response by a visi­ tor, we acknowledge that the built landscape is indeed working to inform, engage, educate (and normalize) at a deeper level of emotion beyond that of factual data or edification. To explore this synergy more closely, this paper explores the relationship between geography, public pedagogy, and affect in three stages. It first

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develops a connection between public pedagogy and landscape through dis­ cussions of both concepts, their development, and their similarities. I then take a more specific approach and apply the idea of public pedagogy to the commemorative landscape by comparing two examples of university campus memory work: the commemoration of the May 4, 1970 shootings at Kent State University, and Good Deeds Chairs Memorial at Syracuse University. I finish the essay by discussing my own attempts to bring a more pedagogical perspective to a memorial site in my local region. These perspectives culmi­ nate in emphasizing the critical role that affective architecture and design play in the pedagogical potential of our memorial landscapes.

Public pedagogy and the geographies of landscape In 2000, Henry Giroux stated, “[a]s a performative practice, pedagogy is at work in all of those public spaces where culture works to secure identities; it does its bridging work negotiating the relationship between knowledge, pleasure, and values; and it renders authority both crucial and problematic in legitimating particular social prac­ tices, communities, and forms of power” (354). Thinking through a more culturally critical approach to pedagogy, Giroux’s words resonate with pedagogical scholars and others throughout cultural studies, including history, literature, and geography. Introducing their Handbook of Public Pedagogy, Jennifer A. Sandlin, Brian D. Schultz, and Jake Burdick drew upon Giroux and defined public pedago­ gies as “spaces, sites, and languages of education and learning that exist out­ side of the walls of the institution of schools” (2010, 1). Despite this more recent critical movement and definition, the notion goes back nearly a century to John Dewey’s call for a democratic and progressive education (1938). Much of this effort has come by way of experiential-learning and service-learning (Boyer 1990; Bringle and Hatcher 1995). I focus on public pedagogy for its more radical attempt to change the way we view education outside the classroom, where—unlike in experiential- or service-learning—the instructor/teacher/professor is entirely absent. It is within our everyday public spaces where we are bombarded by stimuli that attempt to educate us and form our identities of sexuality and gender, race and ethnicity, religion, nationalism, and so on. This ‘informal’ education can go in a few directions. It can broaden, include, democratize, and question the capitalist structure of power. This is what Giroux consistently promotes—a program of education that pushes back against the neoliberal agenda of cor­ porate media and politicized education (e.g., the constant testing) that dehu­ manizes students as future economic cogs (2000, 2003, 2010). Giroux’s argument simultaneously highlights the second way by which public pedagogy is realized: to reinforce economic and political power, stultify its questioning, and create hegemony for the benefit of the few—that is, it becomes propaganda (2010).

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Understanding this dialectic is where geography comes into play. As public spaces and landscapes, the sites of public pedagogy are inherently geographic. Thus, understanding the role of public pedagogy contains parallels to under­ standing the idea of landscape. In geography, much of this intellectual growth comes from being able to “read” the landscape—a, if not the, fundamental way by which we engage with the world (Cosgrove 1998; Cosgrove and Daniels 1988; Harvey 1979; Meinig 1979; Mitchell 2008; Schein 1997, 2009; Wylie 2007). While older geographies stressed seeing the landscape as a series of material artifacts that evidenced a way of life (Sauer 1925), newer cultural geographies have turned that discussion into one of symbols and assemblages, eventually realizing that the self is part of the landscape and simultaneously authors it while being subconsciously formed by that same built environment. Of these methods, I lean on those by Mitchell (2008) and Schein (2009) the most, seeing the landscape as a space authored for an explicit socio-economic purpose—the materialization of a dominant discourse—exactly as Giroux lays out as one objective of public pedagogy (2010). Landscape is therefore not just a geographical question of representing immaterial processes; it is one of exposure, connection, access, epistemology, and being in place. With such experiences, we feel the “push in the world” that is affect, as Nigel Thrift writes of it (2004, 64). Thus, as Simandan (2013) and others established in a special issue of The Professional Geographer, geography—landscape specifically—and learning can never be severed. To extend Denis Cosgrove’s notion that “geography is everywhere” (1989), then, is also to say that public pedagogy and its affective power exist every­ where. They are in everything we do while we carry on our constant rela­ tionship with the world around us—built mostly by others—that informs us how to behave. From lines on the highway to signs in the store window, we are under constant instruction of what is moral and right, or what is wrong and inappropriate. Writing about the Nant-y-Cwm Steiner School in Pembrokeshire, Wales, Peter Kraftl and Peter Adey claim: In particular, children are encouraged to regard education as a holistic, creative, aesthetic-and-performative process, and the importance of developing such more than visual, more than representational skills is constantly stressed. This demands that teachers (and children) should construct the right creative “atmosphere” for learning as much as attend to certain skills or facts. (Kraftl and Adey 2008, 216; emphasis added) A direct and crucial intersection therefore exists between pedagogy and the idea of landscape. Both are everywhere, and so much of what is deemed public pedagogy exists as a form of landscape that we are in constant interaction with. Within geography, a handful of scholars have been arriving at this same conclusion (Alderman, Kingsbury, and Dwyer 2013; Dorsey 2001; Inwood

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2016). James Tyner (with various co-authors) has most effectively moved public pedagogy into the studies of everyday landscapes, both cultural and environmental. Working with music, photography, and poetry produced by the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK, or Khmer Rouge) of Cambodia during its 1975 to 1979 regime, Tyner and colleagues in three separate papers have shown how the CPK state provided a public pedagogy that controlled citizens’ education in as many informal ways as possible, beyond the class­ room (Tyner, Kimsroy, and Sirik 2015a, 2015b; Tyner, Rhodes, and Kimsroy 2016). For the CPK, using public pedagogy through these media in a program beyond mere propaganda was instrumental in transforming Cambodia from a colony into a state. This also exemplifies the largest concern regarding public pedagogy—its potential to function as a hierarchically-prescribed form of state-building that limits mobility, creativity, and well-being, as opposed to what Giroux hoped for when he wrote, “radical pedagogical work proposes that education is a form of political intervention in the world and is capable of creating opportunities for social transformation” (2003, 11). I too analyze the commemorative landscape as a means to intersect these topics of public pedagogy and landscape. Memorials and monuments are built for many reasons: to inform, revere the past, condemn the past, and perhaps produce a sense of empathy over the loss of human life (singularly and collectively). These goals all have educational roots. Achieving any of these objectives, however, requires the production of a landscape—an archi­ tecture—that reaches out to a visitor with an affective sense that moves him or her beyond that experience in place and toward an actionable impact on improving the human condition. Memorial landscapes also exemplify that dialectic of public pedagogy, simultaneously freeing and confining in their definition of whose lives count and whose do not. The Jane Addams Hull-House Museum on the campus of the University of Illinois—Chicago (UIC) exemplifies such a pedagogical approach to com­ memoration. According to Lisa Yun Lee (2010), Director of the School of Art and Art History at UIC and Visiting Curator at Hull-House, that mem­ orial museum works pedagogically in a threefold way. First, the museum allows visitors to choose the verbiage on display labels of artworks. Second, Hull-House has developed an urban garden and hosts a weekly soup kitchen. Finally, the museum has hosted interactive discussions about immigration. Crucially, these activities replicate undertakings of Jane Addams during her time at Hull-House, thus reinforcing the seemingly radical (for the time) events that occurred there as a haven for women, immigrants, laborers, and other marginalized persons (Lee 2010). I focus my attention more on the exterior, or outdoor, memorial landscape. The US National Mall in Washington, DC, serves as an example of a pub­ licly pedagogical landscape that many have experienced. On the one hand, the Mall is filled with monuments—the Vietnam Veterans Memorial stands out— to the men and women who in some way contributed their lives to defining the United States, no matter how tragic or debated the cause for conflict. On

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the other hand, the Mall contains other monuments—such as the National World War II Memorial—that solidify in their marble and bronze the central hegemonic role that the United States plays on the world stage (Doss 2010). The underlying question attempts to unravel those persons in charge of deciding what exactly about that person or event is worth remembering, cel­ ebrating, or mourning. Art historian Kirk Savage (2009) submits that we remember too many people and events on the mall—paralleling Erika Doss’s notion of an American “memorial mania” (2010). Savage calls for a halt to representational commemoration and a tighter approval process that would eventually declutter the Mall’s landscape and perhaps return it to a space of human reflection and affect through a more-than-representational experience in place (2009). Of all landscapes, commemorative spaces stand out for their being doubly historical and of great public interest. Memorial landscapes both remember a past while also containing their own past and the peaks and valleys of praise, ridicule, interest, and forgetfulness that accompany any landscape. Popular interest in the past and how we remember ups the ante for com­ memorative sites as well, making them low-hanging fruit for inquiries such as this. How do our sites of memory, as publicly pedagogical spaces, edu­ cate us on the past in an affective, and therefore effective, manner that helps to respect our historic social mistakes and make amends for improving the lives of all humans?

Examples of realizing (and not realizing) affective architecture Affect in the memorial landscape is an increasingly crucial component to studies on memorial geographies in recent years. A collective of scholars has led this discussion in geography, including Derek Alderman (2008 [with Campbell], 2013 [with Inwood]), Mike Crang and Divya P. Tolia-Kelly (2010), Kenneth Foote (2003, 2010 [with Grider], 2016), Emma Waterton (2014, 2014 [with Dittmer], 2016 [with Drozdzewski and De Nardi]), Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas (2017), Nigel Thrift (2004), and Karen Till (2005, 2012). These scholars have collectively discussed memorial sites as more-than-repre­ sentational, affective, and emotionally impactful—through the handling of artifacts, experience of sights and sounds in museums, or memory work at an urban scale. As Crang and Tolia-Kelly submit, “[w]e see heritage sites as key enablers in the traffic between place, things, identities, and belongings. Affect operates at more than the individual level and crosses different substances” (2010, 2316). I build on this work by turning the discussion of affective spaces into one of publicly pedagogical landscapes—memorial sites that continue to work toward the improvement of society by memorializing tragedies in critical and pedagogical forms. Geography being a visual discipline and mode of thought, I want to present my connection of landscape, public pedagogy, and affect with an illustration (Figure 10.1).

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Figure 10.1 Mapping the relationship between landscape, affect, and public pedagogy

The relationships between public pedagogy and landscape echo back to the previous section where landscape can be defined as a form of public pedagogy that constantly informs and shapes us. The relationship between landscape and affect requires a slightly different approach to understand. For this I refer to affect as part of the place-making process. Therefore, a landscape, like any natural, human, or hybrid space, becomes a place through experience and emotional attachment that brings about a change in the individual. As I claim in previous work, “[p]lace production—that is the transformation of nebulous spaces into meaningful places—requires affect between space and person and subsequent change in that person’s ability to know and attach to the locale” (Post 2018, 84). In application to the commemorative landscape, this means that “[i]n order for memorial landscapes to become places and sites of validation to visitors they must inhibit change within the visitor” (ibid.). Affect and public pedagogy connect through the individual’s commitment to take what is emotionally ingrained from the landscape and transform that connection into something more tangible—the ability to learn from that which has been connected. Not all public pedagogy is necessarily affective (though that could be argued to be an ultimate goal), and not all affective landscapes are pedagogical. Within the memorial landscape, the act of witnessing—deeply and emotionally connecting to the victims of violence to the point of experiencing their struggle—provides this connection. As a pedagogical exercise (pun intended), I like to introduce my students to two commemorative landscapes that exemplify how the production of such a landscape does and does not produce a “successful” publicly pedagogical and affective experience. I have written previously about these two sites—the May 4, 1970 commemorative landscape at Kent State University, and Good Deeds Chairs at Syracuse University (Post 2016, 2018). I discuss the May 4 site as a

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dialectic space for its evolution and absence of a message that went beyond the campus itself and for a more critical examination of the very issues at stake both in 1970 and today—the freedom to peaceful assembly and protest (Post 2016). I also discuss Syracuse’s Good Deeds Chairs from a perspective closer to the question of affect—I used Trip Advisor reviews of the site to evaluate the memorial site as a place and its potential to connect visitors to the loss of innocent life (Post 2018). This discussion, therefore, reviews these two sites, their architectures, and how their architectures do and do not enable a sense of affect for visitors. (Mis)remembering Kent State At noon on May 4, 1970, a group of Kent State University students, and other citizens, peacefully protested President Richard Nixon’s expansion of US efforts in the Vietnam Conflict into Cambodia. This action came on the heels of a weekend of other protests including downtown looting and the burning of a derelict Reserve Officers’ Training Corps building on campus, prompting Ohio Governor James Rhodes to call the state’s National Guard to campus. At 12:30 on May 4, a handful of those national guardsmen shot into the group of students, who had retreated from their original protest space into a parking lot and adjacent athletic practice field. The guardsmen killed four students and wounded nine in a matter of seconds. The memorial land­ scape that has evolved on campus is one of debate and contestation about how to commemorate tragedy when the state is responsible for killing its own citizens. While the site has always been an active commemorative space, it has generally lacked a truly affective and pedagogical focus. While artwork dominated the earliest forms of commemoration, the first memorial to directly spell out its dedication to the lives of those students killed was donated in 1971 by the campus’s B’nai B’rith Hillel center. That memorial was subsequently stolen in 1974, desecrated with bullet holes, and returned a year later. In the meantime, it was replaced by a similar memorial donated by the faculty. That marker was then damaged twice by the heat of candles placed around it during the annual vigil but was fixed both times and stands today in the parking lot where the students were killed. The university waited until 1990 to dedicate its own memorial—The May 4 Memorial (Figure 10.2). This memorial likewise has its own troubled narrative. Proposed in the early 1980s, the memorial that stands today—clearly inspired by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC—is the second-place design from a competition open only to US citizens. The original winning design came from a Canadian artist. In addition, what is seen today repre­ sents only a fraction of the budget and space of the original design by archi­ tect Bruno Ast. Protests accompanied both the memorial’s groundbreaking and its 1990 dedication. In 1998, a group of students proposed to university President Carol Cart­ wright that individual markers be placed to remember each student killed.

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Figure 10.2 The May 4 Memorial at Kent State. Clearly inspired by Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, the memorial was the second-place entry in a design competition and built to a fraction of its proposed structure and budget, and lacks the visitor agency of the VVM and other contemporary memorials

With Cartwright’s approval, these markers were designed by the university’s architect and installed in 1999. Several parties involved with memorial activ­ ities surrounding May 4—the university Board of Trustees and one outspoken injured victim from May 4 included—indicated that these were the final memorials to the lives lost in 1970. In 2010, the site received placement on the National Register of Historic Places and the university added a Walking Tour of the day’s events. Kent State opened a Visitors Center for the tragedy in 2013. As I wrote previously, this constant lack of stability and agreement on how to commemorate May 4—particularly through the permanent and material landscape—has hurt the messaging of the event and what we should learn from it (Post 2016). Seeing modern episodes of suppression of protest in public spaces—in Baltimore; Ferguson; Davis, California—only proves that the lessons of May 4 have not been learned and reinforced. Historically, except for the annual vigil, and the more recently developed parking lot markers, Walking Tour, and Visitors Center, there has been no pedagogical lesson or affective space communicated by the university (Post 2018). Like over-representation on the Mall (Savage 2009), such apolitical approaches to the shootings kept the university at a distance from the debates surrounding the event and the school’s culpability in bringing the National Guard to campus. (Kent State actually canceled the annual memorial service

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in 1976 and rebranded itself as simply “Kent,” as attempts to disassociate itself with the killings.) Though a more controlled narrative is now told through the newer memorial spaces, they do allow for increased visitor par­ ticipation and confrontation with the lives lost and injured and how the events unfolded—placing responsibility on the appropriate parties. Agency at Syracuse’s Good Deeds Chairs On campus at Syracuse University, the community experienced a different type of tragedy. On December 21, 1988, Libyan terrorists bombed Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, on its leg from London to New York City. Thirtyfive Syracuse students were on board returning home from a semester abroad, and all perished. While Syracuse has developed a permanent memorial to those killed, an annual Good Deeds Chairs memorial in recent years has also evolved into a very meaningful memorial space that perhaps eclipses the affectual response and public pedagogy potential of the permanent one (Figure 10.3). Each fall, thirty-five chairs—one for each casualty—are dis­ tributed throughout campus for a week. Students write on these chairs by reporting, or committing themselves to, their performance of a good deed that week. The chairs are then collected and set out on the main quad in front of the university’s chapel, in the positions where each Syracuse student would have been seated on the plane that fateful day. On each side of this temporary memorial is an explanation of its design and the role of good deeds in con­ temporary society. As opposed to the landscape dedicated to May 4 at Kent State, university citizens are actively involved in creating this annual memor­ ial. During my 2013 visit, I was struck more by the spatiality of the chairs and the notes written on them than at nearly any other memorial I have experienced. I am not alone in this sentiment. Annual reports on the Syracuse commemoration activity reinforce my experience and the personal embodi­ ment of witnessing the tragedy (Post 2018). The site begs for any individual’s participation to read the chairs and witness the embodied absence of the bombing’s victims. Thus, the pedagogical potential of this memorial exceeds that of most memorials. It does not merely readdress a story—it creates an affective atmosphere amongst visitors, whether they are well-acquainted with the incident or not. Whereas Kent State’s commemoration, likely due to its own culpability in the May 4 shootings, is a history of “one step up and two steps back,” to quote Bruce Springsteen (1987), Syracuse moves forward with participation, creation, and mobility. Pedagogy—an educational outcome—is one of the ultimate goals of commemoration by attempting to ensure that our past societal sins are not repeated, and works part and parcel with affective placemaking in the commemorative landscape. The more we learn through our agency at a site, the more attached we become to the place, and vice versa. Moving forward, such “in-situ” or “immersed” learning in the landscape not only leads to a connection between visitor and place, but also to a sense of

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Figure 10.3 The Good Deeds Chairs at Syracuse University in 2013. Laid out as the killed students were seated on Flight 103, members of the Syracuse com­ munity decorated the chairs with statements of good deeds that they had or would perform for others

witnessing and empathy for those lives lost and a personal promise to prevent such violence in the world again. Syracuse’s memorial landscape accomplishes this in a way Kent State’s has not.

Looking forward to new sites of affective public pedagogy When planning my Memory and Heritage course for Spring 2010, I agreed to work with the Friends of Fort Laurens, the outreach and funding arm for Fort Laurens State Historic Site, who assist with the interpretation of the Fort Laurens State Historic Site commemorating the only colonial-era fort in Ohio. Fort Laurens served as a supply point west of Fort Pitt (Pittsburgh) for an attack on Fort Detroit (British). Nicknamed “Fort Nonsense” by a Colo­ nial general at the time, it played a dubious role on the frontier as soldiers there experienced extreme cold and starvation, attacks by local Britishaligned indigenous nations, and a siege by British troops, resulting in a mere ten months of operation. Still, I jumped at the chance to incorporate a ser­ vice-learning project (again, thinking of Dewey and Boyer) into the course. I had a great conversation with the chair of the Friends group. We planned a class visit and site tour, and a presentation of ideas for several changes and

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additions to the site at the end of the semester. No promises were made, but everyone agreed we would put forth our best collaborative effort. That was my first foray into the practice of service-learning and public pedagogy. I chronicled our efforts and outcomes a couple of years later in a special issue of Southeastern Geographer (Post 2012), where, with several colleagues in the geographic subfield of memorialization, we brought forward several ideas for bringing issues of memorialization into the classroom. Though there is an admirable (if small) museum, the commemoration of Fort Laurens on the landscape is understated. There are monuments donated by the Sons of the American Revolution, Daughters of the American Revo­ lution, and Children of the American Revolution (CAR), all in native stone and with varying amounts of text to honor their mission. (The CAR marker has one sentence, compared to full descriptive paragraphs on the other two.) In addition, there are two elements of the site built by New Deal organiza­ tions—the entrance gate by the National Youth Administration and a shelter by the Civilian Conservation Corps. A satellite image of Fort Laurens reveals the final component to its mem­ orial landscape—an outline of the fort marked by landscaping mulch. Before archaeological digs were first performed on the site, most archival research indicated the fort existed north of the current museum (built at its site so as not to interfere with the fort’s supposed location). Those archeological tests, however, proved that the fort sat mostly between the museum and the Ohio and Erie Canal to the east, just west of present-day Interstate 77. Today, the express purpose of the Friends of Fort Laurens is to rebuild the fort at this site, log-by-log, through a large capital campaign. With this history of commemoration in hand, I tasked the class with changing the memorial landscape at Fort Laurens by designing—with hopes of eventual implementation—a more critical and affective commemorative site for visitors to understand the fort’s purpose in Ohio Country and the larger context of the infant United States. In response to this challenge, the class designed several venerable ideas—lining the fort’s outline with hedges, lights, and flags in lieu of rebuilding a log structure, better-advertising its location on the Ohio and Erie Canal Towpath with access to other nearby sites, and being more honest about the not-so-unknown soldiers. The class’s presentation to the Friends of Fort Laurens, however, focused on a new memorial that more critically analyzed the role of Fort Laurens in Ohio Country, a land coveted by various American Indian nations (mostly Lenape Delaware), the Colonials, French, and British (Figure 10.4). This memorial space proposed a typical period fort outline—a square with four corner bastions. Within this space were four paths, each representing one of these concerned parties and moving visitors from each bastion into the center of the “fort,” thus placing visitors in the outlines of an absent space while giving them agency in the present to learn about the site. Along each path toward the center, several panels would narrate the goals and plans for each of these nations in controlling the Ohio Country. While two sovereign

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Figure 10.4 Rendering of proposed memorial at Fort Laurens State Historic Site, Ohio

states—Great Britain and France—sought this land for colonial expansion and exploitation, the Colonials were looking to expand their recent claim of independence. The Lenape and other nations were simply trying to keep their homeland intact against all of these claims. (Though they aligned with the Colonials as the seemingly least threatening side.) Visitors would then stand and move within the context of these historic land claims in the very location where violence over those claims occurred. The memorial—theoretically, symbolically, and spatially—anchored past to present while it simultaneously transgressed scale by bringing four separate national claims into one location in northeastern Ohio. Thus, this monument, the students claimed, would raise better awareness of not only Fort Laurens, but they also aimed to move Fort Laurens’s role beyond the frontier of northeast Ohio itself and into a larger global examination of colonialism and territorial expansion (early signs of US Manifest Destiny and settler colonialism). This would ultimately suggest to visitors that Fort Laurens is a place worth learning about by connecting them to this larger global narrative. The students argued in their presentation that this more affective architecture would deliver that message through a more participatory visitor experience. Unfortunately, the Friends of Fort Laurens did not pursue these ideas. How­ ever, the story did not end in the spring of 2010. In the summer of 2017, Fort Laurens’s administration invited me to the fort’s centennial as an Ohio State Historic Site to illustrate these ideas again to a larger audience. After focusing on the history of commemoration at Fort Laurens and how a geographer interprets that landscape, I suggested this proposal as a future direction for commemoration—to move the commemoration of Fort Laurens beyond Ohio and to the larger geopolitical context within which it was conceived as a mili­ tary installation. It was at this point where, along with positive comments about the proposal, a spirited discussion evolved over decision-making at the site— who would control the means of commemoration, and whether a replica of the fort should be built instead of adding other commemorative aspects. This experience taught me that such evolution in the memorial landscape, from a basic—and often biased—retelling of the past to a more critical

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assessment of how we learn in our public spaces, oftentimes uncomfortably challenges a controlled narrative. It confronts visitors with a new set of facts, interpretations, and emotions, and seeks a change in how they understand the past represented at this site. It suggests American failure and American Indian victimization and reminds visitors that the French were also interested in northern Ohio. Creating more affective architecture in commemorative landscapes by involving visitors, giving them agency, and positioning their presence with the absence of the remembered creates a stark contrast to our traditional forms of memorialization. This is necessary as a form of public pedagogy. Just as John Dewey’s radical work a century ago, we are realizing that more publicly pedagogical memorials are essential to our understanding of the past and our position within it.

Concluding thoughts The very idea of landscape facilitates all this understanding. The structures that we interact with—in both symbolic and utilitarian ways—guide, inform, free, limit, and teach us our behaviors. Memorial landscapes are merely one way by which we can visualize and study these interactions. It is my desire to see more affective memorial landscapes, such as Syracuse’s, that are designed to incor­ porate visitors. As one student there stated about the Good Deeds Chairs in 2012, “[i]t unifies everyone on campus; it relates to everyone on campus … . It is important to be a part of something bigger than yourself on campus. Our mes­ sage, look back and act forward, is an important one a lot of people can take to heart” (Freundlich 2012). Both of these examples show that commemorative spaces are not only visual manifestations of the pedagogical power of landscape, but they may also be the most direct and powerful way of challenging the worst of our collective sins and turning us toward a less violent future. By bringing the pedagogical imperative of landscape into a classroombased pedagogy, I have been able to reinforce for students the critical role that memorial landscapes play in public pedagogy. Additionally, I’ve been able to take that message to a larger non-academic audience. According to students, these results have been generally positive despite a failure, thus far, to imple­ ment their collective ideas. Still, I press on, continuing my relationship with both Fort Laurens and the May 4 Visitors Center, working with students to improve their sites while moving the idea of pedagogy, landscape, and commemoration forward through more affective architectures.

References Alderman, Derek H., and Rachel M. Campbell. 2008. “Symbolic Excavation and the Artifact Politics of Remembering Slavery in the American South: Observations from Walterboro, South Carolina.” Southeastern Geographer 48 (3): 338–355. Alderman, Derek H., and Joshua F. J. Inwood. 2013. “Landscapes of Memory and Socially Just Futures.” In The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Cultural Geography,

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Part III

Affective methodologies Negotiating more-than-representational approaches in spatial design

11 The memory in bodily and architectural making Reflections from embodied cognitive science Andrea Jelic´ and Aleksandar Stanicˇ ic´

Introduction: the role of architecture in meaning- and place-making Architecture is often defined as an existential art because of its role in creating meaning in people’s lives by providing a structured framework for making sense of oneself and the world. On the one hand, architecture provides a shelter for biological, living bodies and a setting for situations of life, while on the other, it houses our world of ideas and memories by being inextricably linked—through our embodied existence—to the way we think and behave. This idea was explicitly taken and elaborated within the discourse of archi­ tectural phenomenology, which first emerged in the 1960s and was influenced by works of phenomenological philosophers like Martin Heidegger (2001). Architectural phenomenologists—prominent scholars such as Christian Norberg-Schulz, Dalibor Vesely, and Juhani Pallasmaa, to name only a few— have emphasized this capacity of built spaces to mediate between the world and our consciousness in order to create places for dwelling and belonging (Norberg-Schulz 1971; Pérez-Gómez 2016; Pallasmaa 2011; Vesely 2004; Zumthor 1999). Over the last two decades, these voices have gained addi­ tional strength in the context of the experiential and embodied turn, which occurred in both architectural theory and practice, and advocates for placing the experiencing and perceiving human body as a central concern of archi­ tectural design (Mallgrave 2018, 2013; Jelic´ 2015). Hence, inspired in parti­ cular by phenomenology of embodiment (Merleau-Ponty 1962) with the rediscovery of multi-sensoriality and materiality, a number of architects and scholars have argued that architecture acts as a meaningful scaffolding for human life by articulating the lived existential space into a system of exter­ nalized order, hierarchy, and memory (Pallasmaa 2013; Holl, Pallasmaa, and Pérez-Gómez 2006). In other words, architectural spaces as constructed settings give material expression to layering of time and culture. What has been particularly novel in these ideas in the last few years is the increasing recognition that our cognitive and experiential worlds as a whole— including meaningful encounters with architectural spaces—are shaped through our bodily interactions with the (built) environment. The influx of ideas from cognitive science, especially on embodied cognition (Varela,

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Thompson, and Rosch 1991; Gallagher 2017), prompted a new field of research attempting to reveal the brain and bodily mechanisms behind archi­ tecture’s ability to affect our memory and imagination. Insights from fields as diverse as embodied cognitive science, phenomenological philosophy, and environmental psychology, as well as the young discipline of neuroscience for architecture, have reinforced the conception of architectural experience as fundamentally embodied and emotional. Moreover, this growing body of knowledge illuminates how built spaces contribute to shaping our cognitive lives and have a profound impact on our overall psychosomatic health and behavior (Robinson and Pallasmaa 2015; Mallgrave 2013). According to this new perspective, architects’ design intentions are to be understood as a way of embracing the conditions of human embodiment to provide not only a solution to functional requirements, but also to create meaningful settings in which we can experience a psychosomatic completeness and sense of attunement with the world. While architecture of the everyday is primarily intended to be a silent background to life practices, architectural history is filled with instances of remarkable landmark buildings where this existential attunement is more explicitly—and often intentionally—articulated and experienced. In fact, in contemporary practice of designing memorial spaces and understanding of architectural heritage, the common approach to establishing collective memory and projected narratives is to create instances of distinctly memor­ able experiences of places (Sumartojo 2016; Micieli-Voutsinas 2017; Waterton and Dittmer 2014; Sumartojo and Graves 2018). To achieve this goal, these architectural settings follow a common design strategy—translating archi­ tecture’s capacity to structure our experience of being-in-the-world by creating particular atmospheres and spatial scenarios that invoke in the visitor intense emotional and bodily experiences. Accordingly, the desired effect of these orchestrated embodied experiences is to create a trigger condition for meaning to emerge. Such an experience-centered and embodied approach to designing memor­ ial and heritage architecture is also in line with the recent scholarship on affective and more-than-representational theories of understanding places of memory and memorialization. Concretely, they share the idea that meaning and memorial narratives are produced and communicated as a feeling through affective experiences and embodied encounters with and within the spaces of heritage. Namely, more-than-representational heritage studies emphasize the significance of affect, atmosphere, visceral responses, and materiality in shaping visitors’ experience of place, space, and time in mem­ orials and museums as an act of remembering in the present (see, for example, Micieli-Voutsinas 2017; Waterton 2014; Sumartojo 2016; Sumartojo and Graves 2018). This idea is complementary to recent critiques within archi­ tectural circles of the primacy of vision in contemporary professional practice (Pallasmaa 2005; Vesely 2004). Hence, instead of producing aestheticized and intellectualized designs, there is a call for appreciation of more than just

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visual appearance and architectural imagery (Pallasmaa 2011). Thus, there is a clear consensus in various fields of research on the value of ‘affective architecture’ strategy, especially in the context of building spaces for memory. However, while there is substantial literature on describing this strategy and its effects, what is currently missing is an in-depth understanding of why and how this strategy works at the level of the body. More precisely, the question is how memory and meaning are created through our bodies and spatial experiences, in synchrony with deliberate and carefully considered archi­ tectural design acts. Accordingly, our aim in this chapter is to start filling this gap by proposing a conceptual framework that will link the notion of ‘affec­ tive architecture’ and the state-of-the-art knowledge from embodied cognitive science. Starting from the perspective of the enactive-embodied approach to cogni­ tion (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991; Gallagher 2017; E. Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014) and the understanding of architectural experience as origi­ nating in the pre-reflective architecture-body communication (Jelic´ et al. 2016), we hypothesize that the fundamental pre-condition of memory- and meaning-making in memorial architecture resides in embodied spatial experiences. Specifically, the aim of this chapter is threefold. First, to sketch from the enactive cognition perspective the brain-body mechanisms underpinning human interactions with space, with a particular emphasis on the role of affect and affordances in the experience of architecture and the creation of memories. Second, to provide guidelines for thinking about memorial spaces and architectural heritage as intrinsically connected to the sense of individual and social self through our embodied responsiveness to architectural cues and spatial affordances, where the latter are understood as a materialization of sociocultural patterns, practices, and meanings. Third, to underline the importance of considering the politics of affect and embodiment in archi­ tectural design, and hence the architects’ role and limits in creating affective heritage. Thus, our analysis draws on several disciplinary and theoretical approaches, including philosophy of mind and empirical research in embo­ died cognition, architectural phenomenology, and affective geography, in order to articulate a transdisciplinary conceptual framework for under­ standing the relationship between memory, embodiment, and affect in spaces of architectural heritage. The argument unfolds as follows. We start by outlining key ideas of the enactive-embodied theory of cognition and its implications for con­ ceptualizing architectural experience. Concretely, we discuss how conceiving cognition as enactive, embodied, and affective translates into an understanding of architecture-body communication as originating in body-environment interactions, which are fundamentally meaningful because of the central role of affectivity and emotional responses in shaping these engagements. Next, we discuss the notion of the encultured human being and how our material environments, including architecture, are always imbued with social, political,

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and cultural meanings—highlighting that, accordingly, architectural affor­ dances are essentially cultural affordances. Thus, in line with ideas of cogni­ tion as situated and distributed/extended, we propose how architectural spaces as sociocultural scaffoldings—through embodied experiences—can influence our emotions, moods, and behaviors, as well as our memories and identities. Finally, we exemplify how spatial cues can be used to modulate people’s attention and bodily and affective experiences, and how this trigger­ ing has to be understood as both a form of power and a point where archi­ tects’ intentions translate into visitors’ bodily agency through the act of remembering-in-the-now.

Meaning and memory in the body: the enactive-embodied view The question we want to address in this section is how the enactive­ embodied view of cognition influences how we think and conceive of architectural experience and, hence, the related phenomena of interest— meaning- and memory-making. Therefore, we will focus on three aspects of the enactive-embodied approach and their implications for architecture. These are: (1) cognition as enactive and embodied—i.e., body-environment interac­ tions as the foundation of experience; (2) cognition as affective—i.e., the role of affectivity in engagement with the world and, thus, the built environment; and (3) cognition as situated and distributed/extended—i.e., how architectural spaces have an essential scaffolding role in co-constructing memories and meanings through the history of body-environment interaction patterns and practices. Embodied theories of cognition—of which the here discussed enactive­ embodied approach is a prominent strand—initially appeared in the early 1990s as a critique of the neurocentric and disembodied understanding of how the human brain works and of the disregard for lived experience in sci­ entific studies of the mind (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991; Thompson 2007; Lakoff and Johnson 1999). Essentially, these approaches intended to redefine the Cartesian splits (mind-body as well as brain-body) pervading major cognitive theories by arguing for the conception of cognition beyond neural events in the head and acknowledging the relevance of first-person experiential perspective for explorations of consciousness and cognitive phe­ nomena. In a sense, their efforts parallel the experiential and multi-sensory turn within architectural circles—they both emphasize the centrality of the body, understood as a biological and phenomenal whole, for the experience of the world and architectural space. Today, these embodied cognitive models are known as the 4E or 4EA approaches to cognition: they all share an understanding that cognitive processes are enactive, embodied, embedded, and extended (4E)—and affective (4EA) (Ward and Stapleton 2012; Newen, De Bruin, and Gallagher 2018). Specifically, the main idea of the enactive-embodied approach is that our ability to experience and cognize is grounded in bodily interactions with the

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environment (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991; Gallagher 2017). As Shaun Gallagher puts it clearly: “an organism is not a cognitive agent before coupling to an environment [because] the environment is an essential, con­ stitutive, element in making the organism what it is” (Gallagher 2017, 60). Hence, to say that cognition is enactive is to say that the mind is enacted or brought forth through continuous reciprocal interactions of the brain, the body, and the world. In the enactivist vocabulary, this is termed as a process of sense-making which transforms the world into a place of meaning for the living being (Thompson and Stapleton 2009; Colombetti 2010). Cognition is also embodied: it is not just something that happens in the head, but instead the body has a fundamental role in constituting the way we enact, perceive, and understand the world (Thompson 2007; E. Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014). Accordingly, this means that all these possibilities for body-environment interactions are determined and guided by the conditions of our embodiment— that is, the kind of body we have with its shape, skills, abilities, affective and motivational states, et cetera. In the context of architecture, the implications of the enactive-embodied perspective for experience and meaning are twofold. First, architecture and the body are dynamically interconnected in a two-way dependency: architecture expresses and is shaped upon man’s conditions of embodiment while the way spaces are built influences human mind and behavior. Accordingly, the idea of pre-reflective architecture-body communication has been proposed as a way to emphasize this interdependency between embodiment and designers’ articulation of built spaces as architectural affordances (Jelic´ et al. 2016; Jelic´ 2015). The significant aspect of this notion is the emphasis on the largely pre­ conscious and unconscious nature of people’s architectural experiences. Second, because cognition is understood as emerging from the processes of “skillful know-how”—that is, situated and embodied actions based on bodyenvironment coupling—one of the fundamental postulates of enactivist thinking is the notion that perceiving is a way of acting; perception is not something that happens to us—it is something we do (Noë 2004). In the same manner, we propose that the foundational nucleus of architectural meaning is something that is created—and always reenacted anew—in the interaction between the body and the spatial setting. Thus, the meaning of a situation and architectural space at hand is fundamentally embodied precisely because it emerges from the embodied action of a body in space. Before returning to a more detailed discussion of this hypothesis in the next section, it is valuable to introduce two other aspects of cognition—as affective and situated—in order to examine the relationship between affectivity, memory, and experience of architecture. In the enactive-embodied theory, affectivity stands as an inherent constituent in the perception-action cycle because it motivates and animates all organism-world interactions (Colom­ betti 2014; Colombetti and Thompson 2008). Accordingly, it is considered a key factor in the process of sense-making as it gives salience, meaning, and value to events, actions, and an organism’s environment as a whole. As

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Giovanna Colombetti (2014) argues, we have a fundamental lack of indiffer­ ence toward the world—and it is the reason why this basic, foundational affectivity permeates everything we are and do. Understood in this sense, affectivity (or affect) encompasses several related phenomena such as emo­ tions, feelings, and moods; moreover, it grounds them and makes them pos­ sible. Therefore, according to the enactivist view, all bodily systems are essential for being a cognitive and sentient agent—including not only the neural and sensorimotor system, but also all of the body’s fundamental homeostatic activity, for instance, all physiological, hormonal, and chemical self-regulatory processes (Colombetti 2014; Gallagher 2017). Importantly, many of these processes pertain to the unconscious level, of which we are not and cannot be aware, but they are influencing our way of being and acting upon the world. In that sense, it is posited that affect comprehensively permeates our perceptual openness to the world and acts as a transparent background that constrains and informs the features of the environment which show up for a perceiver at any moment in time (Bower and Gallagher 2013; Ratcliffe 2010). Thus, such pervasive integration of affective phenomena in one’s perceptual and cognitive experiences allows for shifts of attention, which are instances of one’s focus being drawn in one direction or another by the “affective ebb and flow” of what a person is experiencing (Bower and Gallagher 2013; Gallagher 2017). In short, what this means for architecture is that our experience of spaces is inherently affective and that, accordingly, all our perceptions, actions, and behaviors within built spaces depend on the workings of our emotional system, which is in turn influenced by and continuously adjusting to changes within the environment. As noted by scholars writing on atmospheres as well as affective heritage, this nature of our affective system has been used by architects throughout architectural history in order to create different and often powerful spatial atmospheres (Böhme et al. 2014; Edensor and Sumar­ tojo 2015; Zumthor 2006; Mallgrave 2013). Taking the enactivist perspective, this idea is further enriched by making affectivity reach even deeper: by emphasizing the central role of affect and emotional responses for giving meaning and value to bodily engagements with the world, it is implied that all architecture-body communication is inherently embodied and affective—and thus meaningful. The third aspect of embodied cognition that has important implications for understanding the link between memory, meaning, and architecture is the notion of situated (or embedded) and distributed (extended) cognition. In short, to say that cognition is situated means cognitive processes depend fun­ damentally on one’s spatial and temporal context while cognition is extended because cognitive processes take advantage of social and material environ­ ments (Ward and Stapleton 2012; Mengel 2017). Specifically, our aim here is to use these notions to highlight the role of the environment as a whole—and of architectural spaces in particular—in the process of constructing memories. According to the enactive-embodied view, remembering and memory-making

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should be considered as a kind of doing; it is a fundamentally creative, ima­ ginative, and dynamic process which can be understood as the activity of enactively constructing memories using biological, environmental, and social resources (Hutto and Peeters 2018; Mengel 2017). What is more, enactivists hold that memories come into being ‘on the spot’ by reenacting embodied procedures, often prompted and supported by external phenomena (Hutto and Peeters 2018). The complex system of remembering is argued to be essential to who we are as it includes a range of our memory capacities, such as procedural memory (i.e., the skillful and habitual know-how), episodic memory (for spe­ cific personal events and experiences), and autobiographical memory (con­ taining one’s self-narratives). Important for the purpose of this chapter, current research suggests that the environment can be pinpointed as having an important, if not even an essential role in the processes underlying these memory systems. For example, recent studies indicate that the spatial context serves as a scaffold for the imagination and episodic memory-making pro­ cesses—and, what is more, that the context of an event influences the mem­ ory’s quality (Robin 2018). In a similar fashion, it is evidenced that memories of emotional events have a persistence and vividness that other memories seem to lack (Brosch et al. 2013). The role of environments has also been implicated in the construction of autobiographic memories (Hutto and Peeters 2018), where the more non-representational character of evocative objects (e.g., a holiday souvenir compared to a photo or a video from the same holiday) has been proposed to give more freedom for imagining and defining our own self-narratives and identities (Heersmink 2018). What this suggests is that one of the reasons why spatial scenarios in ‘affective archi­ tecture’ can be such a fruitful design strategy is the link between memory, space, and affectivity. Hence, in alignment with arguments made by scholars of affective heritage and architectural phenomenology among others (Sumar­ tojo and Graves 2018; Pallasmaa 2011; Waterton and Dittmer 2014; Verger­ ont 2002), intensive emotional experiences of spaces can result in more memorability, while memorial narratives shared via some other media (like in an exhibition) can be made ‘to stick’ to visitors’ minds precisely thanks to the particularity—memorability—of a spatial setting and atmosphere. In addition, one of the most important implications of understanding cog­ nition as situated and extended is the link between embodiment, culture, and affordances, where the latter are defined as possibilities for action provided to us by the environment (E. Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014; van Dijk and E. Rietveld 2017). Namely, a notion of the “encultured human being” has been proposed following the conception of cognition as being enacted through bodily interactions with material, social, and cultural environments (Thomp­ son 2007). Furthermore, these intertwined environments are interpreted in enactive terms as being available to us as a “landscape of affordances” per­ taining to the human form of life (E. Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014). Defined in such a way, affordances become central to the enactive view by implying

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that the organism and the world are co-constituted precisely because there is a viable coupling between an organism’s perceptual and practical capacities and what the world affords. Importantly, any specific affordance available to a particular individual at any moment in time will depend on his/her (bodily) abilities, needs, and preferences (E. Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014). At the same time, because our world is always social, material, and cul­ tural, affordances are best understood as cultural affordances—they provide us with the sociocultural scaffolding for embodied experiences, and sig­ nificantly, they can both encode and reinforce patterned sociocultural prac­ tices, as well as solicit certain shared expectations and direct attention (especially in case of constructed human environments) (Ramstead, Veissière, and Kirmayer 2016; E. Rietveld et al. 2015). Such tight connection between our embodiment and culture has given rise to the idea of (collective) body memory, where the body is understood as a carrier of cultural tradition and practices through embodied skills and habits—which are, however, always codetermined and enacted through dense histories of embodied engagement with the material affordances and other bodies (Fuchs 2017; Mengel 2017). It is beyond the scope of this paper to provide an in-depth discussion of the similarities of these enactivist-based views and the previous extensive scho­ larship on how habitual activities and interactions with the built environment create the social scaffolding for collective remembering and identity

Figure 11.1 Sketch of the enactive-embodied conceptual framework for memory- and meaning-making in affective architecture

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(Halbwachs 1980; for discussion, see Fuchs 2017; Mengel 2017). However, we wish to highlight that architecture exists at the boundary between the cul­ tural/collective memory and the collective body memory because it has both a supportive and contingent role in memory-making. On the one hand, archi­ tecture is a constructed, materialized expression of the culture as a whole, which implicitly shapes people’s patterns of bodily interaction and behavior, while on the other, it acts as a scaffolding for all our memories and embodied narratives that constitute our sense of self and collective identities (see Figure 11.1). In the next section, we pursue this idea further and discuss how the above-described character of cognition, memory, and meaning as embodied has been translated into design strategies for affecting visitors’ bodily and emotional experiences in order to create memorable and meaningful spaces.

Embodied meaning and memory in architectural making Despite its historical role as a medium of symbolic representation of various societal, political, and cultural conditions—as it is the case as well in the scripted memorial narratives—the task of architecture is also to offer both individuals and societies a place for existential orientation and understanding of one’s place in the world. As argued by Alberto Pérez-Gómez (2006), architecture aims to communicate not a particular meaning, but rather a possibility of recognizing ourselves as complete and as having an existential foothold in space and time. In line with the enactive understanding of archi­ tectural experience, meaning, and embodied memory-making, it is this idea of recognition—allowing people to both confirm and reinvent their sense of self—that we wish to explore here. Specifically, our hypothesis is that the ‘affective architecture’ design strategy—influencing bodily and emotional responses of visitors through specific spatial affordances, attentional archi­ tectural cues, atmospheric elements like light, materials, sound, et cetera—is successful in creating meaningful spaces because it accesses one’s self, memory, and identity in a fundamentally embodied way. As captured in the notion of the pre-reflective architecture-body communica­ tion, an important characteristic of architectural experience is its pre-reflective dimension, and it is this possibility of being available to consciousness and conscious reflection in certain instances in which our capacity to link experi­ ence, places, memories, and meanings lie. As discussed in more detail else­ where (Jelic´ et al. 2016), the mechanism of body schema is one of the crucial elements in this process of becoming aware. Its relevance for architecture resides in its double task of (1) being responsible for the continuous tracing of bodily states and positions as we move through space, and (2) providing us with the capacity to have a pre-reflective bodily awareness of ourselves as experiencing subjects and embodied agents (Gallagher 2005; Berlucchi and Aglioti 2010; Gallese and Sinigaglia 2010). In the context of architecture, this capacity to have a pre-reflective bodily awareness of oneself and of a situation at hand can be hypothesized to provide architects with a playground for

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making moments of directed attention in response to intentionally designed spatial cues. In such instances, the attention is first moved to the body and then to the environment/architectural setting as a way of immersing the person in a present moment. What is more, this capacity of becoming aware also underpins the methods of auto-ethnography—a sensory ethnographic practice of using researchers’ observations of their own bodies and experiences as instruments of research, which is often used in scholarship on atmospheres and affective heritage (Waterton and Dittmer 2014; Yanow 1998). A good illustration of this pre-reflective architecture-body communication through body schema can be found in the design of Daniel Libeskind’s Garden of Exile in the Jewish Museum in Berlin. This space is designed as an allusion to a garden with forty-nine tall and thick concrete columns, which appear to be leaning and out of balance because they are placed on a sloped floor. Additionally, the only connection to the outside world is a view upwards, towards the sky. This particular design with the tilted floor surface acts as a direct and powerful corporeal suggestion of instability and insecur­ ity: because the space influences our body schema by disturbing our sense of balance and normal upright orientation, we are able to experience these changes as feelings of discomfort and disturbance, and hence, to potentially understand in a memorable way the design intention of creating the atmo­ sphere of existential fears. Accordingly, architectural meaning is created as embodied and embedded in space-visitor interaction through deliberate and careful architects’ design acts. Naturally, the richness of architectural expres­ sion allows for myriad ways of creating such attention-directing cues by affecting the body’s sensory systems (Edensor and Sumartojo 2015). Moreover, this capacity to affect the body to notice the world could also be proposed as a designers’ tool to link the individual experience with the col­ lective memory. A hypothesis could be put forward that moments of intense architectural experiences, as in memorial affective spaces, can modulate and shape the dynamical structure of self-patterns—including the self-constituents such as the minimal bodily, social, affective, narrative self (Gallagher and Daly 2018). Recent studies and theoretical models of the self suggest that multisensory manipulations, such as a change of posture, can update even more abstract narrative representations of one’s self (Tsakiris 2017). In that sense, the experience of memorial narrative and scripted meaning, which are built into the architectural structure itself, could become tightly interwoven with one’s sense of self and own identity—by way of embodied, multisensory experiences. At the same time, because these spatial settings present them­ selves to the visitors as cultural affordances—that moreover, direct their attention with spatial cues (such as the sloped floor and leaning columns in the Garden of Exile), they also modulate their affective states and openness to the possible engagements with spaces, exhibits, and other visitors; thus, a condition for shared intentionality is built. According to Ramstead, Veissière, and Kirmayer (2016), these feedback relations between shared attention and shared intentionality are essential for acquiring responsiveness to cultural

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affordances. While this area of research linking the self, (collective) memory, (collective) identity, and architecture as cognitive scaffolding is underexplored as of yet, we will not attempt to address these important questions here, and our arguments should be understood as proposed directions for future research. In addition, it should be underlined that it is not expected that the entire complexity of the Jewish Museum’s narrative is understood by the visitor through bodily engagement and specific atmosphere alone—they are triggers that can make people more receptive to the narrative and, by virtue of the effects of emotional arousal on consolidation of memories in the brain, help the museum visit leave a more profound and memorable experience. As scho­ lars discussing affective atmospheres have argued elsewhere, such places and events always involve anticipation that is built via different media, of which architecture is one example (Sumartojo 2016; Edensor 2012). Accordingly, it has been proposed that such atmospheres at/of memorial spaces present a mix of narrative, sensory, and affective elements tied into powerful combinations with political implications (Sumartojo 2016; Micieli-Voutsinas 2017). For this reason, in the next section, we will address the politics of atmospheres in the light of embodied cognition theory, and the relevant implications for the design and understanding of memorial and heritage architecture.

“Affective architecture” and the politics of atmospheres and embodiment As discussed above, recent works in the field of enactive-embodied cognition have emphasized that we are encultured human beings—that is, enactive and embodied agents living and interacting with sociomaterial environments. Such interconnectedness also means that our experiences and identities are intrinsi­ cally shaped—and thus can be influenced—through the kinds of environments in which we live. However, this notion of enculturation and the idea of archi­ tectural affordances as cultural also bring forward another perspective—that this influence is indivisibly linked to politics and power. The very fact that the notions of collective memory and heritage or patrimony became parts of the conceptual apparatus of both the nation-state and architecture emphasize their political connotations. Accordingly, it has been proposed that the design of architectural atmospheres is a form of soft power because of the primarily implicit, unconscious way in which they modulate and guide people’s beha­ viors, desires, and experiences (Borch 2014; Edensor and Sumartojo 2015). This power of atmospheres has been largely exploited as a way of influencing consumers based on the ideas of the “experience economy” (Klingmann 2007). Similarly, the emerging discourse of “affective urbanism” supports the idea of mobilizing temporary events and intense encounters with material structures in urban spaces devised by city-makers in order to influence dwellers’ embodied, affective experience of the city (Ernwein and Matthey 2018). As captured in the notion of the political affect, there is a critical link between the somatic and the social (Protevi 2009)—and it can be mediated through the built spaces and

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their designed atmospheres. Closer to the enactivist perspective, it has been argued that embodiment can be considered from two sides (Wehrle 2017): on the one hand, the body is a vehicle of being-in-the-world—it allows us to interact with our environment, to have and acquire skills, abilities, habits; the body is an agent of change as it can affect the world. At the same time, the body has been considered as used, formed, or even produced by dominant cultural norms and technologies of power; in other words, the body is affected and disciplined (Wehrle 2017; Fuchs 2017). For this reason, in the context of memorial architecture and the designing of ‘affective architecture,’ there is a need to put a word of caution to the implicit meanings and feelings that could be intentionally—or, perhaps worse—unin­ tentionally, created by architects. While there is growing scholarship on the connection between the politics of atmospheres and affective spaces (Borch 2014; Sumartojo 2016; Micieli-Voutsinas 2017; Waterton 2014), there is more work to be done to understand the bodily mechanisms behind the politics of affective design. However, what we wish to highlight here is that even though all body-environment interactions are always inherently political, they can never be fully determined. This is because of the dynamic and enactive nature of architecture-body communication: it is always an open-ended process, bringing new possibilities and meanings with every new encounter with archi­ tectural settings. This is why we can speak of the memory- and meaningmaking in architecture as being remembering-in-the-now. Therefore, it can be argued that using the strategy of ‘affective architecture’ can never result in the definitive disciplining of bodies—but instead, it is a “continuous labor of directing attention” (Ernwein and Matthey 2018, 15). The importance of this is especially evident in the ongoing redefinitions of understanding and designing heritage architecture. In fact, how desired poli­ tical messages of monuments and heritage architecture were conveyed and visualized changed drastically in the last century or so. Early explorations in memorial architecture borrowed their monumentality directly from classic architectural styles while their narratives were pretty straightforward and served mainly the glorification of a nation and/or its sovereign. Modern times brought diversification and abstraction of architectural forms and conse­ quently changed the nature of the interpretation of architectural heritage. Moreover, it became evident that original interpretations are susceptible to changes of cultural affordances with use—a phenomenon which is quite evi­ dent in Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, now a favorite picnic place of many Berliners—and over time with political and social changes, of which socialist monuments in Yugoslavia are an extreme example (Stanicˇ ic´ 2016). Those uncertainties regarding the ‘true reading’ of memorials and architectural heritage essentially reveal the limita­ tions of architectural design—what architects can or cannot do in the demanding task of ‘sending a message.’ Architects responded to these phenomena by focusing on the adaptable nature of spatial forms and their accompanying interpretations. Underlying

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narratives hence became more interactive for visitors, with proposals like ‘hardcore heritage’ (E. Rietveld and R. Rietveld 2017), which reinvented the purpose and way of engaging with narratives, typically by placing the body with all its capacities for making embodied and emotional meanings and memories at the center, as a driving force. The most successful designs try to incorporate the element of desired social change and/or reconciliation, such as projects like the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, founded by the Equal Justice Initiative and designed by MASS Design Group. In this building complex, the central position is the memorial square with steel rectangles, the size and shape of coffins, hanging over the visitors’ heads, and representing each of the counties in the United States where a documented lynching took place. The floor of the memorial is under the ground level, with the light source coming from above—through the steel rectangles—and thus placing a tremendous amount of psychological unease and even physical pressure on visitors’ bodies. Outside of the central piece, laid in rows, are corresponding steel columns identical to the ones hanging in the memorial. These columns are intended to be temporary: representatives of each of the counties are asked to acknowledge the lynching, claim their monument, and establish a memorial on home ground. Making amends with the past transforms the violence and relieves both the social tension and the physical tension created by the monument. The goal, therefore, is that social and historic reconciliation become visible in the transformed landscape surrounding the memorial. An important conclusion to draw from this is that embodied experience and embodied meaning are only a pre-condition—only one aspect of the entire story of what makes a memorial architecture. Undoubtedly, as exem­ plified in the previous section, the strong emotional and bodily experiences can be crucial triggers and essential elements in telling the story. However, as evidenced through the history of heritage architecture, this can be understood as an advantage—because it is the nature of architectural meaning and memory being linked to the body’s capacities of experience-from-interaction and the remembering-in-the-now that ensures that architectural design and visitors’ engagement with memorial spaces remain a playground for imagination and reinvention.

Conclusion In this paper, we have outlined a framework based on the enactive-embodied approach to cognition for how to think about memory- and meaning-making in architecture as originating in embodied spatial experiences. Accordingly, our aim in this chapter was to discuss the implications of conceiving cognition as enactive, embodied, affective, situated, and extended in three ways. First, architectural experience always becomes meaningful ‘from within’— that is, through our bodily interactions with the environment—and is inher­ ently affective. In that sense, it is possible to argue that architectural meaning

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and memorial narrative are always understood in an open-ended, rememberingin-the-now process. Second, design strategy, like ‘affective architecture,’ by influencing visitors’ bodily and emotional responses through a variety of spa­ tial cues and the directing of attention, can also affect one’s sense of self, as well as individual and collective memories and identities—which are all inter­ linked by virtue of human embodiment. Third, because architectural environ­ ments provide us with cultural affordances, there is a need to be cautious in the designs emphasizing the embodied experience and atmospheres in the light of implicit political, social, economic narratives imbuing the built spaces. Therefore, with the enactive-embodied perspective in mind, we argue for thinking about the embodied experience of architecture as an open-ended playground whose power of triggering emotional responses is both a source of understanding the scripted, designed narrative as well as a place for reinvention and necessary flexibility of heritage architecture in fast-changing times.

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Sumartojo, Shanti, and Matthew Graves. 2018. “Rust and Dust: Materiality and the Feel of Memory at Camp des Milles.” Journal of Material Culture 23 (3): 328–343. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183518769110. Thompson, Evan. 2007. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Thompson, Evan, and Mog Stapleton. 2009. “Making Sense of Sense-Making: Reflections on Enactive and Extended Mind Theories.” Topoi 28 (1): 23–30. https:// doi.org/10.1007/s11245-008-9043-2. Tsakiris, Manos. 2017. “The Multisensory Basis of the Self: From Body to Identity to Others.” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 70 (4): 597–609. https://doi. org/10.1080/17470218.2016.1181768. Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. 1991. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vergeront, Jeanne. 2002. “Shaping Spaces for Learners and Learning.” Journal of Museum Education 27 (1): 8–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/10598650.2002.11510455. Vesely, Dalibor. 2004. Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ward, Dave, and Mog Stapleton. 2012. “Es Are Good: Cognition as Enacted, Embo­ died, Embedded, Affective and Extended.” In Consciousness in Interaction: The Role of the Natural and Social Context in Shaping Consciousness, edited by Fabio Paglieri, 89–106. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins. Waterton, Emma. 2014. “A More-than-Representational Understanding of Heritage? The ‘Past’ and the Politics of Affect.” Geography Compass 8 (11): 823–833. https:// doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12182. Waterton, Emma, and Jason Dittmer. 2014. “The Museum as Assemblage: Bringing Forth Affect at the Australian War Memorial.” Museum Management and Curatorship 29 (2): 122–139. https://doi.org/10.1080/09647775.2014.888819. Wehrle, Maren. 2017. “The Normative Body and the Embodiment of Norms: Brid­ ging the Gap between Phenomenological and Foucauldian Approaches.” Yearbook of Eastern and Western Philosophy 2017 (2): 323–337. https://doi.org/10.1515/yewp h-2017-0023. Yanow, Dvora. 1998. “Space Stories: Studying Museum Buildings as Organizational Spaces While Reflecting on Interpretive Methods and Their Narration.” Journal of Management Inquiry 7 (3): 215–239. https://doi.org/10.1177/105649269873004. Zumthor, Peter. 1999. Thinking Architecture. Basel, Switzerland: Birkhäuser. Zumthor, Peter. 2006. Atmospheres: Architectural Environments—Surrounding Objects. Basel, Switzerland: Birkhäuser.

12 Architecture as memorialisation “Using” buildings to remember the Shoah Michelle Bentley

Pinkas Synagogue Located in the Czech Republic, Pinkas Synagogue dates back to the fifteenth century. Incorporated as part of Prague’s Jewish Museum in 1906, Pinkas was effectively shut down after the Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1939. A new museum was established in 1941 under Nazi control—although its pur­ pose was less to secure Jewish cultural heritage and more to catalogue any valuable property confiscated from Jews being deported to the concentration camps, including nearby Theresienstadt (Rupnow 2004, 143–45; Pavlát 2008, 124). With the war over, a decision was taken to restore the synagogue in 1950. Museum director and Holocaust survivor Hana Volavkova rejected suggestions that the building be turned into an exhibition hall, instead push­ ing forward a plan to make Pinkas a permanent memorial to the genocide. She said: “The Pinkas Synagogue is to fulfil a sacred purpose as a shrine” (Volavkova 1955, 119). Between 1954 and 1959, the names of 77,297 Bohe­ mian and Moravian Jewish victims of the Holocaust were inscribed en masse across the synagogue’s interior walls. The list is ordered first according to the town of residence and then by surname; dates of birth and death are also included (where the date of death was unknown, the deportation date was used). The “Memorial to the Victims of Nazi Persecution” opened to the public in 1959. Consequently, Pinkas is not simply a building that contains a memorial: it is a memorial in and of itself, whereby the synagogue has been deliberately redesigned to incorporate the names as part of its very architectural fabric (see Figure 12.1). The way in which the walls are covered with names means a visitor is emotively immersed in a seemingly endless catalogue of the mur­ dered. They are brought face to face with the reality of what the scale of genocide ‘looks’ like, while the presence of the names simultaneously pre­ serves the individual identities of the victims. The synagogue’s physical struc­ ture has been re-employed to facilitate an affective expression of the inherent ‘mass-ness’ of the Holocaust, engaging the visitor in both acts of witnessing (becoming aware of the scale of killing by perceiving the victims’ names) and memorialisation (commemorating the individual victims through the process

Figure 12.1 Jewish Museum in Prague (I)

Figure 12.2 Jewish Museum in Prague (II)

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of naming).1 This conflation of monumental architecture with architectural memorialization makes visitation at Pinkas highly affective and compelling (see Figure 12.2). Visitors describe the site as a “moving experience” (Frankel 2016), suggesting that it is, indeed, the “most moving” part of the entire Jewish Museum (Sundar 2012). In analysing the way in which Pinkas’s physical structure has been employed to express the Holocaust, this chapter examines the role of perfor­ mativity in relation to ‘more-than-representational’ architecture. The phrase ‘more-than-representational’ expresses a significant turn in the analytic debate on architectural meaning (Waterton 2014, 824) and is understood here as the idea that “what matters about architecture and buildings is not simply meaning, as expressed in the order of the symbolic and in human attach­ ment to that order” (Jacobs, Cairns, and Strebel 2012, 128). Architecture contributes to an experience on the part of a user that comprises ‘more than’ the sum of its physicality, especially where this is connected to affect.2 While the current literature recognises performative elements as relevant to affective experience, this study places performativity at the very centre of the relationship between architecture and those who engage with it. In applying this to Pinkas, the chapter identifies two key ways in which the memorialization of architecture is performative. First, the conflation of building as memorial uses architecture to create an affective and immersive experience. Second, ‘more-than-representational’ registries of memorialisation (i.e., commemorating names) defamiliarise the visitor. These examples underpin the article’s wider conclusion: performativity is both essential and central to comprehending how architecture influences what people do/perform, specifically where this engenders affect.

Performativity and architecture Before discussing Pinkas’s performative construction, analysis must first establish what ‘performativity’ and ‘performance’ are. The definition of each concept, as well as the difference (or not) between them, is heavily contested. Both ideas, however, have been employed to conceptualise Holocaust mem­ orialisation and the idea of interactive visitor engagement as an effective means of transmitting knowledge. While ‘performativity’ has been used within a variety of theoretical frameworks (Sedgwick 2003, 6–7), the concept is typically associated with the work of J. L. Austin and his classic text How to Do Things with Words (1975). Austin’s work is frequently seen as the theore­ tical origin of performativity and, therefore, a solid basis for understanding the concept (Culler 2007, 137; Loxley 2007, 1). Austin proposes the idea of the speech act, which claims that an utter­ ance—or the manifestation of an utterance within a text—is an intrinsically meaningful and performative act. Within this, Austin distinguishes between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary force—that is, between the actual meaning of an utterance (typically associated with a realist ontology

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that draws a line between language and reality), what the agent employing that utterance intended by it, and the effects of that utterance. Importantly, it is recognised that the concept of the speech act can apply to non-linguistic expressions (Sweetser 2000, 310). Consequently, this theoretical model can be used in relation to Pinkas (as well as other memorials/museums) in that the synagogue’s architectural design intentionally seeks not only to create a meaningful space for its patrons, but also ‘does’ something through acts of witnessing and memorialisation. As memorial, the building both expresses the Holocaust and invites visitors to engage via their own expression of affective remembrance. Performativity has an uneasy relationship with performance. Mieke Bal (2002, 175) differentiates between the two: “Performance—the unique execu­ tion of a work—is of a different order from performativity, an aspect of a word that does what it says.” Put another way, performance is grounded in representational aesthetics (where parallels are most commonly drawn with a theatre actor on a stage). In effect, performance maps onto Austin’s con­ ception of perlocutionary force where this comprises the outcome of perfor­ mativity, or what is more-than-representationally possible. Critically, this is not to argue that performativity as a whole (i.e., locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary as a single act) can or cannot be deemed performance alone. Within the context examined here, however, a model that separates performativity and performance allows analysis to differentiate between what a memorial seeks to achieve in terms of the visitor experience and how that experience is realised; in other words, what is aesthetically possible versus what is aesthetically palpable. This approach complements the work of Gaynor Bagnall (2003, 87), who states that visitation at memorial sites is “informed by performativity”; Vivian Patraka (1999, 91, 122), who calls museums “a performance site,” specifically “a cultural performance of Holocaust history”; and Bryoni Trezise (2014), who distinguishes between Holocaust performative and Holocaust affect. The role of performativity in affective architecture is frequently over­ looked. For example, Ben Anderson (2009, 77) conceptualises ‘affective atmosphere’ in respect to architecture. Drawing on Mikel Dufrenne’s idea of atmosphere as aesthetic, Anderson proposes a compelling account as to how atmosphere plays into the ‘more-than-representational.’ Anderson’s theory is especially relevant to memorials and other sacred spaces (as per the focus of this study) where it is recognised that such buildings intrinsi­ cally generate affective atmospheres (Dora 2011; Finlayson 2012). There is a reason why no one shouts in a church, or why people speak in hushed tones at a memorial. This behaviour expresses not just respect but a socially constructed response to the hallowed atmosphere such sites engender. Yet Anderson fails to consider the connection between affect and performance, where architecture can generate and facilitate performance—and, more spe­ cifically, where that performance underpins a ‘more-than-representational’ experience. The person who attends a memorial is not merely visiting a

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physical space but performs an act of memorialisation. It is this act that pushes that person’s engagement beyond a simple presence within a physical building and into the ‘more-than-representational.’ Consequently, perfor­ mance is essential in comprehending the person’s experience of affect in relation to the given architecture. Atmosphere cannot be divorced from what the user ‘does.’ Elsewhere, the debate on affective architecture has begun to recognise performativity. For example, it is acknowledged that affect has “tangible effects on our surroundings and can shape the very nature and experience of our being-in-the-world” (Davidson and Milligan 2004, 524) and comprises “a sense of push in the world” whereby architecture derives meaning (Thrift 2004, 64). Within this context, affect is linked to performativity and how a building’s users interact with their physical environment (Doss 2008, 229; Rose, Degen, and Basdas 2010), including the ‘more-than-representational’ (Kraftl and Adey 2008; Jacobs, Cairns, and Strebel 2012; Buser 2014; Waterton 2014). As such, affective architecture can be deliberately har­ nessed through creative architectural design, to the extent that affect can be ‘curated’ (Waterton 2018). Architecture is itself a speech act, where it invites others to engage with both its physical and ideational structure. This approach can subsequently be applied to memorials/memorialisation and the ways in which performative experience is created via architectural design (Micieli-Voutsinas 2017). The work of Shoshana Felman (1995, 56) is espe­ cially useful here, where she models the Holocaust performative as something that lies beyond the cognitive—a conceptualisation that strongly parallels the ‘more-than-representational.’ These ideas of performative memorialisation and affective architecture can be brought together to intellectualise an experience that is more than the sum of its parts. Not only does a physical site ‘do’ something in creating a certain environment, but that environment also constructs a curated space for the visitor to ‘do’ something as well, where this goes beyond the building itself. This argument is especially relevant in cases where memorial performance is understood as transformative (Cooke and Frieze 2015, 159). Performativity is not limited to bringing about an affective experience, but also changes the visitor in some way. Such an approach adds weight to the ‘more-than-repre­ sentational’ where this conceptualises not only the idea that architecture is affective, but that it is affective to the point of transforming its user. A user does not just observe a piece of architecture or experience affect in doing so; they can be mentally and/or ideationally altered as a consequence of their performative engagement with the physical site. Critically, the theoretical model proposed here does not divorce the indivi­ dual from the idea of memorialisation as a social process, or suggest that the individual’s performance does not take place within a pre-existing social con­ text and process of meaning-making (Steele 2006, 4). Nor does this analysis argue that everyone will engage with a memorial site in the same way (i.e., that they will enact the same form of performance), if at all. Indeed, Daniel

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Reynolds (2016, 349) argues that some people are incapable of bearing wit­ ness and memorialisation. Analysis must also consider that acts of witnessing/ memorialisation may not be genuine—that a visitor may perform a ‘thea­ trical’ act that lacks authenticity. A visitor may simply ‘do’ what they feel they are supposed to according to social convention, without any real com­ mitment or internalisation. This is especially relevant if we consider that many visitors attend memorials as an act of tourism (Walter 2009, 52). The Jewish Museum is one of Prague’s top tourist sites; it is reasonable, therefore, to assume that people visit not to deliberately engage in memorialisation, but simply because it is listed in Lonely Planet. So-called dark tourism, however, is still performative (McDaniel 2018). Furthermore, this situation does not preclude that, when the visitor attends a memorial, affective architecture will still place them in a position of a ‘more-than-representational’ performance regardless of motivation. James Young (1993, xii) argues that visitors inevi­ tably become part of a ‘memorial performance’ just by being present. As such, even where these caveats are taken into account, they fail to undermine the core argument that performativity is significant in the comprehension of affective architecture. In terms of connecting this conceptualisation of performativity to Pinkas, on-site fieldwork was carried out. This analysis included: observational ana­ lysis of both the architecture itself and the visitors (e.g., documenting and assessing visitor reactions and movements around the site), as well as infor­ mal and unstructured interviews (n=23) with visitors. The observation was specifically designed to be unobtrusive (the observer would appear as a visitor themselves) and all interviews were carried out at the end of the visit, so that the visitation experience was not interrupted or biased by the interviewer. Following the fieldwork, additional data were gathered from online eyewitness accounts of visitation to the synagogue, obtained through Internet searches. This second data set was acquired to both supplement and corroborate the evidence gathered in the initial fieldwork.

At Pinkas Memorialisation performance can fall into one or more of numerous cate­ gories. For example, memorials can be: educational, whereby performativity involves transmitting knowledge (Moore 2009, 48, 51); a vehicle for healing or reconciliation (Carroll 2014—although the success of this is disputed; see Giblin 2014, 500; Viejo-Rose 2011, 465–66); a performance of security (Heath-Kelly 2017); a space for the expression of extreme feeling (Jacobs 2011, 154, 157); and/or a numinous experience (Cameron and Gatewood 2003; Latham 2013). While many of these performances apply to Pinkas, this article focuses on one: expressing the scale of killing associated with the Holocaust. Affective performativity in relation to this is achieved in two key ways at Pinkas: the direct engagement of the synagogue building with the commemoration of names and defamiliarisation.

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Naming names I was rooted to the spot, for all around me, on every wall, ceiling to floor, were row upon row of names, each as if bleeding into one another with no beginning and no end, hand painted in gold, red, or black letters. I felt as if they had gripped me by my wrist and were telling me to stop: ‘Wait. Look, see who we are.’ (Carlson 2015)

The names at Pinkas have a story of their own. Less than a decade after the memorial was opened, the Czech Republic’s communist regime erased the names from the synagogue’s walls (Seifter 2005, 80; Eizenstat 2003, 31; Frankl 2003, 184). Pinkas had initially been viewed favourably by the gov­ ernment, who were keen to play up the terrors of the Nazi regime as part of their wider anti-fascist narrative (Veselská 2008, 115). It was later felt, how­ ever, that the memorial could potentially incite the country’s Jewish popula­ tion, which was viewed as politically dangerous (Baumel 1995, 147). Claiming that the walls needed to be repainted due to ‘damp,’ the names were removed. Following the Velvet Revolution, however, the Federation of Jewish Com­ munities took charge of the museum and re-opened Pinkas on Holocaust Memorial Day 1996, with the names fully re-inscribed. There would, however, be one more repainting. In 2002, the Vltava River flooded, causing water damage to nearly one-quarter of the names. The names were restored soon thereafter thanks to funding from the World Monument Fund.

Figure 12.3 Jewish Museum in Prague (III)

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It is these names that make Pinkas such an emotive experience. While the synagogue intrinsically exudes an affective atmosphere as a religious building, it is the names that cover its walls that transform the building into ‘more’ than a spiritual space (see Figure 12.3). A critical point is that there are names. Naming is a powerful act, especially in relation to human rights abuse (Bronkhorst 1998, 457–60). Naming overcomes dehumanisation, as discussed by Judith Butler (2004) in her work on grievability. Butler essentially con­ structs death as a hierarchical concept wherein certain lives are considered more valuable—more grievable—than others. These others are thereby dehu­ manised: “If violence is done against those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated” (2004, 33). By classifying the ‘other’ as not human, their lives are stripped of meaning and their deaths deemed irrelevant. The perfor­ mativity of name-based commemoration gives the victim back their humanity and identifies them as worthy of memorialisation—an important contrast to the way in which the Holocaust removed this status from the murdered in that they were not considered as having valid life. Recognising individual victims of the Holocaust, while at the same time communicating the scale of killing, is problematic. The extreme number of deaths is frequently expressed through collective statistics or illustrative case studies due to the difficulties in commemorating every individual fatality in a total of six million. These representations, however, only measure the horror and cannot necessarily engender any meaningful engagement with the con­ cept of the mass killing of individual people (Michaels 1996, 9; Anders and Dubrovskis 2003, 16; Popescu 2012, 103). In response, many genocide muse­ ums/memorials have adopted performativity in order to promote such engagement (Steele 2006, 3; Messham-Muir 2004; Remes, MacCulloch, and Leino 2014). At Pinkas, the aim has been to reject non-performative statis­ tical measurements and “infuse[s] these statistics with human dimensions” (Arnold and Stargardt 2003, 65). While the 77,297 names represent only a fraction of the overall Holocaust, Pinkas replaces the statistic with a perfor­ mative expression of mass killing by showing what a number (of deaths) ‘looks’ like when you recognise every individual. The performance here is two-fold: witnessing (becoming aware of the scale of killing by perceiving the victims’ names), and memorialisation (commemorating the individual victims through the process of naming). Architecture facilitates performativity by creating a sufficient physical space for the names: “Every inch of the walls of the Pinkas Synagogue is covered with NAMES” (HaLevy 2015). Consequently, architecture provides the means by which the performances of witnessing and memorialisation can occur, where visitors can view and access the names. Such performance com­ prises a highly affective experience; as one visitor said: “I stared at those names and dates until they ran like rivers of blood” (Rothberg 1973, 200). This facilitation, however, is not merely one of practicality. The deliberate use of architecture in this way also engages with the ‘more-than-representational.’

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One aspect is that the sacred nature of the synagogue is effectively transposed onto the names, where these now form part of the architectural structure. The names, and the affective performance they engender, become associated as sacred themselves. The names are the synagogue; therefore, they become hal­ lowed also. A further feature is that, by using the synagogue’s walls to com­ municate the names, the architecture expresses the harsh reality of how much space is required to list so many victims. The sheer fact that an entire building can be filled with names is the point and a key source of affect. The physical structure is effectively transformed into a measuring stick by which the visitor gauges the extent of the names according to the extensive space required in which to list them. The building comprises a frame of reference that subsequently expresses the scale of death. Architecture creates the perspective necessary for the performance of witnessing, even where—somewhat ironically—that per­ formance centres on a realisation that the Holocaust is something that lies beyond (representational) perspective. In addition, the synagogue’s wider architectural layout is employed to engender affective performativity. The list of names continues as the visitor progresses throughout the various rooms within the synagogue: they keep moving, but there are still more victims. One of the most compelling moments at Pinkas (according to the fieldwork interview data) is when the visitor has witnessed the main worship hall and thinks that this substantial space con­ tains the full list of victims. The visitor then ascends a small set of steps that reveal a further spacious level, also covered in red, gold, and black. This unexpected continuation of the names again highlights the dreadful amount of space necessary to realise this exercise of listing. The names of the victims keep coming, filling room after room. The re-employed use of the building’s layout in this manner creates an emotive ‘layering’ effect, whereby the list of victims builds up in the mind of the visitor—each layer comprising a new shock and a new reminder of the horror that the visitor is witnessing. In doing so, this approach makes the performance of witnessing more affective and dynamic. Affective performativity is also facilitated by the way Pinkas’s architecture constructs the list of names as an immersive experience, both physically and emotively. The often floor-to-ceiling names, carried throughout the building, surround and immerse the visitor: “The sheer volume of names and dates overwhelms you; you are helpless, speechless in that sea of black and white that surrounds you. And the ghosts are all around you” (Weiss 2011).3 The total and inescapable nature of this environment enables performance by fully engaging the visitor in the acts of witnessing and memorialisation. Critically, this sense of immersion is exacerbated by the lack of anything other than the names within the synagogue. The main worship hall contains a pulpit and other original architectural features, but there is little else except for the names. An interesting comparison can be drawn at this point between Pinkas and the other synagogues in Prague that make up the Jewish Museum (Maisel, Klausen, and Spanish), which are utilised as exhibition halls. These

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other spaces are highly ornate and decorative, with exquisite Jewish cultural artefacts on display. At Pinkas, there are only the names, painted on other­ wise bare white walls. This contrast demonstrates the deliberate emphasis constructed explicitly on the names at Pinkas and the way that its architecture has been employed to promote immersion and control the visitor’s focus, which in turn influences performance. Overall, the relevance of Pinkas’s architecture is not simply concerned with the provision of physical space for the names, but a case where the building itself is directly performative. This performativity makes Pinkas ‘more-than­ representational.’ This memorial is not merely a collection of walls, or even the names written on them. The combination of architecture and name-based commemoration makes a significant statement regarding the nature and extent of the Holocaust—one that is realised through the affective perfor­ mance of the visitor. The deliberate use of the synagogue and its structure to facilitate that performance means that Pinkas is more than the sum of its physical reality. The deliberate re-employment of the site from religious space to memorial (specifically as opposed to a building that contains a memorial) creates an experience that goes far beyond bricks and mortar. Furthermore, the way in which visitors intimately interact with the building makes its architecture an essential aspect of that experience. Pinkas is not just a physical space in which witnessing and memorialisation can occur, but one where the very architecture shapes and governs the nature of those performances, including whether or not the visitor performs at all. Pinkas is not architecture that is merely observed; the architecture comprises an intrinsic and integral part of the memorial environment. Defamiliarisation Performativity at Pinkas is also linked to defamiliarisation. Diana Popescu (2012, 105) demonstrates that defamiliarisation promotes performative engagement, specifically where this relates to the Holocaust. By making spaces unfamiliar, this aesthetically prolongs the memorialisation experience, allowing for increased engagement by/with the visitor. The visitor takes time to absorb and reconcile their alien surroundings, which in turn creates extra space and opportunity for interactive performance (Bal 1992, 562). Com­ ments by author Andrea Goldsmith—who has published a novel on memor­ ialisation, The Memory Trap—reflect this. Identifying Pinkas as one of her favourite memorials, Goldsmith says that “a good monument actually has you pulling out of your own self and your own life” (quoted in Steger 2013). Defamiliarisation both disarms and engages the visitor, not least as setting the stage for performative behaviour. Defamiliarisation is especially relevant when considered within the context of Susan Moeller’s (1999) ‘compassion fatigue.’ Moller states that people can become normalised to the experience of horrific death. When an actor is repeatedly exposed to extreme events, often through the media, they will become immune to the horrors that these events

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express. This immunity, especially to what we see, means that bearing witness to horror may be insufficient to overcome this barrier to performance. Pinkas effectively addresses the concept of compassion fatigue by making the acts of witnessing and memorialisation defamiliar. The shocking effect of the names (evidenced in the witness testimony above) precludes the impact of normal­ isation by re-constructing the Holocaust in original and innovative terms. This opens up new possibilities for performance by re-engaging the visitor on a novel level of expression. There are a number of ways in which defamiliarisation is achieved at Pinkas. First, the extensive list of names in respect of the Holocaust is origi­ nal. As already stated, the problematic nature of communicating the scale of killing means that most visitors will be more used to the Holocaust as expressed through statistics, not least the reference to six million fatalities. Visitors may have never previously conceptualised the Holocaust in a manner that combines the collective and the individual, as at Pinkas. Second, to the extent that visitors may have been previously subject to lists of com­ memorative names (for instance, on war memorials), these lists are typically short enough to be confined to traditional forms of memorial, such as pla­ ques.4 The contrast between these shorter lists and the magnitude of the Holocaust is defamiliar and engages the visitor in a performative act of wit­ nessing whereby they make this comparison. Third, in a related point, more familiar commemorative lists not only are typically not extensive enough to fill an entire building, they are not part of a building. Within this context, the role of architecture again becomes a major factor in analysis. The conflation of a physical building with the commemoration of names is original, creating defamiliarisation and promoting performative behaviour. Fourth, in expand­ ing this point further, visitors will not usually associate such an extensive presentation of the dead with a synagogue. A synagogue is a place of worship, not a memorial in itself. This is not to suggest that this situation does not have parallels; for example, religious buildings often house individual mem­ orials, and it can be argued that any synagogue in Europe not demolished or desecrated as a consequence of World War II acts as a type of memorial. Yet at Pinkas, the names have taken over not only the physical confines of the synagogue, but also its purpose—thereby creating a sense of unfamiliarity. In questioning ‘where’ they are (i.e., synagogue or memorial), visitors engage in performative behaviours around witnessing and memorialisation. The extent to which naming leads to a conflict of space and purpose facilitates this per­ formance. The alien nature of the environment promotes performativity and informs performance by presenting a new way of thinking about scale that transcends the limitations and normalisation of the statistic.

Conclusion Performativity is an essential and central concept in understanding affective architecture, and specifically the concept of the ‘more-than-representational.’

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While this issue has sometimes been overlooked as a factor in the affectarchitecture connection, this article demonstrates that performativity is a necessary consideration that should feature at the very heart of debate. Affect can be found in what people do and the roles they perform. Where archi­ tectural design can deliberately and directly shape that performance, there­ fore, performativity must comprise a key element of analysis. The importance of performativity is made clear in relation to Pinkas Synagogue. Here, the synagogue building has been explicitly re-employed in order to deliver an immersive and performative experience, one that embraces both the acts of witnessing and memorialisation. By conflating the synagogue’s physical structure with the commemoration of names—whereby the names are incor­ porated within its very architectural fabric—visitation becomes an affective performance. Critically, Pinkas represents not merely the creation of a mem­ orial, but the direct ‘use’ of physical architecture to generate a performative experience. The very building is a speech act. Consequently, this case study demonstrates how important performativity is to engendering ‘more-than­ representational’ experiences within the context of architecture and archi­ tectural design. Pinkas is compelling only because the visitor engages with architecture as part of a wider performance, and it is within this performance that we can locate affect.

Notes 1 The intention inherent to Pinkas’s performativity is discussed here as facilitating ‘expression’ as opposed to bringing about an understanding of the Holocaust on the part of the visitor, where it is argued that the Holocaust is beyond comprehension (e.g., Sicher 2000, 65; Duffy 2000, 303). 2 Affect is understood here according to Eric Shouse’s (2005) prominent definition as “a non-conscious experience of intensity,” where this is distinct from emotion as “the projection/display of a feeling.” 3 The expression ‘overwhelming’ is frequently used to describe the visitor experience; see also Katalin Deme (2015, 254). 4 The concept of collective naming on a large scale, however, is not exclusive to Pinkas; see, for instance, the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC.

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Waterton, Emma. 2018. “Curating Affect: Exploring the Historical Geography-Heri­ tage Studies Nexus at Sovereign Hill.” Australian Geographer 49 (1): 219–235. http s://doi.org/10.1080/00049182.2017.1336966. Weiss, Stewart. 2011. “In Plain Language: The Ghost of Judaism Past.” Jerusalem Post, November 25, 2011. www.jpost.com/Magazine/Opinion/In-Plain-Langua ge-The-ghost-of-Judaism-past. Young, James E. 1993. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

13 Using game engines to create activist spatial experiences of the occupation of Palestine Rusaila Bazlamit

Introduction Sites of atrocity and political violence exist all over the world. Memorial museums are contemporary examples of built spaces dedicated to preserving histories of atrocity. Some of these museums started as memorials and then developed into museological sites with more traditional educational missions, whereas others originated as museums with commemorative spaces. Responding to specific historical events such as the Jewish Holocaust and South African Apartheid (Hamber 2012), “[m]ore memorial museums have been opened in the last 10 years than in the last 100 years (Jenkins, 2005)” (Hamber 2012, 269). One reason for this ‘commemorative urgency’ is that many survivors of these events are passing away (Landsberg 1997). Therefore, now more than ever, there is a renewed interest in documenting the oral histories of survivors of these historical events and preserving evidentiary objects of these crimes against humanity. Memorial museums are first and foremost didactic spaces; they present and communicate cultural memories aimed at raising awareness about their respective subjects of history (Teeger and Vinitzky-Seroussi 2007). An important outcome of raising awareness is thus taking action against similar injustices still happening in the world, or learning from the past to ensure it never happens again (Hamber 2012). However, people in long-running or ongoing contemporary political conflicts do not have the capacity to build permanent physical sites dedicated to raising awareness about their situations. Such ‘moral education’ therefore lacks a deeper understanding of how changing ‘hearts and minds’ can effect real change with regard to alleviating contemporary forms of political violence and suffering. This chapter introduces the term ‘activist spatial experiences’ to describe a new kind of virtual memory environment generated through more-thanrepresentational encounters with people, places, and objects, spatially abstracted from their primary audiences. In these virtual memory environments, the primacy of the audience’s spatial encounter with the ‘authentic’ is thwarted by digital technologies, generating instead experiential simulations with the ‘real’ or ‘authentic.’ This applies to contemporary conflict zones

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where affectual encounters with the ‘real,’ the survivors, the object, and the site are in many cases unfeasible. Such is the case of the ongoing Palestine/ Israel situation. The Palestine/Israel situation is one of the long-standing conflicts of our times; it is highly contested and considered one of the most influential con­ temporary conflicts that transcend the Middle East (Annan 2012). The Nakba of 1948 is a pivotal moment for Palestinians, and many of its survivors have passed away. In recent years, a wave of revisionist Israeli historians have actively challenged their state-backed understandings of the political conflict at hand (Azoulay 2011; Beinin 2004; Pappé 2006; Hilal and Pappé 2010; Shlaim 1999). These narratives echo narratives prevalent in Palestinian and Arab scholarship on the situation (Masalha 1999). Highlighting how ‘Arab narratives’ of the conflict have been dismissed as untrustworthy or irrational (Said 1984), terms like ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘apartheid’ are being used more frequently in recent years to describe some of the political subjugation of Palestinians by the state of Israel due to the advancements of international scholarship on the subject (Finkelstein 2006; Harlow 2013; Makdisi 2010; Pappé 2006; Hilal and Pappé 2010; Stevens and Elmessiri 1977; Weizman 2007). As a long-standing inequity on part of the international community to acknowledge Palestinian humanity, an equivalent memorial landscape dedi­ cated to understanding the Palestinian situation remains unresolved. Palesti­ nian narratives about their situation are generally still inaccessible and usually overlooked by Western audiences. However, with the rise of social media and alternative media, Palestinians now have valuable resources to share their narratives on their own terms, away from traditional media outlets. Thus, Arabs and Palestinians can “break the silence” by resisting and contesting the misrepresentation, and disseminating images and messages of their own (Said 2001). To further explore how an activist spatial experience can be designed, a prototype has been created and evaluated as part of this research (Bazlamit 2018a). The prototype titled “re:Visit Palestine” proposed communicating alternative and counter-narratives of the Palestinian situation. By exposing narratives from the Palestinian perspective, the prototype aimed at raising empathetic awareness of the plight of Palestinians. To document and share experiences of those living in this conflict zone, this research explores how virtual memory environments can foster collective memories of living under Occupation as well as evaluate their potential to affect international audiences (Bazlamit 2018a). These ‘activist spatial experiences’ are designed to be mobile, temporal, adaptable, and low-cost. This research will add to the investigation of possible media exposure for political narratives which have been contested, over-sha­ dowed, neglected, or silenced by better-resourced narratives. The introduction of counter-narratives highlights new perspectives which can generate a more balanced and positive change (Fuad-Luke 2013). Building from the conven­ tional roles of memorial museums of education, these ‘activist spatial

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experiences’ can raise awareness about contemporary political conflicts and evoke empathy towards people living through them. This, in turn, can induce a will to change and alleviate the sufferings of those people.

Designing affective spaces Designing more-than-representational spaces with affective experiences in mind has been paramount in memorial museums (Micieli-Voutsinas, forth­ coming). A memorial museum is: “A specific kind of museum dedicated to a historic event commemorating mass suffering of some kind” (Williams 2007, 8). Another term that is used in this context is “conflict museums,” which Hamber defined as: “permanent sites of conservation and exhibition that focus on the legacy of political violence” (Hamber 2012, 269). These mem­ orial museums and spaces are “transferential spaces” (Landsberg 1997)—that is, spaces where people enter into experiential relationships with events that they did not live through in real life (Landsberg 1997). The importance of transferential spaces lies in their ability to communicate memories and nar­ ratives to people who are not genealogically connected to the subject matter (Landsberg 1997). As a result, one of the primary objectives of the memorial museum is to commemorate painful pasts in hopes that future generations will not repeat the mistakes of history (Sodaro 2018). In these hybrid commemorative spaces, moral education is a primary factor, including the conservation of memories, artefacts, stories, and shared values (Hasian 2004). Museums in general function as elicitors of experiences and thoughts (Hein 2000). This is even more so apparent in memorial museums. For example, various Holocaust memorial museums create spatially dynamic environments based on memory narratives in hopes of generating evocative experiences for their visitors (Meadows 2003). The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, for instance, is structured with complex spaces ranging from narrow corridors to bridges, to towers, backed with photographs and artefacts—all in the service of enhancing the narrative experience through embodiment (Linenthal 1994). Crang and Tolia-Kelly (2010) highlight the need to under­ stand how affect, emotions, and physical interaction between visitors and the displays work at national heritage sites. Sites of “affective heritage” do not rely on authoritative narratives for creating meaning at commemorative sites; instead, they rely on the visitors to such sites to “feel meaning as it is pro­ duced through their embodied encounters with and within memorial spaces” (Micieli-Voutsinas 2017, 94). While affect has been discussed in philosophy for many centuries, there is no set definition of affect (Kraftl and Adey 2008; Thien 2005; Thrift 2004; Waterton 2014). Thien gives an overarching defini­ tion of affect after her examination of the various existing definitions: “affect is the how of emotion. That is, affect is used to describe (in both the com­ municative and literal sense) the motion of emotion” (2005, 451; emphasis in original). The use of the word motion resonates with the premise of this research as spatial communication is central to the construction of affective

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spaces, and the designed spatial experience—the virtual environment—is an emotional journey. Bringing critical approaches to the emotive and affective forces within such spatial design elements makes sense. According to Thrift, affect is contagious (Waterton 2014). And through this idea of contagion, affect becomes political and the term “the politics of affect” has emerged (Waterton 2014). This contagion, however, is influenced by other factors both on the individual and collective levels. As Davidson and Milligan (2004) echo, our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in is continually being shaped and reshaped by how we feel. Thrift specifically explains how affect could be used to change the political. He states that the goal of such a change could be considered a kind of “emotional liberty.” But he emphasises that the real need for evoking emotions is not in a romanticised sense of creating emotions for emotions’ sake, but instead in looking at how to navigate through them (Thrift 2004, 68). Affect and emotions play a significant role in heritage spaces. An impor­ tant step forward in memorial museum development has been to improve engagement with visitors in order to facilitate increased empathy. When designing contemporary heritage spaces, the focus now is on embodied and affective experiences instead of sheer monumentality or iconography (Micieli-Voutsinas 2017). The emotional reaction of visitors at these mnemonic sites is meant to be transformative on a personal level (Hamber 2012). Provoking empathy in visitors in this way allows for a better connection with the victims as visitors feel for, but still feel different from, the victims of history (Landsberg 1997). Feeling empathy toward the traumatic subject is not the same as having a lived experience of that trauma (Micieli-Voutsinas 2017). The use of affective design strategies in memorial museums is aimed at creating experiential and embodied engagements with difficult history (Messham-Muir 2004; Rankin and Schmidt 2009). For example, the use of dark or dimly lit spaces is one of the affective design strategies used in mem­ orial museums such as Holocaust museums (Messham-Muir 2015). Creating experiences in spaces necessitates a deeper level of interaction between the viewer, the site, and the subject matter. Löwgren (2007) argues that interac­ tion design requires its own set of experiential concepts that is strongly con­ cerned with how the interaction feels. The role of the designer is to enable the intended experiences (Press and Cooper 2003). One of the characteristics of design is that it makes ideas and beliefs “experientially accessible and known” (DiSalvo 2012, 16). Activism denotes an aim to activate people to action. But the first step required to achieve this is to challenge people’s views and raise their aware­ ness. Thus, when designing ‘an experience,’ the designer should be mindful of the desired emotional and cognitive content of that experience: what triggers will be activated in the design, and what reactions do those triggers aid in stimulating? Changing people’s attitude is one of the roles of memorial museums. But what is still lacking is a better understanding of how effective

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that attitude of change can be on existing conflicts. This is especially so if the conflict is politically complex and there is almost nothing that individuals can do to stop that conflict (Hamber 2012). This applies more to contemporary conflicts, where not only raising awareness but more substantial calls for action are needed to stop or alleviate the sufferings of people in these conflicts.

The limits of affective spatial experiences in contemporary political conflicts Many political conflicts have emerged in recent years: the Second Gulf War; the establishment of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or “ISIS”; the wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen; persecution of Rohingyas in Myanmar; various political unrests in South America and Southern Europe; not to mention the unresolved long-standing Palestine/Israel situation. Throughout history, social activists have played a significant role in dis­ mantling existing political structures and advancing human rights advocacy. An important strategy in ending South African Apartheid, for example, was the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Social activists used non-violent tactics—such as protests, boycotts, civil disobedience, sit-ins, and strikes—in order to yield political support for their cause. A main objec­ tive of these activities was to elicit public reaction and generate sympathy and understanding for the plight of the oppressed. Recent examples of similar affect-driven forms of social activism include the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, and the #blacklivesmatter and #metoo movements, many of which are driven by virtual spaces, especially social media (Julier 2013; Juris 2012). Artists and designers have played significant roles in transforming social activism throughout history, mainly as tools of/for political expression. And now, digitally designed, virtual landscapes, such as social media, play an important role in social activism as well. Since the field of ‘design activism’ is still considered relatively new, having a singular and clear definition of what design activism constitutes is largely a work in progress. Fuad-Luke offers a tentative definition of design activism: “Design acti­ vism is ‘design thinking, imagination and practice applied knowingly or unknowingly to create a counter-narrative aimed at generating and balan­ cing positive social, institutional, environmental and/or economic change’” (2013, 27). This research aims at highlighting and presenting alternative ways of knowing to new audiences. This research thus proposes utilising design activism as a solution for presenting such counter-narratives. The prototype “re:Visit Palestine,” for example, is a virtual activist spatial experience oriented towards transforming the political present. These temporal, mobile, and low-cost virtual memory environments focus attention on the voices of everyday people living through current or unresolved political conflicts.

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The prototype: re:Visit Palestine To examine how an “activist spatial experience” will work, a prototype of such an experience has been created, tested, and evaluated (Bazlamit 2018a). The prototype focused on the Palestinian Situation and was titled “re:Visit Palestine.” Prototypes are not final products. They are a means to an end, and their significance in the research is in terms of how the process of their con­ struction leads to conversation and reflection (Ratto 2011). Before starting the process of creating the prototype, a set of design considerations were outlined. These considerations were informed by extensive background research, which included conducting case studies on experiential memorial spaces and the visual and thematic mapping of Palestinian visual cultures (Bazlamit 2018b). These design considerations informed and directed the design process of the prototype. �

The design solution had to convey the spatial experiences of Occupation. There is a tendency to use spatial experiences when communicating dif­ ficult narratives in memorial museums. The focus is shifting to the experiential mode of delivering the information in order to extend the visitor’s cognitive and affective processing. The Occupation of Palestine is manifested physically in the built and natural environments through myriad spatial interventions. These spatial manifestations of Occupation are then reflected in the day-to-day experiences of Palestinians by restricting their movement, dehumanising them, and causing distress, trauma, and more. Therefore, the proposed design solution needed to create spatial experiences that employ both cognitive and affective modes of communication.

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The design solution had to be fixed on memory narratives and facilitate interactivity. Memorial museums are often dedicated to one specific topic (e.g., the Jewish Holocaust and South African Apartheid), with a clear overarching narrative that takes visitors on an emotional journey. The use of memory narratives is strengthened by memory’s spatialisation in place, aiding visitors to process difficult, or disturbing, content more fully. Therefore, this design solution needed to be based on a cohesive memory narrative that would facilitate a smooth transition of the visitors from one point to another in their journey through the spatial experience.

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The design solution needed to be adaptable to different spaces. While some political and historical events attract substantial funding to build dedicated physical architectural buildings, contemporary political events and conflicts might not have those financial capacities. Therefore, the prototype needed to create memorial and affective engagement with­ out the construction of a monumental space. The space can be anywhere,

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Rusaila Bazlamit occupying urban and public space, or inside museums, classrooms, or galleries.

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The design solution needed to be dynamic regarding how its content can be updated. Unlike memorials and museums dedicated to historic events, this design solution is dedicated to an ongoing political situation. Therefore, the proposed solution must be designed to allow for an easy process of updating content or including new materials as they emerge.

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The design solution needed to be created on a limited budget. As previously discussed, the premise of the research is looking at how people in conflict zones can use technology as an activist mnemonic tool. In an ideal world, marginalised groups would have access to large funds to build museums and memorials that can be used to communicate their narratives. But they do not. So, looking at low-cost technology could be a solution for this disparity.

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The design solution needed to address the needs of a specific audience. Any design should first and foremost take into consideration who is the target audience. In this research, the target audience is people who have limited knowledge about the situation in Palestine.

In general, the design decisions of the prototype responded well to these initial design considerations (Bazlamit 2018a). The prototype design has demonstrated the effectiveness of using low-cost technology to create spatial experiences that communicate memory narratives. Technical description of the prototype The prototype “re:Visit Palestine” is a multi-channel installation (Figure 13.1) which consists of an interactive virtual environment and video projections (Bazlamit 2018a). The virtual environment (VE) was created using the Unity game engine. The VE served as the main navigational interface between the viewers and the experience. The Leap Motion, which is an infra-red sensor, was used as the input device for the interaction. The projected videos were edited from footage sourced from the internet that was produced by people in Palestine or by different activist organisations working directly with Palestinians. To create a sense of immersion within the installation, the work was shown on three walls. The central wall had the virtual environment built using Unity. The two adjacent walls showed the video projections whenever they were triggered by the movement of the viewer in the VE. The Leap Motion was concealed inside a custom-built plinth that stood in the middle, facing the central projection (Bazlamit 2018a).

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Figure 13.1 re:Visit Palestine exhibition. The middle projection shows the virtual environment while the two adjacent walls show a video projection

Using game engines to create affective spatial experiences based on memory narratives Game engines are a powerful tool to create three-dimensional (3D) interactivity. Game design methods have been used to create serious games and virtual heritage projects. Marsh argues that there should be a continuum of serious games that go beyond screen-based games (Marsh 2011). He identified three main groups of serious games that aim at extending our current under­ standing of what serious games are. The groups are: “serious games as games for purpose,” “serious games with reduced gaming characteristics,” and “ser­ ious experiential and cultural purposes” (Marsh 2011, 63–65). The continuum starts with games that are built with specific purposes other than entertain­ ment and have the traditional characteristics of video games in general. The second group focuses on games and environments that have some of the gaming characteristics, but shift away from games into environments and digital media with purposes as well. The third group includes environments and digital media that have no or hardly any gaming characteristics. The purpose of these environments is to provide experiences and emotions that facilitate meaning-making for their users. There is good potential for using computer games in virtual heritage as they are low-cost and can be designed as open-ended learning experiences

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(Champion 2016a). Serious games provide an interactive and experiential relationship with cultural heritage (Malegiannaki and Daradoumis 2017). The use of serious games in virtual heritage is still a new field, and while the discussion on the use of gaming for leisure is well established, the use of games in virtual heritage is less discussed (Anderson et al. 2009). Ser­ ious games in virtual heritage have to make sure that immersion and col­ laboration are introduced to the players (Andreoli et al. 2017). Serious games in virtual heritage must provide a better understanding of the cul­ tural artefacts, assets, and materials presented (Champion 2016b). Serious games in virtual heritage not only deal with the built environment but also with the natural environment and cultural influences (Mortara et al. 2014). As virtual heritage projects usually involve personal memories and sacred community artefacts, it is important that care and respect are shown (Champion 2016b). What establishes the difference between serious games in general and those in virtual heritage is that serious games in virtual heritage are not only tools for education, but also tools for preservation, reproduction, and appreciation of cultural material (Malegiannaki and Daradoumis 2017). The use of serious games in virtual heritage is well suited for the affective domain especially in terms of using empathy for characters and plots that might help in under­ standing historical events and other people’s culture, behaviour, and chal­ lenges (Mortara et al. 2014). Serious games in virtual heritage usually use exploration to facilitate interaction with the cultural materials presented (Malegiannaki and Daradoumis 2017). Using game engines to create activist affective experiences that are based on memory and heritage, ‘political and social,’ in a non-gaming setting is a relatively nascent approach and is fol­ lowing the continuum that Marsh discussed earlier and the current scholarly focus of using serious games in virtual heritage projects. The Unity game engine was used to facilitate the intended 3D interactivity of the prototype. The prototype was supposed to convey the narrative of Occupation through spatial experiences. The prototype had to communicate the Occupation’s physical interventions on the Palestinian built environment and how these affect the Palestinians’ daily lives. In this case, the VE was the vehicle to express the spatial representation of Occupation by creating tight spaces and blocked access. The VE was not a hyper-realistic representation of the built environment of Palestine. Instead, it facilitated ‘impressionable experiences’—simulations of spatial encroachment and enclosure. As a result, the prototype provided a “transferential space” where people experience something that did not happen to them (Landsberg 1997), to enable them to come away with a better understanding of what it ‘feels like’ to live through it. The VE gave the viewers a spatial sense of the political context presented to them. This is similar to the spatial treatment inside the Apartheid Museum in South Africa. Inside the Apartheid Museum, visitors have to walk through caged mazes while various media and textual displays are scattered along their routes through those mazes (Figure 13.2).

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Figure 13.2 A comparison between the Apartheid Museum in South Africa and the VE in the Gaza scene

In this prototype, the viewers would experience the difficulty in moving from one space to another through their embodied movement inside the VE. At the same time, there was a sense of ambiguity about what was coming next and where they were headed. This experience echoes the emotional uncertainty faced by Palestinians in their real lives. For example, even when crossing the same checkpoint as part of their daily routines, Palestinians do not know when this process could be interrupted, suspended, or blocked. Audience interaction within the VE is then amplified through the immersion of the video footage projections. The virtual environment and the real-life footage here complemented one another and helped in creating an immersive, affective experience. The presentation of digital online footage in virtual environments Feldman (1972) argues that sometimes people need new frames of reference to be placed on conventional events for them to discover different under­ standings and perceptions of these events. Presenting readily available video footage within the VE created a different kind of ‘viewing’ exposure. The footage transformed from being documentary, vlogging, or news information to an embodied, experiential narrative. By immersing the footage within the virtual environment, the experience moved from being a disjointed, dis­ embodied journey into the world of ‘digital information’ to becoming a cohesive spatial communication of a ‘real-life’ situation. The content of the footage was contextualised within specific points in the narrative and related to the VE. This meant that the footage helped the

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Figure 13.3 A screenshot illustrating a point in the experience. The viewer is standing inside a refugee tent while a video of an elderly refugee woman is being shown

viewers build their own experiences and engagement with their navigation of the VE, creating a good understanding of the subject matter at any given point. For example, towards the end of the first scene in Jaffa, the viewer enters a refugee tent, and at the same time, a video of an elderly woman living in a refugee camp in Lebanon starts playing. The woman talks about her experience of being expelled from her village in 1948 and how that displace­ ment has impacted the rest of her life. The viewer then listens to her expres­ sing difficulty in having no country, no family, no identity, and no official documents while the viewer is still waiting in the dark refugee tent (Figure 13.3). Another advantage of using digital footage is its relevancy. This is parti­ cularly important in spatial experiences communicating present-day political conflicts. So, having the flexibility to update the content of the installation is beneficial. Having footage sourced online means that we have access to up-to-date footage as soon as it emerges online. This will allow for fluid shifting of the highlighted themes within the digital installation. Major events—for example, military operations—can be reflected in the experience of the installation. The ability to update the content of the footage will adjust the engagement between the viewers and the virtual environment to respond more accurately to the current reality of the situation. Using online media in this sense liberates the experience from being rigid, irrelevant, or outdated. Also, using footage from different sources brings credibility to the stories being shared, as the people featured in the videos have their narra­ tives triangulated with others from all walks of life and with different affiliations. The exposition of counter-narratives in activist spatial experiences Counter-narratives are used in design activism (Fuad-Luke 2013) to disrupt the status quo (Kaygan and Julier 2013). In “re:Visit Palestine,” presenting the counter-narrative relied on two key points. The first point was the information and statistics that were derived from extensive background research of scholarly works about and around Palestine (Bazlamit 2018b). This information was then fed into the design of the virtual environment; it

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informed the choice of themes presented and was finally presented in the textual displays that popped up in the VE as the participants navigated the space. The second point was the use of common people’s voices in the videos projected, as audiences tend to engage more with people relatable to themselves. The political situation in Palestine is contested (Brennan 2006; Goldstone 2011; Said 1984). As a result, Palestinian memory narratives are often painted as propaganda or a smearing campaign, dismissed as hate speech or anti-Semitism (Loewenstein 2009; Bloch 2005; Said 2001). Documenting the daily lives of Palestinians living under Occupation, the prototype “re:Visit Palestine,” thus seeks to humanize everyday Palestinians by giving the visi­ tors of this installation a window into their lives. As a result of audience interactions with Palestinian memory narratives within the VE, the embo­ died experiences of those living under Occupation can no longer be rele­ gated as abstract or unknown. The aim of this project is therefore to bring the voices and experiences of Palestinians into the ‘real.’ It is expected to be a difficult experience, or even a confrontational one for some audiences. However, a key of this type of activist spatial experience is presenting new information to inform cross-cultural understanding and generate positive social change.

Conclusion This research introduced the term “activist spatial experiences” to describe new kinds of digital heritage spaces that are based on activist approaches for raising awareness about contemporary political situations to enact social change. These installations focus on experiential and affective approaches to the spatial design of memory narratives relating to ongoing or contemporary political conflicts. Physical sites of memory are often products of powerful individuals, governments, and institutions. In contrast, activist spatial experi­ ences can be created from the grassroots level. Therefore, it is important that these designed spatial environments and encounters reflect the real lived experiences of the people in question. The memories of those living inside contemporary political conflicts need to be preserved. Arundhati Roy (2004), the Indian author and activist, said: “There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.” The accessibility of social media as a means for documenting aggressions and human rights abuses, for instance, has produced a wealth of digital material that can be brought to the fore when designing these activist spatial experiences. Any digital heritage narrative, therefore, can adopt an ethnographic approach of accessing, assessing, and preserving the memories of those living in conflict zones. Digital approaches to heritage can provide new, more accessible venues for preserving and presenting experiences and memory, pushing the boundaries not only of who gets to talk, but also of how they can be heard.

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14 Embedded memories of site at Woodford Academy, National Trust of Australia Sarah Breen Lovett

Introduction This chapter looks at how contemporary art practices that engage with the methods of heightened presence and loosened narrative performances allow embedded memories of sites to emerge. Here methods of heightened presence means practices of ritual, deep listening, walking, and meditative mind map­ ping; loosened narrative performance refers to non-linear, multifarious, and fragmented performances; embedded memories refers to traces of past hap­ penings, held within one’s self as well as the fabric of built form and the depths of landscape. These embedded memories can be sensed corporeally and consciously by the artist and the viewer of the site. This proposal has been explored in a number of ways that will be outlined herein: firstly, through examination of post-colonial, more-than-representational, and more-than-human theories that can be used to situate the research within contemporary discourses; secondly through curation, by the author, of a con­ temporary art series called Palimpsest Performances involving artists who use methods of heightened presence and loosened narrative performance in their practices; and thirdly, through an installation created by the author called The Void which explores the method of meditative mind mapping of the site for embedded memories of site to emerge. These contemporary art works were made in response to the Woodford Academy, the oldest surviving building in the Blue Mountains, Australia. The building and the creative works discussed in this chapter were made by people who are not indigenous to Australia. The Woodford Academy building sits on the site of a natural spring that has traces of rich Aboriginal heritage of the Darug and Gundungurra people and was taken over by British soldiers looking for a place ‘to water horses.’ A permanent exhibition to acknowledge and communicate the Aboriginal heri­ tage of the site now exists, where Darug man Chris Tobin hosts visitors at the site, often with burning fire of eucalyptus leaves. While this exhibition and engagement with visitors to the site did not formally exist while the first works in this chapter were being made, the boundaries and sensitivities of different histories of the site were very present in the artists’ engagement with the site and audience’s readings of the works.

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The Woodford Academy building on this site was originally an inn for people on the way to the Bathurst gold mines from Sydney; it was also the first private residence in the Blue Mountains, the first guesthouse, briefly a sanatorium, and later a boys’ school. Today the building is a National Trust property, a historic museum, and most recently a site for contemporary art projects. The different exhibitions have included moving image, installa­ tion, painting, performance, participatory practices, conceptual interventions, social practices, photography, and sound art.

Pre- and post-colonial context In opening up the site for interpretation through art practices, an undeniable fact became evident: that the surroundings of the Woodford Academy are simultaneously a site of traumatic cultural memory due to the displacement of indigenous groups by British colonial invasion and a site of multiple layers of various post-colonial occupations. This tension became foregrounded in the artists’ engagement and the audience’s reception of the works. This reso­ nates with Jacqueline Milner’s comment about the Woodford Academy artists being “driven by a desire to deepen and complicate existing cultural under­ standings of Australia … including: the relations between the past and the present, [and] how best to tell stories that genuinely capture a diverse spec­ trum of experience while still honouring collective memory.” She goes on to state that “the discomfort it may cause has been recognised as generative” (Milner 2017, 4). John Cameron is an Australian academic who goes through detailed debate on the issues of connecting to place from a post-colonial perspective and points toward theorists such as Peter Read, who “acknowledges that we have to understand the ‘rivers of blood and tears’ that have been shed before we can talk of belonging here, and wonders what the knowledge of Aboriginal history brings to a modern white Australian sense of belonging” (Cameron 2003, 178). Val Plumwood, an Australian philosopher and ecofeminist, says that we need to acknowledge the deep spiritual relationship with the land that indigenous people have and that we should engage with indigenous peoples wherever possible in connecting to place, but also respect our differences in how we connect to place. This is necessary to overcome a polarisation between the colonised and the coloniser, which she describes as “a double movement or gesture of affirming kinship and also affirming The Other’s dif­ ference, as an independent presence to be engaged with on its own terms” (Plumwood 2003, 60). This mix of pre- and post-colonial histories has been described as a Third Space (Bhabha 2004) and, in the context of this work, we can think of this as a space that is informed by many cultures and times at once. Cameron points to the richness that comes from being simultaneously mentally connected to the land in another part of the world (through ancestral lineage) and physi­ cally to the land of Australia (2003, 174). He also articulates Carl Jung’s

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understanding of the spirit of the land in Australia consuming the post-colonial occupant (Jung 1927, 49). Through these discussions, one begins to under­ stand the role of artists and visitors to be respectful and aware of the multiple histories of the site. It is this merging between the pre-colonial and post-colonial, the inner and outer, the real and imagined, the physical and metaphysical, that can dissolve the typical (often polarising) narratives of a historic site.

More-than-human An awareness of different histories being active at once brings us to the notion that embedded memory is held and can be accessed or felt by visi­ tors to the site. This line of thinking can be linked to notions of the ‘more­ than-human’ agencies (Harrison 2013, 51–55). In the context of this chapter, the non-human elements of our environment such as buildings and land­ scape have agency in forming our experience but are also valid entities in their own right, with separate lives of their own—separate from our ‘use’ of them. In relation to the Blue Mountains context, Cameron has run multiple uni­ versity courses on teaching people to connect to place and recognise the power of the more-than-human. He clearly articulates this as a “felt sense of a place and the intuitive and imaginative sensing that is active when one is attuned to, and receptive towards, one’s surroundings” (Cameron 2003, 173). This type of engagement is in dire need because, as Plumwood notes, not only a colonial suppression of indigenous people has occurred but also the sup­ pression of the more-than-human agency of the land (2003, 52). To remedy this, Plumwood urges us to “recognize overlap and continuity in order to understand our own nature as ecological, nature-dependent beings and to relate more ethically and less arrogantly to the more-than-human world” (2003, 56). While in relation to built form, Australian academic Emma Waterton more pointedly notes that there has “been an urging to give weight to heritage spaces in ways that mean … that we as researchers are prepared for them to ‘answer back’” (2014, 830). Internationally the more-than-human in built and landscaped environment is examined by many authors, including UK-based academics Peter Kraftl and Peter Adey who note that “architecture can be a form of code-making, or control, and that certain visual clues are used to symbolize something other than the immediate time and place of the building” (Kraftl and Adey 2008, 214). UK-based artist Ingrid Pollard states, “you do not have to look very far beneath the surface of rural landscapes to find new narra­ tives of the past. The exhuming of these ghosts and the places they inhabit is a kind of ‘cultural archaeology’” (quoted in Crang and Tolia-Kelly 2010, 2324). American artist Susan Lacy suggests that the more-than­ human “has sensation, is mutable; it is also not only individual, but resides in places, physical spaces” (Lacy and Riaño-Alcalá 2006, 97).

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Therefore, if we are to accept the more-than-human presence of land and built form, they must have a combined agency in informing the experience of a site. Being open to these elements means that our normative modes of sense-making and human-made narratives of site can become disrupted, and one can experience site in ways that are beyond human narrative.

More-than-representational This approach of artists attempting to connect to the more-than-human in a site builds upon contemporary more-than-representational theories (Thrift 2008). More-than-representational theories are understood in this chapter to be focused around embodied experience rather than traditional forms of represented knowledge. This phenomenon has been discussed in relation to heritage sites by many academics, including Waterton, who says that more­ than-representational approaches “make more sense to a broader range of people” because they are concerned with “senses of ‘the now’ so often left neglected by conventional understandings of heritage” (2014, 824). As Waterton states, this can be through “the tactile, experiential, aural, emo­ tional and sonic,” which is a “vigorous and distinct way of conceptualising heritage in terms of the body, practice and performativity, together with an insistence that our engagements with it occur through a range of embodied dispositions and interactions” (2014, 824). This means, as US-based academic Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas says, that the history of site is “no longer confined to the space and time of the past; rather, it exists presently through newly unfolding emotional and material registries” (2017, 96). This leads to a loos­ ening of narrative, where, as US-based academic Lyndsey Boekenkamp says, “previously sealed avenues of interpretation and dialogue are opened, encouraging audience participation in formulating meaning” (2012, 110). In relation to the body of work made at Woodford Academy to be dis­ cussed in the next section, the more-than-representational experience of place is specifically thought through Gilles Deleuze’s any-space-whatever. While originally used to discuss cinema, this concept is useful to think about here because it articulates how an unsettling of typical ways of knowing can bring about a heightened experience of the mind-body connection. Deleuze describes any-space-whatever as a disconnected place image or sound with no discernible characters, narrative, or plot (Deleuze 1990, 150). In discussing the consequences of this type of image on the spectator, Deleuze says, “con­ nections are now valid only by virtue of the upsets that affect, loosen, unba­ lance, or uncouple them” (Deleuze 1997, 5–6). This type of moving image “makes us grasp, it is supposed to make us grasp, something intolerable and unbearable … . It is a matter of something too powerful, or too unjust, but sometimes also too beautiful, and which henceforth outstrips our sensorymotor capacities” (Deleuze 1997, 18). Further, the effect of this on the mindbody experience can be explained through Deleuze’s redefinition of Spinoza’s distinction between affection and idea-affection. Here affection is the haptic,

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incorporated internal experience of an external effect whereas idea-affection is the mental and abstract conceptualisation of that experience (Deleuze 1978, 1–6). This in turn leads to another Deleuzian term, cogito, a seeing of oneself see, where one has a heightened awareness about the corporeal sensations felt on a site, but also an awareness of one’s own mental processes about these experiences (Rushton 2008, 126–27). Therefore the proposition through the above theoretical framework is that engaging with aspects of site that are more-than-human can be carried out through contemporary art works that are more-than-representational. This in turn can lead to a heightened awareness of one’s self as a filter or receptor in allowing embedded memories of site to emerge. This theoretical framework will now be examined through some practicebased research examples of curating and creating new works at the Woodford Academy. These works engage with methods of ritual, walking the land, deep listening, and meditative mind mapping. The resulting works are an intricate network of aesthetic combinations, visual cues, temporal shifts, emotional experiences, and memory triggers, equally constituted by site and practice. This network is realised as a combination of outcomes, including body movements, visual aesthetic juxtaposition, language-free sound, fragmented narrative, communal walking, sound recording, and installation. Through these works, the potential for narratives of site to be loosened and for embedded memories to be heightened and reframed through contemporary art will be illustrated.

Palimpsest performance #1 Palimpsest Performance #1 is by Melaka Straits-born Chinese body/sound artist WeiZen Ho and performance artist Alan Schacher, a first-generation Australian of Jewish ancestry. Schacher’s work centres around aesthetics of composition of himself in a Beckettian-style dialogue with site, while Ho approaches her practice as “a deviser of performances that explores voice and body relationships as a way of communing with the land and its histories” (Ho 2015). Ho works with a series of fragmented moments of ghosting, appeasement, ritual for place, habitation, and imagined histories and explains Palimpsest Performance #1 as a “roving performance, where the viewer will explore the architecture of the Woodford Academy, and stumble upon pre­ sences; discovering scenes and sounds emerging out of corners and crannies.” Together, they describe themselves as working collaboratively and intuitively to develop scenes from the histories of the building they had heard and the feelings the building gave them (Ho 2015). Ho specifically calls this a “psycho-historical exercise” where they “performatively and energetically channel the presences and atmospheres of the building.” All of this is pre­ sented in a series of non-linear, layered, and abstract scenes that are “uncon­ nected in any narrative sense” (Ho 2015). A moment-by-moment description of the performance will be outlined below.We enter the Academy to find

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Figure 14.1 WeiZen Ho in Palimpsest Performance #1

Schacher sitting silently and expectantly in the corner of the room. The audience crowds around him expectantly, until he suddenly walks outside with a pile of books. In the courtyard Schacher begins to sort the books on top of an unused well. Ho appears walking slowly up the pathway (Figure 14.1), with glazed, almost blue eyes and a hunched back, a “spirit-creature re-mythologised” (Ho 2015). Schacher re-appears carrying a long plank of timber, masking his body, until he gives up the weight and leans forehead against the board. Ho enters the centre of the courtyard pulling long black veins out of her coat sleeves; she puts each one into her mouth, until it is overflowing with darkness. Ho jumps higher and higher in the air, over and over; the pain on her face felt viscerally, she then runs inside the dark building. Once inside the space, we find Schacher playing a curious clattering game with dinnerware on the fireplace hearth; he then places one plate on each step. Upstairs Ho and Schacher are hiding in corners of the claustrophobic rooms, while Ho is affecting a chant. Downstairs Ho is sitting at the piano almost lifeless, while Schacher stands behind her, arms under hers and plays a tune for her. Schacher is covered with his jacket and then uses it to cover a mirror and rocking chair that eerily looks empty.

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Sarah Breen Lovett Ho reads fragments found in books from the room in a layered back-and-forth style, seemingly random, but synchronistic. Schacher lying on the floor of the drawing room is in call-and-response style with Ho; all the while Schacher is slowly being buried in a pile of books, until he is no longer seen. After the series of performances inside the building, we return to the courtyard. Schacher reflects the architecture, light, and audience off a set of washing bowls. They both try to fit themselves into the doorways, like the air filling every void of place. Ho drags a long chain out from under one of the doors and begins to spin as if on a vortex. Schacher lays directly above the well with a rock on his chest, while Ho incants deep somber guttural sounds, with words that seem to come from another time and place. The pair turn and walk to the back of the property. They do not turn around to face us for a few minutes, and when they do, we know it is over. We are profoundly silent before applause.

The power in Ho and Schacher’s work is a heady mixture of acute sensi­ tivity to site, visceral metaphysicality, and absurdity. In experiencing the work, there is constant questioning: why does he look so serious and con­ templative?; was there a man like that here?; why does she look so lost and empty—is she some spirit of the land?; why does he keep doing futile repeti­ tive tasks—has he lost his mind, was there someone here that had lost their mind?; why does she have black veins coming from her arms—is this symbolic of an earth creature?; why is he paying such acute attention to the different parts of the site—is there significance to this part of the site?; why is there so much pain in her voice—is there loss here? The relentless stream of ques­ tioning constantly pushes attention between the performers and the site, until the point that one tires of trying to make meaning, gives up questioning, and just enjoys the feeling of not-knowing in a non-space of heightened presence, where logical meaning and literal place fall away. Ho discusses the generative aspect of her work as inspired by a ritualistic form of possession, which allows her to explore “many kinds of absences”; she says this has a transformative effect on herself and the audience (Ho 2017). Ho further elaborates on performance art as rituals, where she deline­ ates between creating a performative ritual in relation to a time and place, and rituals of a specific culture, time, and space influencing her own work (Ho 2018, 9). Ho describes performative ritual as “[t]he body and time con­ versing with the site’s ecological, acoustic and affective environment […] The body as a conduit for possession” (Ho 2018, 14). She explains how she lets the space lead her as she questions, “[h]ow do you commune with a space like this? How do I contact its layers of history?” (Ho 2018, 22). Therefore, Ho

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sees the ritual as a way of preparing the ‘loosening’ of the (belief in) self in order to create spaces within, for possession by the site and other-than-human inhabitants to take place. It is significant to note here that Ho and Schacher are acutely aware of the effect of their own cultural background on the reading of the site and the performance. This is explained in the artist statement that they are “inter­ cultural, each of us bringing our respective (Chinese and Jewish) mythology into play. As artist-performers we ‘stand in’ for what is absent” (Ho 2015). Ho goes on to explain how her background has affected her choice of working with rituals: “I find these rituals empowering for someone who has found it hard to be proud of my racial culture (Chinese Malaysian) and Chinese poli­ tical history” (Ho 2018, 9). But as she is based in Australia, the question of identity and culture is also foregrounded in her practice and her thoughts when she says, “I maintain that even in coming in to observe rituals that form my grandparents’ practice and belief, I already come in as an outsider. How do I see myself differently from them? What form of otherness and judgement am I bearing?” (Ho 2018, 5). This questioning of otherness, belonging, and background is a powerful presence in this type of work. When an artist presents themselves as a medium for interpreting the site, they are invariably open to questions of rights to con­ nect to and interpret land in such a way. This is especially true on this site, which is of rich Aboriginal history and significance but, as noted previously, during the making of this work was not represented at the Academy. While it was not the initial ambition of any of the artworks discussed here, this part of the site’s history emerged. This may have been because of the void in the Academy’s timeline. The works of loosened narrative allowed space for this to come forth—that is, in the absence of the normative colonial narrative of the site, the mind turns its attention to the unspoken. The Aboriginal significance of the site was sensed by the artists and audience members most potently in relation to the courtyard space. This is evidenced in Ho and Schacher bookending their work with their most visceral performances in this location, which made one feel and question the pain and loss of the land. This was also com­ mented on by some audience members. Perhaps, as the next work explores in greater detail, this was also because the unused well and water pump are still present on the site, so that the original water spring and the significance that it would have held for the Aboriginal people of this area come to the forefront of the performers’ practices and audiences’ minds.

Along the well Palimpsest Performance #2 featured Blue Mountains- and Berlin-based artist Honi Ryan’s participatory performance called Along the Well. In this work, the act of walking is key to her process of deep listening and encouraging others to have a new way of experiencing place. As Ryan summarises, “Walking as art practice is employed to commune with the land … It is the

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Figure 14.2 Honi Ryan’s Palimpsest Performance #2

rhythm of my body collaborating with the rhythm of a place to find our shared patterns, and acknowledge our differences” (Ryan 2015c, 7). This act of walking is part of Ryan’s broader practice in which she aims to make ges­ tures of peace through actions and lived experience. One example is Ryan’s spectacular walking performance in Lahore where people walked in silence to mark the streets where walking is not normally acceptable, especially by females (Ryan 2016). While in the work in Lahore, walking was an act of reclaiming the built environment, in the work at Woodford it was an act of reacquainting ourselves with parts of the site that had been overshadowed by the built environment. A moment-by-moment description of encountering the work will be outlined below. Inside the dark Academy building Ryan handed out a glass of water and white shawl to each visitor, explaining this would be a silent communal walk around the site. Entering the rear courtyard, we are led into a circle and encounter three men around the well, where there is a pulley system with two buckets of water. Holding glass vases, they continually pour water from one vase into the next. After a period of watching, we are led out of the courtyard in a procession. Down a long path, across the lawn, and along a rock with a “ten metre long deeply engraved groove in the sandstone slab, believed to indicate ancient aboriginal occupation,” we pause (Goodlet 2017, 72).

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We proceeded through an unmarked graveyard with scattered people standing with white umbrellas in the rain (Figure 14.2). Proceeding along the edge of a dried riverbed, we encounter a spring. Returning back to the courtyard, the men are still pouring water from one vase to the next in a continuous cycle. There is a long silence, until the waterbuckets are played by Ben Denham and begin to resonate with the courtyard’s architecture. As an audience member witnessing Ryan’s considered interaction with the site and experiencing the silent space she created through the communal act of walking, my connection with the land was heightened. This was not in terms of feeling like there was communication from the land to me personally, but rather we were offering an acknowledgement back to it with a certain gravitas, as though we were part of a collective moment. We were travelling across the land, in the rain, paying homage to the significance of water on the site. In Ryan’s initial deep listening walks on the site, she perceived a strong sense of stagnancy, particularly in the courtyard well area, where she felt the “dark, heavy and stagnant” colonial history of the site. In contrast, she felt a “greater force at play in the undercurrent … something was trying to shift the energy that was somehow stuck.” On learning that the natural spring on the site had been made into a well, she attributed this feeling to the “trapped body of water” under the stone pavers behind the house. The walking paths consequently followed the natural flow of water along the site, activating the dried-up passages of water. Her response was to create the walking tour, so the participants of the performance could “feel the presence of water spirits on the land” (Ryan 2015a). The history and awareness of water on the site which, as Ryan says, was the reason the site became a meeting point “for many travellers who have passed through over the years, or stopped to hydrate, eat and rest before moving on to the next place” (Ryan 2015a) became a dominant narrative in the work. Ryan does not explicitly refer to the indigenous histories of this site in her work—out of respect for “the sacred histories of the site that for cultural reasons will not be spoken” (Ryan 2015a). An engagement with and sensitivity to Australian Aboriginal culture is evident in many aspects of Ryan’s work. Prior to Along the Well, Ryan had been invited to be an active artist at the indigenous art centre Warmun in Western Australia, where she collaborated with local artists on an installation (Ryan 2015d). Within her fine art master’s dissertation, the complexity of this interface is raised, where Ryan refers to her white shame and post-colonial guilt (Ryan 2015c, 12). However, Ryan does not see this guilt as a barrier to engaging with indigenous history; rather, she tries to develop an “awareness in order that they become a source for healing, creating dialogues of nonexclusivity,” as well as “multicultural tolerance and co-habitation” (Ryan 2015c, 12).

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Ultimately Ryan summarises the work as “a gesture in extending peaceful intentions into the post-colonial situation in Australia, through silence, pre­ sence, and respect” (Ryan 2015b). Like Ho, Ryan is aware of her placement between cultures in making this work, and she also sees this as generative, where she explains: “I dwell in the hybrid space between cultures … in the moment of essential exchange and mutuality that is the root level of socia­ bility and the interconnectedness of ecosystems” (Ryan 2015c, 25). This is a clear acknowledgment of a complex network of exchanges between self, site, cultural background, and memory of site being explored. The next work to be discussed will be my own artwork made in response to the site, which was inspired and influenced by the works and practices of Ho, Schacher, and Ryan discussed above.

The void Several years after curating the Palimpsest Performances, I was invited back to the site as an artist to make a site-specific work for an exhibition called Explorer’s: Narratives of Site. The exhibition, involving sixteen contemporary artists from the Blue Mountains, was curated by Modern Art Projects with Beata Geyer and Mahalya Middlemist and funded by Create NSW. The exhibition aim was described as “an extended, multi-layered, accumulative exhibition project, which responded to the complex and overlapping narratives of the Woodford Academy site” (Geyer 2017). After working with the site a number of times and experiencing informa­ tion sessions on the layered history of the site, I felt overwhelmed by the his­ torically dense saturation of significant stories and a strong sense of questioning of my own role, as a non-indigenous person once again attempt­ ing to relate to this site. In the Aboriginal exhibition space, Chris Tobin had an artwork of “three lone, almost stick figures making their way up an incline, underneath which looked like vast shelves of Aboriginal symbols alluding to the deep, rich store of Aboriginal culture held within the country to which these three explorers were sadly oblivious” (Tobin 2017, 57). This work was affirming of the image I had of a multifarious, networked layering of so many unknown and hidden elements of the site. In response to this artwork and feelings about the site, my work chose to simply acknowledge the void of everything that is unknown on the site. In my work, the void is the complete history of the site, such as: movement of the stars, air, fire, water and earth; growth of flora and fauna; occupation by Darug and Gundungurra people and post-colonial settlement; use for star gazing, ritual, gatherings, hunting, drinking, residence, education, relaxation, sanctuary, and historicity; experiences of the sublime, happiness, infatuation, love, sadness, anger, fear and regret; and … In this way, the void is a place of no-thingness, where no separate moment has identity, where everything merges together, everything that is known and unknown.

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Figure 14.3 Sarah Breen Lovett—The Void 2017

To make The Void, a circle was cast from bark shed by a large eucalyptus tree on the site. The bark departed from its life source and is in a state of temporal trans­ ference; it is in between being a perceived physical unity called ‘tree’ and becoming a fragmented entity called dust which returns to the earth, and ultimately to the void itself. Each piece of bark was woven with recycled cotton, in a state of con­ templation with the string responding to existing contours—a tracing of layers of history (Figure 14.3). The pieces emerged from the making process with various acknowledgements of the past present in its visual language. The bark was laid with each axis of the circle in relation to various aspects of the landscape, the silent witnesses to a million stories. The circle is placed with a gateway open to the north that invites the viewer to lay within. Once within the circle, one can choose to listen to my contemplation of the void, through a sound recording generated in meditative mind mapping, or connect to the void through one’s own mind. The meditative mind mapping was recorded in the circle, as I was sitting with eyes closed, allowing thoughts of different parts of the site, words, and feelings to come to me. Excavating my own memories and allowing deep lis­ tening to lead the voice, the experience of doing this was unexpected. What emerged was: a strong visceral spatial experience of the site, where my con­ sciousness was spatially exploring the whole site, moving under the ground and through various rooms; this was accompanied by physical sensations such as hot, cold, wet, pressure, release, angle of trajectory; and emotional feelings such as emptiness, sadness, curiosity, wonderment, certainty, and even anger

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where I was having ‘arguments’ with myself. I felt this was spurred on by remembering stories of the site that I had heard over the years and different fictions that emerged from nowhere. Overall it was a visceral, potent, unexpected, fast-changing, semi-meditational, trance-like journey. I recorded this text on the initial attempt and, apart from layering the sound to make an ‘echo,’ I did not edit the spoken word in any way prior to the presentation at the exhibition. The exact words experienced during the act of making and presented at the exhibition are below. The academy, the school, eggs on toast, burning, bodies, burning sadness, feeling, sadness, feeling depth, feeling deeper, deeper, under the ground, under the ground, deeper, under the ground, slowly, slowly moving, moving, slowly moving, stuck, stuck under the ground, can’t get through, can’t get through, slowly moving, under the ground, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze through, that little hole, squeeze through that little hole, squeeze through that little hole, make your way down, down, down, down, and release through, into the opening, into the opening. Sad, cool, tears, breasts, water, wet, sadness, draw back, draw back, up, up, up the hill, up the hill, up the hill, draw back, up the hill, up the hill, draw back, back. Red, red, red, coat, gun, gun, blood. The rock, the rock will show you the way, the rock will show you the way, no it doesn’t, it doesn’t, it doesn’t no, it doesn’t, no it doesn’t show you the way, no, no, yes, no, no! Nothing, nothing, nothing, black, black lace, black lace and a bun, a bun up high, big breasts and a bun, a tight belt and buckled shoes, and it’s hot, it’s hot, it’s too hot for this, it’s too hot for these clothes. Linen, cotton, hanging in the breeze, quietness, creaking, creaking, heavy, cold, heavy, cold, heavy, cold. Dark, empty, dark and empty, dark, breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing … Bread, bread and flour mixed together, bread and flour, bread and flour, mixed together, water? there is no milk, there is no milk left. Water, water, water, under there, it’s under there, it’s under there, he is under there, he is under there, he is under there, laid out like a cross, he is under there, what is he doing under there? he is hiding, he is hiding under there. I told you, I told you, I told you there would be trouble, I told you there would be trouble if you didn’t listen to me, no you didn’t, you didn’t listen to me, that’s what I said, I told you there would be trouble in the window. There is not enough air, there is not enough air in this house, the window is too small, the window is too small. Smack, smack, smack, smack, cane, desk, chalk, long day, it’s a long day, apples, apples and the smell of apples.

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Look up look up, look up, at the sky, the air is moving through and the sky is opening, the air is moving through and the sky is opening, look at the sky, look how high we are, look how high we are. Do you feel better now, in this air, does this air make you feel better? does the air make you feel better? Oh the skin, yours looks so much better, the dewy skin, the dewy skin. And I heard there was sadness, and love, he thought if he died, he thought if he died, he thought if he died he would find her. There is so much pain, aching, twisting, twisting, twisting, twisting around and around and around, and around, knot it, knot it tighter, tighter, tighter, knot it tighter. They come past here every day, they come past here every day, they don’t even stop, why don’t they stop? why don’t they stop? aren’t they thirsty? Ah the dust is everywhere, the dust, the dust and the sound, supposed to be relaxing here, supposed to be relaxing. Those pine trees at the back, those pine trees at the back, why did he put them so far away, we could have used that shade. The pears and the peaches and the sweet juice, in the summer sun the sweet juice is sticky on your face. We have to be quiet, we have to be quiet because we don’t know who is downstairs, we don’t know who is downstairs, who is downstairs? just be quiet. Sucking me in, sucking me in the hole, sucking me in the hole, down, down, down, down, down, opening, opening, opening, wider, opening up, opening up, opening up, up, up the past. Every moment of this past. With this work the intention was to create a void space with a circle of bark and a voice recording that did not privilege one story over another, exploring layers of the site’s history in a non-prescriptive manner. The bark-circle itself created an open experience, as Milner described it, “a space of contemplation in the Academy’s gardens, re-purposing the bark of the ancient eucalypt that dominates the building’s street frontage to mark out a circle on the ground, counterbalancing the myriad voices emanating from the house with an accepting silence” (Milner 2017, 6). Despite the voice recording evolving with segments of narrative, the overall approach was one of trying to access embedded memories of site without overtly communicating stories of the site that had been prevalent before.

Conclusion This body of works that explore the role of narrative on the site of the Woodford Academy was a way of encouraging artists and visitors to explore their own interpretation of site and the emergence of memories embedded within place itself. It was hoped that a varied response to the site through the

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works would evoke a state of not-knowing, a transportation to multiple times and places, tied together by an awareness of self-seeing. More significantly, because the indigenous history of the site was traumatic but unspoken, the lacuna was bound to become foregrounded in general awareness. This project raises relevant questions about non-indigenous people carrying out dialogues with the land while respectfully acknowledging indi­ genous histories. It has also foregrounded how issues of inter-cultural rela­ tions, intuitive communication, and social history have a very real impact on the experience and memory of site, as evidenced through the dialogues around these contemporary performance art practices.

References Bhabha, Homi K. 2004. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Boekenkamp, Lyndsey. 2012. “Alternative legacies: Artist projects in history museums & the importance of context.” Journal of Arts and Humanities (JAH) 1 (3): 107–128. Cameron, John. 2003. “Responding to Place in a Post-colonial Era: An Australian Per­ spective.” In Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Post-colonial Era, edited by William M. Adams and Martin Mulligan, 172–196. London: Earthscan. Crang, Mike, and Divya P. Tolia-Kelly. 2010. “Nation, Race, and Affect: Senses and Sensibilities at National Heritage Sites.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 42 (10): 2315–2331. https://doi.org/10.1068/a4346. Deleuze, Gilles. 1978. Lecture Transcripts on Spinoza’s Concept of Affect. Paris: Cours Vincennes. Accessed May 21, 2015. www.gold.ac.uk/media/images-by-section/depa rtments/research-centres-and-units/research-centres/centre-for-invention-and-social-p rocess/deleuze_spinoza_affect.pdf. Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. “Thirteenth Series of the Schizophrenic and the Little Girl.” In The Logic of Sense, translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, edited by Constantin V. Boundas, 82–93. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1997. Cinema 2: The Time Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Geyer, Beata. 2017. “About Explorers.” Accessed July 12, 2018. https://explorersnarra tivesofsite.org/about-explorers/. Goodlet, Ken. 2017. “The Woodford Academy.” In Explorers: Narratives of Site in Contemporary Art Practice, edited by Sarah Breen Lovett, 72–79. Blue Mountains, Australia: Modern Art Projects. Harrison, Rodney. 2013. Heritage: Critical Approaches. London: Routledge. Ho, WeiZen. 2015. “Palimpsest #1.” Accessed July 12, 2018. www.weizenho.com/pa limpsest-1/. Ho, WeiZen. 2017. “RABBIT # 20.” Accessed July 12, 2018. www.weizenho.com/ work-avenue/#/storiesfromthebody4-essay/. Ho, WeiZen. 2018. “Body as Material: Reflections on Sharing, Doing and Making Solo.” Critical Path. Accessed July 12, 2018. https://criticalpath.org.au/wp-content/ uploads/2018/04/BodyAsMaterial_casestudy_2018.pdf. Jung, Carl Gustav. (1927) 1970. “Mind and Earth” in trans, Gerhard Adler and R.F. C. Hull. The Collected Works of Carl G. Jung, vol. 10: Civilization in Transition. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Kraftl, Peter, and Peter Adey. 2008. “Architecture/Affect/Inhabitation: Geographies of Being-In Buildings.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 98 (1): 213–231. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045600701734687. Lacy, Suzanne, and Pilar Riaño-Alcalá. 2006. “Medellin, Colombia: Reinhabiting Memory.” Art Journal 65 (4): 96–112. https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2006. 10791230. Micieli-Voutsinas. Jacque. 2017. “An Absent Presence: Affective Heritage at the National September 11th Memorial & Museum.” Emotion, Space and Society 24: 93–104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2016.09.005. Milner, Jacqueline. 2017. “Explorer’s Narratives of Site in Contemporary Art Prac­ tice.” In Explorers: Narratives of Site in Contemporary Art Practice, edited by Sarah Breen Lovett, 4–7. Blue Mountains, Australia: Modern Art Projects. Plumwood, Val. 2003. “Decolonizing Relationships with Nature.” In Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Post-colonial Era, edited by William M. Adams and Martin Mulligan, 51–78. London: Earthscan. Rushton, Richard. 2008. “Passions and Actions: Deleuze’s Cinematographic Cogito.” Deleuze Studies 2 (2): 121–139. Ryan, Honi. 2015a. “Along the Well.” Accessed July 12, 2018. https://honiryan.wordp ress.com/2015/03/24/along-the-well/. Ryan, Honi. 2015b. “Along the Well.” Accessed July 12, 2018. www.honiryan.net/a long-the-well. Ryan, Honi. 2015c. “Gestures of Intent: A Year of Nomadic Social Practice.” Master’s of Fine Art in Creative Practice Project Report/Research Paper, Transart Institute. Accessed July 12, 2018. www.hedonics.com.au/Honi-Ryan_Gestures-of-Intent_2015.pdf. Ryan, Honi. 2015d. “Everything Man Made Can Be Destroyed.” Accessed July 12, 2018. www.honiryan.net/warmun. Ryan, Honi. 2016. We Walk Lahore. Goethe-Institut Pakistan. Accessed May 31, 2019. www.goethe.de/resources/files/pdf158/we-walk-lahore-honi-ryan-2.pdf. Thrift, Nigel. 2008. Non-Representational Theories: Space, Politics, Affect. London: Routledge. Tobin, Chris. 2017. “Stories of Country.” In Art at the Academy: A Year of Exhibitions at the Woodford Academy 2015/2016, edited by Woodford Academy Management Committee, 54–69. Woodford, Australia: Woodford Academy. Waterton, Emma. 2014. “A More-Than-Representational Understanding of Heritage? The ‘Past’ and the Politics of Affect.” Geography Compass 8 (11): 823–833. https:// doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12182.

15 Virtual reality and memorials (Re)building and experiencing the past Tess Osborne and Phil Jones

Introduction The ‘traditional’ memorial, in the physical forms of museums, monuments, and statues, has been discussed extensively (especially in regard to the National Mall—see Miller 2005; Savage 2011), but in recent years, with the advancement in technology, scholars are increasingly exploring the possibi­ lities and consequences of digital remembrance (see, e.g., Harrison 2009; Hess 2007; Kaelber 2007). Within this work, virtual reality (VR) has been used to safeguard protected locations, such as archaeological sites (F. Bruno et al. 2010), and recreate them for present and future generations (e.g., Pierdicca et al. 2016). Indeed, the term ‘virtual heritage,’ as a combination of cultural heritage and virtual reality, has been used and applied since the turn of the century (Roussou 2002); yet geographers (especially those interested in heri­ tage and memory) have broadly not engaged with the potentials of VR in their research. This chapter, as one of the first geographical considerations of VR for memory research, examines the possibilities and problems that arise from such research by reflecting on a memory method workshop held on Washington’s National Mall in April 2019. In doing so, we critically analyze how VR can be used to reconstruct the past (both real and imagined), and the implications of being immersed in a virtual environment. It is demonstrated that whilst VR may have promise in memory research, it is important to avoid the pitfalls of ‘solutionism’ (cf. Morozov 2013). Rather than merely developing (technological) solutions to problems that do not exist, it is crucial to consider the practical and embodied nature(s) of being in a virtual envir­ onment to ensure that VR is used effectively in memory and heritage research.

Virtual reality Although one of the key texts on VR and geography was written over fifteen years ago (Fisher and Unwin 2003), geographers have only slowly begun to engage with this technology. Indeed, Batty, Lin, and Chen (2017) argue that

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whilst geographers often work with three-dimensional (3D) environments, immersive technologies are rarely adopted in geographical practice. In recent years there has been an increase in the use of VR for research, primarily driven by the commercial development of new, high-quality devices, including standalone headsets that do not need to be tethered to a powerful computer (Jones and Osborne, forthcoming). While this may mean that VR is becoming more mainstream, social scientists are only just beginning to engage with the methodological possibilities of this technology. VR has, however, been heavily researched and applied in computer science, with scholars exploring notions of immersion (Cheng, She, and Annetta 2015; Jennett et al. 2008; Zhang, Perkis, and Arndt 2017), presence (Bulu 2012; Witmer and Singer 1998), and sense of place (Benyon et al. 2006; P. Turner and S. Turner 2006). VR’s most compelling quality is in many ways also its biggest weakness. A sense of presence is often taken to be a subjective marker of quality in video games (Schumann, Bowman, and Schultheiss 2016), but VR by definition removes people’s awareness of the material world in order to immerse them in a virtual environment. This creates significant risks of injury from tripping over real objects or getting tangled up when using a wired headset. Indeed, the apparent reality of the experience can cause participants to lose their balance when responding to visual prompts within a headset (Menzies et al. 2016). It can also be quite socially isolating as shared experiences tend to be either rather clunky (Gugenheimer et al. 2017) or very expensive to set up (Schild et al. 2018). Indeed, despite significant improvements to visual fidelity, there remains considerable work to be done combatting so-called VR sick­ ness, caused when the actual movements of the body do not quite match up to the virtual movements being reproduced in the headset (Lee, M. Kim, and J. Kim 2017). Despite these issues, VR has been widely employed in specialized applica­ tions where it would be too dangerous or expensive to undertake that experi­ ence in the real world. VR has been applied as a training tool in medicine, the military, and for those visiting hazardous environments such as industrial sites (see, for example, Grabowski and Jankowski 2015; Lele 2013). Here the drawbacks of VR as a medium are far outweighed by the ability to allow people to develop an understanding of a given space or experience in a lowrisk environment. This also demonstrates the great potential for research use. Virtual environments can be inexpensively built to examine how participants behave in a particular scenario (Felnhofer et al. 2015), or simply to allow them to experience and reflect on an otherwise inaccessible location (Guttentag 2010).

Virtual environments for heritage VR has been quite widely deployed within the heritage sector, with many experiences being developed and applied in museums and heritage sites that can be difficult to access (Jung et al. 2016). For example, Oculus, in

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collaboration with Anne Frank House and Force Field VR, developed a 25­ minute immersive tour of Anne Frank’s Secret Annex. This tour, which is a free VR application, allows audiences to visit the secret annex even if they are unable to travel to Amsterdam or have limited mobility and cannot climb the stairs.1 An increasing number of heritage sites and museums worldwide have been using VR and augmented reality (AR) technologies in their exhibitions, including the British Museum, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and Paris’s National Museum of Natural History. The use of VR by these muse­ ums and galleries not only allows people who previously were unable to access these spaces to have those cultural experiences but also enriches the exhibition through interactivity (see, e.g., Mortara and Catalano 2018). This counters Champion’s (2008) claim that virtual heritage environments merely focus on the presentation, not the experience. Drawing upon the literature of non-representational theory, discussed throughout this book, it is possible to situate VR as a virtual place which presents users with a variety of affectual and embodied experiences. VR, just like other forms of virtual worlds (such as films and video games), blurs the distinction between the real and the imagined, and consequently has been frequently discussed using non-representational theories (see, e.g., Ash 2010; Carter and McCormack 2006; Shaw and Warf 2009). Being immersed in a VR environment, however, has uniquely fully embodied features, which enriches the affective capacities of both the (re)built landscapes in the headset and the emotional connections with the real places they represent. Bob Stone and his Human Interface Technologies Team (HITT) at the University of Birmingham, for example, have been working with virtual rea­ lity for over thirty years in collaboration with military defense, healthcare, and the heritage industries (Radd 2017). The heritage sector, which Stone regards as his “personal favourite,” enables him to “undertake projects as wide-ranging as using drones to recreate VR models of remote areas of his­ torical significance, subsea wreck visualizations, and the development of VR and AR content to support the educational aspects of the Mayflower 400 commemorations scheduled for 2020” (Stone quoted in Radd 2017, n.p.). Stone and the HITT have explored the possibilities of using VR for heritage on a wide range of historical sites, including Mesopotamia (Hanes and Stone 2019), Stonehenge (Stone 1998), Wembury Commercial Dock and Railway of 1909, HMS Amethyst, and the warship Anne (Stone 2015). The HITT’s work is interesting because they immerse people in these virtual environments to explore how they connect to the history of their local area, demonstrating how virtual experiences can help deepen connections to physical places and the imaginative place images. For example, the HITT have used underwater robot sonar systems and old maps to create an extensive 3D model of the Burrator reservoir in Dorset, United Kingdom, to visualize the landscapes as they existed before they were flooded. Although the model is factually based, the HITT added an imagined church to their model because “there’s a popu­ lar myth that when the water is low enough the spire of the village church will

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appear above the waterline and the bells will chime” (interview with Stone in BBC News 2018, n.p.). Similarly, the Memoryscapes project based at Northumbria University, United Kingdom, has been exploring how heritage assets can be recontex­ tualized using immersive technologies, including but not limited to virtual and augmented reality (Swords 2019).2 Unlike many projects involving VR, the Memoryscapes project seeks to avoid ‘solutionism’ by organizing workshops with various stakeholders and members of the public to aid the development of these immersive environments. Although this project is yet to publish their findings, Memoryscapes has begun to demonstrate the possibilities of partici­ patory creation and application of virtual worlds to understand heritage, narratives, places, and audiences. Building upon the work of the Memor­ yscapes project and the work of Bob Stone and his HITT, this chapter con­ siders two major possibilities of virtual environments and reality for heritage and memory-based applications: recreation of past landscapes (e.g., Burrator reservoir), but also the embodied experiences of virtual transcendence.

Method This chapter discusses some tentative findings from a methods workshop held on the National Mall in Washington, DC, as part of the Association of American Geographers Annual Conference in April 2019. The workshop, entitled “Applied Memory: Putting Affective & Embodied Methods into Practice on the National Mall,” explored the use of different memory meth­ ods to investigate four memorials: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Korean War Veterans Memorial, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The workshop enabled participants to explore a variety of methods, including biosensing, a smartphone application, embodied ethnography, video and sound recording, and VR. For the VR component, three virtual environments were loaded onto Oculus Go Headsets, which were shared with the workshop attendees (Figure 15.1). Alongside the other memory methods used in the workshop, the VR environments were developed to allow the participants to have the experience of using the headsets (which is often a new experience for many people), but also help deepen their connections to the physical places visited during the workshop and the (re)built or imagined spaces of the past. The Oculus Go is a standalone VR headset which is untethered from a computer but only tracks in three degrees of freedom, meaning that the headset responds to the user’s rotational/head movements (orientation) but not embodied directional movement (position). The only way to move around a model in the headset is thus ‘teleporting’ via a handheld controller. For the memorial sites selected, we built two environments in Unity,3 a recreation of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech on the National Mall (Figure 15.2) and a representation of Albert Speer’s Germania plan for the reconstruction of post-war Berlin. Both were designed to

Figure 15.1 Workshop participants using the Oculus Go Headsets on the National Mall

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Figure 15.2 The National Mall recreated in Unity

complement the experience of being physically present on the Mall. We also gave participants the opportunity to experience a 360° video of Auschwitz Concentration Camp whilst located within the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech On August 28, 1963, when 250,000 people gathered at the Washington Monument for the goal of securing civil rights for black Americans, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, which “transformed a meandering march into one of America’s historic events” (Brooks 1974 quoted in Vail 2006, 51). The speech, in which King describes and argues for his dreams of equality and freedom in a nation with a history of slavery and racial distrust, was filmed and has subsequently been remas­ tered,4 allowing current and future generations to experience such a momen­ tous event. Besides one of the remastered audio files of the speech, a simplified model of buildings within the capitol area was also purchased to form the base of the virtual environment. This was edited to remove parts of the map that would not be seen from the Mall (e.g., the Arlington district on the opposite side of the Potomac River) and then augmented with readymade 3D assets available through the Unity Store to add trees, water, and the sky. A 3D model of Martin Luther King Jr. himself was added, standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial along with an audio recording of the speech that played as users navigated the environment. Albert Speer’s Germania Berlin was intended to be redesigned following a German victory in World War II and renamed Germania. The project was led by Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect, and was to have been a lasting monument to the Third Reich’s power and grandeur for thousands of years (Featherstone 2005; Speer 1970). Indeed, the architecture was designed to be monstrously large (e.g., the inter­ ior of the Volkshalle was designed to be sixteen times the size of St. Peter’s

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Basilica Dome with a height slightly smaller than the Eiffel Tower). The design took inspiration from a variety of sources, including Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire as well as classically influenced contemporary ‘state’ architecture such as the National Mall (Lane 1986; Scobie 1990); yet very little of the project materialized. With game engines like Unity, however, it is possible to build this unmaterialized project and allow people to experience the sheer scale of Speer’s design and its underlying megalomania. In common with the recreation of the “I Have a Dream” speech, we used pre-existing 3D assets, including a model of the Reichstag, a pre-existing building which Speer integrated into his design. The inclusion of this actual building helps establish the monstrous scale of the planned development, which we also indicated by including a car parked in the main square and positioning eye level for the game camera as being 1.8 meters from the ground. Auschwitz Concentration Camp in 360° An accurate model of Auschwitz has been developed in Unity to aid prose­ cutors of a former SS guard who claimed he had been unaware of the mur­ ders taking place on the site (Buder 2019). This model, however, is not readily available for public use and is too detailed and complex to run in the rela­ tively underpowered Oculus Go Headset. Instead, we used a pre-existing 360° video, the ‘Auschwitz-Birkenau Walk through’ produced by Discover Cracow (2016). This promotional video, which we edited for length and to remove a somewhat distracting audio track, lasts three minutes and depicts various locations within the camp, including both interior and exterior spaces. The use of this video allowed the workshop attendees to experience the various spaces of the camp which could then be used to reflect on the design choices that were made both for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum building and its exhibitions. Indeed, some of the participants reflected on how the use of red brick, metal, and glass—which gives the museum a particular industrial feel—echoes the design of the concentration camp. Thus, the use of the 360° video not only allowed the participants to see Auschwitz beyond photographs but also to easily evaluate the affective architectural design of the museum by blurring the real and the virtual.

(Re)building the past Aside from complementing the visited memorials during the workshop, these three virtual environments demonstrate how virtual reality can be used to recreate, reimagine, and reconnect the past and the present. Physically stand­ ing in the National Mall is a reminder of how these kinds of monumental spaces gain their power from dwarfing the individual in an immense, stark expanse stripped of human activity. The VR model, meanwhile, does not attempt to reproduce the crowds who were present at the speech in 19635 and instead strips the landscape back to its simplified and symbolic form, without

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the clutter of tourists and the constantly distracting flow of aircraft heading into Ronald Reagan National Airport that are present in the material envir­ onment. The empty spaces in the VR model thus reaffirm some of the inti­ midating power of this planned landscape and enhance one’s ‘reading’ of the actual space. Placing audio of King’s words within the model of the National Mall at one level simply allowed participants to orientate themselves, gaining an understanding of where he stood when giving one of history’s most famous speeches. This in turn allowed them to imaginatively populate the space of the actual Mall beyond the headset, understanding something of how the crowds would have been fitted into the location. The speech itself runs to just sixteen minutes, with the section that plays in the headsets only including the last five minutes, which feature the renowned, repeated refrain “I have a dream.” Although the refrain is familiar, for many the speech is not and listening to it can be a tremendously moving reminder of the cause that was being fought for by King’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The sense of its significance is heightened by bringing the speech back into the physical space in which it was given, with the VR model allowing a creative collision of the virtual, physical, and imaginative in order to create a unique experience of the National Mall as a heritage space. This experience took a somewhat darker turn when we asked participants to examine the Germania model. The architectural style favored by Albert Speer was a kind of simplified classicism common in government buildings of the period. As architectural historian Barbara Miller Lane (1986) highlights, Paul Cret’s design for the Federal Reserve Board Building located just at the edge of the National Mall, which was completed in 1937, has a strikingly similar look and feel to what Speer planned for Berlin. Being able to look around the Germania model gives an opportunity to understand something of the axial plan for a monumental parade route that was envisaged as well as the sheer scale of the buildings. Even though the material landscape of the National Mall is intended to be intimidatingly large, the Germania model is even bigger, lined with buildings of an inhuman scale. Nonetheless, the architectural style and purpose of Germania is not radically different from the National Mall—it was simply designed to be somewhat larger. The simila­ rities between the experience of a virtual environment designed to celebrate the achievements of a Nazi government and a material environment cele­ brating the United States created a frisson of discomfort for Phil when he was building the model, but also for the participants during the workshop. It also raises questions about how the atmosphere of place is changed by the creation of these kinds of large memorial spaces at the heart of cities. The experience generated by the 360° video was somewhat different from the built environments, in part because it is actual footage of a real space, rather than an abstract rendering in a games engine. The lack of interactivity does, however, give more of a sense that the viewer is a spectator rather than actually immersed in the scene. The opportunity to see the material textures

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of the camp allowed participants to understand how the design language of the museum echoed, without reproducing, those environments. Of course, a more detailed 3D model, such as the one built by German prosecutors, can also give this sense of texture. Indeed, there are now many models of heritage sites built with minute detail using laser scanning and photogrammetry. When these models are repurposed into a games engine and placed in VR, they can give a powerful sense of being in that location. As such, this is clearly a useful approach for exploring how different landscapes are remembered by letting participants experience heritage spaces that they might not otherwise be able to access.

Experiencing the past It would be too easy to be seduced by the technology into forgetting that heritage is something more than a physical form and is brought into being through the intersection of the material and the more-than-representational. A heritage-rich landmark is a place where a range of different activities can occur, especially spaces incorporating a cultural site since they are the histor­ ical location of rituals, performances, and affectual flows. To understand the significance of these heritage-rich spaces, a virtual 3D reconstruction may not be sufficient. Indeed, Kalay (2008), Dave (2008), and Tan and Rahaman (2009) have each critiqued VR for merely representing the tangible, or physi­ cal aspects, of heritage at the expense of its intangible and emotional quali­ ties. Yet virtual experiences can be emotionally, affectively, and psychologically impactful. Decades of research on VR suggests that people internalize their virtual experiences and treat them as real (Blascovich and Bailenson 2011). Experiencing a VR environment through a headset is a curious embodied experience, similar to entering a dream state, that allows an individual to transcend space and time whilst being (mostly) immobile. Thus, exploring a VR environment could be argued to be an example of quiescent experience (cf. Bissell 2008, 2009) where the body is physically sedentary but ‘moving’ beyond the limits of the physical body. For example, many of the workshop attendees had never been to Auschwitz and had only seen it through photo­ graphs and videos. Yet through being immersed in a 360° video, the attendees felt like they had a ‘presence’ in the environment, as if they were physically there. Furthermore, it is this transcendent quality of using VR that makes it such an effective tool for memory scholars because it allows researchers to immerse their subjects in the spaces and places of the past. This immersion creates a greater sense of emotional connection to those locations, which can then prompt more nuanced reflections from participants being asked to discuss a particular place. When the individual enters a dreamlike state in VR, the body can be sub­ ject to performative slippages such as lurching, murmuring, and what we jokingly term ‘VR face,’ where the individual has their mouth agape for their

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6

period in the headset. When immersed within a VR environment, the body enters a close-to-subconscious state where the body withdraws and relaxes and “the smooth, well-practiced, calculated veneers of performance recede, to disclose the bare life of the autonomic body” (Bissell 2009, 431). Aside from these performative slippages, however, the body can also be bothered by the VR headset. Tess vividly remembers being overcome with simulator sickness while exploring a virtual model of Wembury during her first experience in a VR environment whilst on a tour of Bob Stone’s lab.7 Sadly, this is a common occurrence as a result of movement lag—where the moving of one’s head and line of sight is not at the same speed as movement in the VR environment— and can often discourage people from engaging with VR. Indeed, this was the case for one of the workshop attendees who had suffered from simulator sickness in the past and, as a result, did not want to take part in the VR aspect of the workshop. Taking regular breaks from VR is often seen as a way of avoiding simulator sickness (as well as other issues such as eyestrain and reality blurring [cf. Bailenson 2018]), but this discontinuity can distract from the experience of being in the virtual environment. It is also important to stress that an experience in VR rarely feels com­ pletely immersive because most of the virtual environments are designed with limited opportunity for active participation by users. Rarely is there a role for the visitor to play or any task to perform that is not predefined. Mosaker (2001) argued that virtual heritage environments suffered a lack of ‘thematic interactivity.’ This means users can move around inside the environment without any certain goal or objective in mind, which sometimes leaves them feeling lost and bored. At the workshop, however, the novelty and con­ sequential excitement that arose from being in the VR headsets meant that none of the participants was bored. Yet, the novelty of the VR also meant that many of the workshop attendees needed to explore the environments twice—the first time to get used to interacting in VR, and the second time to explore the virtual heritage environments. Indeed, it is important when plan­ ning any research using VR to allow additional time for the users to get used to the technology and the experience of being in a virtual environment.

Conclusion VR offers an exciting opportunity for memory and heritage researchers to (re)build and experience spaces of the past. These technologies allow scholars and the heritage sector to give participants and visitors access to experiences that would otherwise be either difficult or impossible, but they also stretch our imaginations to see the real world in new ways. And whilst impossible struc­ tures can be recreated in video or image, it has been argued that VR feels ‘more real’ than other virtual representations because VR experiences “will feel so realistic and immersive they will have the potential, similar to experi­ ences in the real world, to enact profound and lasting changes in us … [it is] better understood not as a media experience, but as an actual experience”

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(Bailenson 2018, 12, 47). As a result, VR as a memory method has a unique capacity to evoke affects which not only enrich the experience of being in a VR headset but also our understanding of and associations to sites of memory and past landscapes (both real and imagined). The use of VR should, however, be treated with a degree of caution. For all the possibilities that it can bring to memory and heritage research, it is important not to adopt a method that is simply novel for the sake of novelty (cf. Merriman 2014), but consider whether this is an effective method for the research focus. It is easy for researchers to plunge into the pitfalls of ‘solu­ tionism’ (Morozov 2013) and simply develop a method that answers a non­ existent research question. Regardless, we still believe that there is a future for VR in memory studies, especially when it is used as a tool to facilitate other methods. Carefully deployed, VR elicitation interviews, participatory VR, and similar hybrid approaches can help social science and humanities scholars reveal more-than-representational understandings of the past.

Notes 1 It is important to note that the Anne Frank Secret Annex in VR has not been without criticism and ethical debate as a result of its sensitive subject matter (e.g., Fletcher 2016). 2 Additional information about the Memoryscapes project can be found at the pro­ ject website (https://numemoryscapes.wordpress.com/). Also see: https://heritage-re search.org/case-studies/memoryscapes-re-imagining-place/. 3 Unity is a game engine used to build 3D and 2D environments compatible with both desktop and standalone VR/AR devices. 4 For a remastered video of the speech, see: www.youtube.com/watch?v= vP4iY1TtS3s. 5 This was in part a practical decision. The headsets being used would have struggled to run a complex model containing multiple characters in a crowd, while a simplified crowd would have looked distractingly fake, spoiling the sense of immersion. 6 We do have images of ‘VR face’ but decided not to include them in this chapter to avoid embarrassment. 7 Wembury is a small village situated in Devon, United Kingdom.

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Index

Figures are indexed with italic page numbering. Tables with bold page numbering. #blacklivesmatter movement 224 #metoo movement 224 Aboriginal culture 246 Aboriginal heritage 236 Aboriginal history 237, 243 ‘activist spatial experiences’ 12, 220–1, 225, 231 Actors’ Equity group 114 Addams, Jane 171 Adey, Peter 4, 124, 129, 133, 170, 238 Admission to Magnolia Plantation and Gardens 19, 30, 31 “The Affect of Memorializing the Loss, the Affect of Losing the Memorial: Confederate War Monuments in New Orleans” 8 “affective atmospheres” 98–9, 102, 176, 197, 207, 211 “affective engagements” 20, 23–4, 26–7, 35, 37, 41, 57, 225 “affective heritage” 2, 5, 70, 100, 122, 192–3, 196, 222 affordances 189, 193–4, 197; archi­ tectural 191, 197; cultural 190, 194, 196, 198, 200; landscape of 193 African Americans 35, 94, 98, 100 African enslavement 6, 24; see also slaves; see also slavery Ahmed, Sara 21, 43, 46 Alderman, Derek 1, 22, 172 Allan, Thomas 159, 163 alley of oaks 25, 26, 32 alligators 19, 23 alternative tours 30–1 American Civil War 8, 19, 24, 30, 32, 92–4, 97–8, 100, 108, 110–12, 115–17;

and African Americans freed by the 98; and the burying of all of the Drayton treasures 31; interpretation of events and icons of the 90; and the Lost Cause movement 24, 92–3, 98, 158; soldiers 28 American eels 140 American Indian victimization 180 American ‘memorial mania’ 172 American Revolution 121, 178 amnesia 143–4 Anderson, Ben 168, 207 Anderson, Brian 124 Andes-Norte Gallery 55 Andres Bello courtyard 64 animal figures, fantasy 127 Anne (warship) 254 Anne Frank House 254 antebellum plantations 6 antifascist monuments 51 Apartheid 12, 220–1, 224–5 Apartheid Museum, South Africa 228, 229 “Applied Memory: Putting Affective & Embodied Methods into Practice on the National Mall” (workshop) 255 AR see augmented reality Arab Spring 224 Arabs 221 Arad, Michael 70–2 architects 4–5, 129, 159, 190, 192, 195–6, 198; argue that architecture acts as a meaningful scaffolding for human life 187; design intentions are to be understood as embracing the condi­ tions of human embodiment 188; and designers increasingly seek to imbue

268

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spaces with deeper sensory resonance 4; grounding their work in evidencebased approaches that draw on interdisciplinary research to enhance outcomes for occupants 5; role and limits in creating affective heritage 189; university’s 175 architectural affordances 191, 197 architectural design 11, 13, 48, 122, 187, 189, 198–9, 207–8, 215, 258 Architectural Digest 4 architectural experiences 188–90, 195, 199 architectural heritage 3, 134, 188–9, 197–200 architectural history 117, 188, 192 architectural phenomenologists 187 architectural spaces 120, 125, 129, 136, 187, 190–2 architectural structures 196, 212 architectural style 20, 259 architecture 1, 3–5, 10–11, 13, 22–4, 55–6, 127–9, 174, 187–92, 195, 197–9, 204, 206–9, 211–13, 257–8; authentic 7; city’s subterranean colonial 10; courtyard 245; experiences of 11, 189, 191, 200; and grounds 24, 81, 140, 143, 153; imperial 9; monumental 91, 101, 103, 206; plantation 7; role and limits in creating affective heritage 11, 187, 214; subterranean 142 architecture-body communication 189, 191–2, 195–6; and body-environment interactions 189; dynamic and enactive nature of 198; pre-reflective 189, 191, 195–6 archives 6–7, 49, 73, 153, 163; local 161; sedimented 144 armed forces 56 Armstrong, Keith 157 art galleries 2, 115 artists 12, 51, 236–8, 243, 246, 249; active 245; attempting to connect to the more-than-human in a site 239; commissioned 95; contemporary 246; and designers 224; and the embedded memories sensed corporeally and consciously by the 236; Honi Ryan 243, 244, 245–6; local 245; new generation of 10, 51; using methods of heightened presence and loosened narrative performance in their practices 236; Woodrow Nash 37

Asociación de Fotógrafos Independientes 63 assassinations 3, 9, 108–10, 112–18; Abraham Lincoln 9, 114–17; John F. Kennedy 108, 113 Association of American Geographers Annual Conference 255 atmospheres 24, 50, 91, 101, 133, 155, 168, 170, 188, 192–3, 196–8, 200, 207–8, 240, 259; calming 72; compre­ hending more-than-representational 11; creating particular 188; deseg­ regated political 99; hallowed 207; peaceful 55, 64; popular emotional 59 atrocities 37, 44–5, 47, 49–50, 98, 220; American Civil War 8, 19, 24, 28, 30–2, 90, 92–4, 97–8, 100, 108, 110–12, 115–17; Apartheid 12, 220–1, 224–5; human rights 7; Japan’s World War II 41, 46; Jewish Holocaust 204, 210, 220, 225, 243; Unit 731 40–2, 44, 49, 51; unveiled 45 attacks 71–4, 78–82, 114, 177 audiences 12, 35, 91, 114, 116, 231, 242–3, 254–5; interactions 229, 231; international 221; members 243, 245; target 226 augmented reality 254–5 Auschwitz Concentration Camp in 360° 48, 257–8, 260 Austin, J.L. 206 Australia 12, 121, 126, 236–7, 246; Aboriginal culture 245; academic Emma Waterton giving weight to heritage spaces 238; cross-cultural and multi-cultural values 123; cultural understandings of 237; issues of iden­ tity and culture 243; modern white sense of belonging 237; philosopher and ecofeminist Val Plumwood acknowledges the deep spiritual rela­ tionship with the land of the indigen­ ous people 237; and the post-colonial occupants 238 Bachelard, Gaston 131–2 Bacon’s Castle 28, 32 Bal, Mieke 207, 213 Ballast Hills burial ground, Newcastleupon-Tyne 161, 162–3 Basdas, Begum 64 Batiste, Jonathan 90 The Battle of Liberty Place 92 Bazlamit, Rusaila 12, 221, 225–6, 230

Index BDS see Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement Beckstead, Zachary 42 Beijing 120–1 Beijing’s Forbidden City see Forbidden City beliefs 2, 71, 122, 168, 223, 243 Bellow, Martin 81 Bennett, Jill 22, 41, 112 Bentley, Michelle 11, 204, 206, 208, 210, 212, 214 Berkeley Plantation 32 Berlin 58, 196, 198, 257, 259 Big House 20, 24, 34, 37; and gardens 26; plantation 24 biological warfare 44 biopolitical bonds 71 biopolitics 70 black Americans 257 ‘black code’ (constraining black civil rights in Louisiana) 92 Black Lives Matter movement 97, 224 black subjugation 93 black suffrage 92 Black voices 92 Blackman, Lisa 121, 124 blacks 93, 97–8 blankets 62–3 Blue Mountains, Australia 236–8, 246 bodily actions 120, 125, 128–31, 134 bodily experience 43, 57, 123–4, 126, 132–3, 136; contemporary 132, 136; of intensity 4; provocative 124; in the space 120–6, 128–9, 131, 134–6 body 3–4, 21–2, 58, 60–1, 63, 81, 120–36, 140–1, 144–6, 152–3, 189–92, 196, 198–9, 241–2, 260–1; autonomic 261; changes 129, 135; collective 78; composite 135; contemporary 132–3, 135; cultural 123, 133; discipline 132; emerging 5; ever-changing 129, 137; exhumed 97; human 80, 146, 187; indigenous 146; living 187; memory 147, 194; movements 240; natural 71, 82; physical 133, 260; politic 70, 82; relationships 240; schema 195–6; sociological 120, 123–6, 136; studies 123; of work 239, 249 body and space 121–2, 127–8, 130; impact in contemporary time 122; interrelationship between 121, 127, 130 body-environment coupling 191

269

body-environment interaction 189–91, 198; and architecture-body communication 189; patterns 190 Boogaarts, Inez 21, 23 Boone Hall (South Carolina) 32, 34 Booth’s derringer (gun) 115, 118 Borch, Christian 197–8 borderlands 55, 57–8 Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement 224 boycotts 224 brain-body mechanisms 189 Brathwaite, Kamau 145 bricks 45, 128, 213 British Museum 254 Buffalo Morning Express 112 building code 130 buildings 11–12, 43–4, 57, 77–8, 100, 108–11, 116–17, 121–2, 129–30, 204, 206–8, 211–15, 236–8, 240, 257–9; dark 241; federal 112; historic 49–50, 111; landmark 188; modern 49–50; old 47, 50; original 41; physical 208, 214; pre-existing 258; religious 211, 214 Burdick, Jake 169 burial sites 81, 140, 143, 152–3 burials 95, 162 Burn, George 159 Burnett, David 55 Bush, Pres. George W. 69, 79 Butler, Judith 147, 162, 211 Callery pears 73–6 Cameron, John 237–8 “Caminando por la Memoria” (Walking through Memory Exhibition) 55, 62 camps 258, 260 campus 171, 174–6, 180; see also university campuses capacity 12, 21–2, 34, 57, 76, 124, 134, 152–3, 187, 194–6, 199, 220; body’s 199; financial 225; to relate or engage 124; representational 8, 67; sensory-motor 239; translating architecture’s 188 Capture Unit (Estadio Nacional) 61 carabineros (police) 61 Carr, Ralph 1, 155 Carson, Cary 20 Carter, Beverly 29–30, 254 Carter, Perry L. 6 Cavicchi, Julia 8–10, 67 CCP see Chinese Communist Party cemeteries 152–4, 157, 159, 161–2

270

Index

Center for Paranormal Research and Investigation 28 chemical monitoring 78 chemical testing 78 Chicken, Edward 151 children 29–31, 36–7, 63, 79, 94, 96, 170, 178; enslaved 37; exposed to histories deemed “age appropriate” 29; newborn 5; school 29 Children of Whitney 36, 37 China 3, 7, 40–1, 43–4, 46–7, 51, 73, 121, 125–6, 131; anti-Japanese sentiment 46; contemporary 135; dark moment in history 46; Japanese War in 47; new exhibition hall 40–2, 44–51; and the pedagogical and political connotations of Unit 731 40–1, 49, 51; and Southeast Asia 40 Chinese Communist Party 40, 43, 46, 57, 171 Chinese government 7, 40, 46, 51 Chinese memorials 43 Chinese officials 41, 48–9 Chinese royal architecture 121 Chinese victimization 41, 50 Chinese visitors 41 A Christmas Carol 114 churchyards 151–2, 154–7 cities 75, 77–9, 81–2, 90, 92, 94, 97, 100–1, 111, 121–2, 127, 129–30, 140, 142–3, 147; creative cultural 90; neighboring 142; occupied 40; port 94; provincial English 154 civil disobedience 224 civil rights movement 92, 98, 257 Civil War 19, 28, 30–2, 90, 92–4, 97–8, 100, 108, 110–12, 115–17; gave visible materiality to the Lost Cause movement 24; memorials projecting communal values 8; monuments as symbols of white supremacy and pro-slavery sentiment 8; and the post-Reconstruction South 94, 96; and the Reconstruction government 92 cognition 189–93, 195, 199; and con­ sciousness of the site 153; embodied theories of 187, 189–90, 192; enactive­ embodied 11, 197; implications of understanding 193 collective memory 1, 7, 69, 74, 135, 141, 196–7, 200, 221, 237 colonial 9, 12, 140–1, 143, 145, 177–9; conquests 143; history 245;

infrastructures 140, 145; knowledge 143; suppression 238 “Colonial Unknowing and Affective Uncertainty: Sewers and Eels in Troy, New York” 9, 140–3, 145 colonialism 10, 35, 144, 179 combined sewer overflows 142, 146 “Come enjoy her beauty and dream of her past” 25 Come from Away 114 Cominando por al Memoria Permanent Exposition 62 commemorating 67, 204, 211; mass historic events 222; places 4; processes 83 commemoration of names 11, 206, 209, 214–15 commemorative lists 214 commemorative spaces 79, 168, 172, 180, 220; active 174; hybrid 222 commodified history 6, 24 Communist Party see Chinese Communist Party community 10, 13, 68, 73, 76, 91, 98, 100–2, 140, 157, 159, 163–4, 176–7, 221, 228; efforts 73; engagement 101; gardens 76; gendered 70; idols 100; literary 157, 164 Confederate memorials 8, 98–100, 103 Confederate monuments 94; flashpoints for political conflict, demonstrations, and identity contestation 97; the greatest physical manifestation of the ‘Lost Cause of the Confederacy’ 93; make gestures about the mores of ‘traditional’ Southern culture 91; in New Orleans 8, 90–1, 93, 95, 97, 99, 101; present a problem of competing and disturbing affect 8, 90; public debate surrounding 98 Connerton, Paul 6 coup d’états 7, 56, 59–60, 92 courtyards 123–4, 126–7, 130–3, 241–2, 244–5 CPRI see Center for Paranormal Research and Investigation Crang, Mike 172 Creating Sensory Spaces: The Architecture of the Invisible 4 Crescent City White League 92 Cret, Paul 259 crimes 48, 50, 109, 220 cross-cultural understanding 231 crosses 45, 158, 172

Index CSOs see combined sewer overflows cultural 8–11, 57–8, 67–9, 71–5, 98, 120–1, 123–31, 133–6, 155–6, 169–71, 189–90, 193–8, 227–8, 237–8, 245–6; affordances 190, 194, 196, 198, 200; artefacts 213, 228; changes 123; codes 65, 133, 136; geography 1, 5–6, 13; healing 43; heroes 155; meaning of sites 120–1, 126–7, 130, 190; and social background 130, 243, 246 ‘cultural, archaeology’ 238 culture 120, 123, 132, 187, 193–5, 237, 242–3, 246; dynamic vernacular 164; local literary 158; national 155; nine­ teenth-century 152; racial 243; ther­ apeutic 99; traditional Southern 91; traditions 98, 194; working to secure identities 169 Cunningham, John 151, 154–7; death of 156; honoured by Keith Armstrong as a fellow traveller and entertainer 157; memorial 154–5; monument in St John’s church yard 156; tomb of 151, 156, 163; venerated by poets 155 Dalibor Vesely 187 damage 73, 83; accretional 145; environmental 77–8; potential 47, 49 damnatio memoriae (condemned memory) 55, 57 dark history exhibitions 46–7, 51 Darug people 236, 246 Davidson, Joyce 99, 223 Davies, Thom 78–9, 83 de Vega, Perez 122 death 62, 65, 67, 71, 77, 79, 82–3, 111, 114, 145, 153–7, 161, 163, 204, 211–13; constructed by Judith Butler as a hierarchical concept about lives 211; corporeal 155; of cultural heroes 155; social 157; unfathomable 68 Decoudu, Veronique 61 dedications 174 Degen, Monica 43, 64 Deleuze, Gilles 12, 239 Denton, Kirk 41, 49 desaparecidos (missing) 56, 61, 63 design 1, 4–6, 9, 11, 13, 43, 73, 94, 121–2, 126, 129, 131, 196–7, 223, 258; acts 189, 196; affective 198; considera­ tions 225–6; initial 130, 132, 136; intellectualized 188; new exhibition hall’s 47; original winning 174; physical 134

271

‘design activism’ 224, 230 designers 4–5, 130, 191, 196, 223–4 destinations 116, 133, 152; popular 115; prized 164 destruction 70–2, 76–7, 82 detainees 3, 56, 61–2 Dewey, John 169, 177, 180 dialectics 69, 145, 163, 170–1 Diaoyu Islands dispute 46 digital media 227 diplomatic relationships 41, 43 disembodied understanding (of how the human brain works) 190 disputes 46, 55, 92, 209; Diaoyu Islands 46; maritime boundary 46 dollars 19, 21, 23, 27, 29–31, 33, 35 Doss, Erika 1, 4, 6, 70–1, 172, 208 downtown workers 116 dreams 25, 100, 141, 144–5, 257, 259 dressing rooms 62 Drozdzewski, Danielle 4–5, 172 dust 68, 72, 81, 154, 247, 249 dust clouds 8, 67, 69, 71, 73, 75, 77, 79, 81 ecologies 8, 69, 76, 82–3, 141, 143–6; affective 140–1; memorial’s attendant 82 economy 6–8, 33–4, 58, 69, 74, 98, 131, 164, 197; agrarian 98; new museum 8, 33; political 34; racialized 7 Edensor, Tim 45, 125, 152, 192, 196–7 Edkins, Jenny 68, 82 education 27, 47, 115, 144, 169–71, 221, 228, 246; experience of 168; informal 169; and learning 169; moral 220, 222; patriotic 46; politicized 169; progressive 169 eel stories 146 eels 9–10, 140–1, 143–7; burrowing 140; harvesting 144; ‘pleating the traces of the places they have lived’ 145; on the table at the first Thanksgiving dinner 144; tumbling out of abandoned cars 146 Eisenman, Peter 198 El Mercurio 60 El Universal 61 elderly refugee woman 230 elections 73, 78, 92 Elliott, Scott 72–3 embedded 5, 7, 9, 12, 43, 80, 83, 142, 190, 192, 236–41, 243, 245, 247, 249; geographies 5, 9; memories 236, 238, 240; place-memories 7, 12, 83

272

Index

embodied 1–6, 9, 11–13, 41–7, 57–8, 63–4, 108, 120–6, 130, 187–97, 199–200, 222–3, 229, 239, 254–5; beings 122, 128, 130; encounters 1–4, 12–13, 55, 125, 188, 222; experiences 41–4, 46, 49, 51, 108, 199–200, 239, 260; meaning and memory in archi­ tectural making 195; sensibilities 9, 120, 126 embodiment 3, 7, 55, 59–60, 63, 123, 126, 187, 189, 191, 193–4, 197–8, 222; in architectural design 11; cultural 123, 134; of history and romance 24; human 73, 188, 200; personal 176 emotional 100; arousal 197; association 152; attachments 7, 173; contrivances 156; costs 91; dimensions of Ford’s Theatre and the Petersen House 108; feelings 247; injuries 100; liberty 223; outcomes 116; qualities 260; reactions 223; resonances 2, 134; responses 11, 31, 45, 155, 189, 192, 195, 200 emotions 1, 3–6, 9, 11, 13, 21, 23, 108, 110, 115, 117, 124, 126, 153, 222–3; creating 223; everyday 134; perfor­ mance of 102; primordial 90; public 109 encounters 4, 37, 122, 124, 129–30, 134, 151, 153–4, 164, 231, 244–5; affectual 221; cultural/political 125; emotional 10; meaningful 187 enslaved people 21, 29, 30 enslavement 23–4, 29, 34–5, 90 environment 3–4, 8, 12–13, 69–71, 77–8, 101–2, 123, 125–6, 187–94, 196–200, 208, 212–14, 220–31, 252–5, 257–61; architectural 200; artistic 12; changing 123; cultural 125, 193; external 123; hazardous 253; immersive 255; landscaped 238; local 157; low-risk 253; natural 75, 225, 228; physical 208; simulated 12; sociomaterial 197 environmental damage 77–8 Environmental Protection Agency 77, 82 environmental psychology 188 epitaphs 152, 154, 162 Ernwein, Marion 197–8 “Essay on Sepulchres” 155 essays 2–3, 5–6, 9–11, 94, 154, 169; “The Affect of Memorializing the Loss, the Affect of Losing the Memorial: Con­ federate War Monuments in New Orleans” 8; “Colonial Unknowing and Affective Uncertainty: Sewers and Eels

in Troy, New York” 9, 140–3, 145; “Essay on Sepulchres” 155; “‘Give them more and more for their dollar’: Searching for Slavery Amongst the Plantation Edutainment Complex” 6; “How Buildings Mean” 94 Estadio Nacional de Santiago de Chile 3, 5, 7, 55–8, 59, 60–5 eunuchs 124, 135 Evans, Jocelyn 8 exhibition halls 7, 40–2, 44–8, 50–1, 204, 212 exhibitions 21, 35, 40–1, 50, 115, 193, 222, 236–7, 246, 248, 254, 258; “Caminando por la Memoria” (Walking through Memory Exhibition) 55, 62; dark history 46–7, 51; eloquent 47; Explorer’s: Narratives of Site 246; Palestine 227; permanent 236; photography 55; retelling the story of the assassination and the Civil War 115; text-heavy 115; theatrical 109 experience 60–3, 126–7, 129–32, 134–6, 171–3, 188, 190–2, 206–8, 213, 225–6, 229–30, 237–40, 253–5, 257–9, 261–2; ‘authentic’ Imperial Confucian 126; collective 6; cross-cultural 125; emo­ tional 57; heightened 239; immersive 11, 206, 212; incorporated internal 240; individual 196; intimate 134; memorable 197; narrative 222; perfor­ mative 208, 215; personal 42; planta­ tion museum 35; psychological 152; quiescent 260; romantic 35; sensorial 127; simultaneous 136; traditional plantation tourist 37 experiential 11, 169, 187, 190, 227, 229, 231, 239; approaches 5; concepts 223; elements 1; learning 169; simulations 220 Explorer’s: Narratives of Site 246 families 19, 31, 46, 60, 64, 73, 78, 81, 111, 116, 230; friendly events with 31; members 72, 81, 161; plantation owner’s 28, 37; and WTC Families for a Proper Burial Inc. 81 fantasy animal figures 127 fear 7, 45, 56, 58, 61–2, 79, 99, 246; an emotion that quickly seized people’s minds 60; existential 196; public 71 Federal forces 92 Federal Reserve Board Building 259

Index Fergusson, Robert 155 festivals 23, 31 Feuer, Alan 68, 81 fieldtrips 28–9 fieldwork 140, 209, 212 films 168, 254, 257 fish 140–1, 144–7 flashpoints for political conflict and protest 7, 97, 99, 221–2, 224, 230–1 flowers 67 Fluri, Jennifer 71–2, 80, 82 Foote, Kenneth 9, 110 footprints 70, 113, 132; memorial 70; showing Booth’s escape route 113; tourists’ 132 “For ‘Cuny’” 157 Forbidden City 9, 120–7, 129–31, 133–6; challenges 129; investigations 124; studies 121 force 50, 61, 70, 77, 81–2, 92, 96, 98–101, 158, 199, 206–7, 223, 245, 254; illocu­ tionary 206–7; locutionary 206–7; perlocutionary 206–7; political 135 Force Field VR 254 Ford, John Thompson 109 Ford’s Theatre 3, 9, 107, 108–10, 112–18; and Museum 115; plays 114, 117; restoring 113; site 115; stage 114; visitors 116–17 Ford’s Theatre Museum 115 Ford’s Theatre Society 107–9, 115, 117 Fort Laurens State Historic Site, Ohio 177–9 Foucault, Michel 122–3 freedom 55, 80, 90, 255, 257, 259; for imagining and defining our own self-narratives and identities 193; to peaceful assembly and protest 174; political 55; transition of slavery to 35 Fresh Kills landfill 68 Fresh Kills Memorial Park 83 FTS see Ford’s Theatre Society Fuad-Luke, Alastair 221, 224, 230 Fuchs, Ron 152, 194–5, 198 Gaddie, Keith 6, 8 Gallagher, Shaun 93, 188–92, 195–6 galleries 55–7, 63, 226, 254 game engines 220–31, 258 games 56, 227–8; clattering 241; engine 259–60; screen-based 227 garbage 81, 83 Garden of Exile 196

273

gardens 19, 23, 26, 30–2, 34, 196; Academy’s 249; beautiful 31; and the Big House 26; community 76; flower 26; Magnolia Plantation and Gardens 26, 30–2; plantation museum’s 24; romantic 26; urban 171 Gay, Flaminia 146 gender 91, 122–3, 169 gendered taxonomies 71 generations 9–10, 55, 57, 74, 76, 102, 121, 141, 151, 222, 252, 257; multiple 99; new 6, 64, 74–5, 147; younger 64, 91 genocide 35, 204; memorials 211; museums 211 geographers 22, 63, 109, 152, 163, 170, 178–9, 252–3, 255; historical 109; human 152 geographies 1, 13, 169–70; disparate 75; historical 12; interrelated material 74; personal 99; social 99; unequal racial 8; wounded 83 geography 145, 168–70, 172, 252; affec­ tive 189; auditory 45; contemporary 122; cultural 1, 5–6, 13; emotional 99 geopolitical order 71 geopolitics 46, 82 Germania model 259 gestures 55, 64, 91, 126, 133–4, 159, 237, 244, 246; affective 91; appropriate 91; bodily 23; initial 127, 130; intended 128, 132; more-than-representational 2 ghost stories 28 ghost tours 27–8; with focus on the tragic and macabre 28; offering special 28; websites 28 ghosts 27–8, 49–50, 82, 212, 238 Gilchrist, Paul 10, 151, 154, 156, 162–3 Gilchrist, Robert 10, 151, 154, 161–2 Giroux, Henry 169–70 “‘Give them more and more for their dollar’: Searching for Slavery Amongst the Plantation Edutainment Complex” 6 Godwin, William 155, 163 gold 210, 212 Goldsmith, Andrea 213 Gone with the Wind 24 good deeds 176–7 Good Deeds Chairs Memorial 169, 176, 177 Goodman, Nelson 94, 96 government 77, 92, 121, 210, 231; build­ ings 259; central 41, 46; Chinese 7, 40,

274

Index

46, 51; compensation programs 78; federal 98, 113; interventions 77; lea­ ders 69; national 77; Nazi 259; United States 80 graves 10, 110, 152, 154–7, 159, 161, 163–4, 188, 193; familial 2; lonely 156; markers 155, 161, 164; visiting 164 gravesites 5, 10 gravestones 158–9 “graveyard school” (English literature) 155–6 graveyards 1, 65, 67, 153, 155, 157, 159, 162, 245 green ecologies of 9/11 memory and memorialization 69 Greenwald, Alice 79 guided house tours 27 guides 19–20, 23–4, 26–8, 30–1, 35, 99, 123, 161, 180; finding 27; kayaking 144; use of 24; white 30–1 Gundungurra people 236, 246 Gurian, Elaine-Heumann 1–2 Halloween Fright Nights 31 Hamber, Brandon 220, 222–4 Handbook of Public Pedagogy 169 Hanna, Stephen P. 6 Haraway, Donna 83 headquarters 47–8, 50, 121; former 41, 47–51; former dynastic 9; Japanese Army 7; political 121; Unit 731 Biological Warfare Headquarters 40, 44, 49 headsets 253–6, 258–61 headstones 152, 162 healing 83, 209, 245; cultural 43; psychological 93 health 72, 74, 79, 146; conditions 78; consequences of chemical testing 78; groups 141; psychosomatic 188; public 78; threats 77; unknown effects to 78 hegemonic meanings 8 hegemonic role 172 Heidegger, Martin 187 heritage 1–4, 6, 13, 42, 65, 70, 73, 75, 82, 98–9, 134–6, 228, 231, 252–5, 260; architectural 3, 134, 188–9, 197–200; buildings 48; conceptualising 239; digital 231; experience 42, 120, 122; hardcore 199; industries 254; intangi­ ble 153, 157; landscapes 91; public 10; research 12, 252, 262; sectors 253–4, 261; studies 1, 4–5; tourism 10, 20, 22, 26

heritage sites 3, 50, 97, 101–2, 122, 172, 239, 253–4, 260; dedicated to the Confederacy 103; important 6; and the Lee Monument 98; original 47–8; political 37 heritage space 120, 122–5, 130, 134–7, 223, 238, 259; contemporary 223; designing 13 heroisms 79 historians 100, 111, 162; Kamau Brathwaite 145; public 109; revisionist Israeli 221; Richard Holmes 154 historic buildings 49–50, 111 Historic Haunt Night Tours 28 historic monuments 57 historical ambience 41, 50 historical characters 29 historical events 114, 220, 225, 228 historical sites: Anne (warship) 254; HMS Amethyst 254; Mesopotamia 254; national 107, 114; recognized 143; Stonehenge 254; Wembury Commercial Dock and Railway 1909 254 history 23–4, 26–9, 33–5, 41, 46–51, 74, 90–1, 93, 108–9, 111–12, 130–1, 140–4, 178–9, 222–4, 238–40; Abori­ ginal 237, 243; architectural 117, 188, 192; authentic 41, 50; colonial 245; commodified 6, 24; competing 7; constructed 48; cultural 135; discarded 141; dogmatic 12; embodied 47; eroded 147; forgotten 141; and the Holocaust 207; indigenous 143, 245, 250; institutional 55; interrelated 70; local 102; oral 220; original 48; pain­ ful 6, 10; political 243; post-colonial 237; sacred 245; of slavery 27, 257; social 250 HITT see Human Interface Technologies Team HMS Amethyst 254 Ho, WeiZen 240, 241, 242–3, 246 holidays 131, 193 Holmes, Richard 154 Holocaust 11–12, 204, 206–7, 209, 211–14; history 207; memorials 11; museums 222–3; survivors 57, 204 Holocaust Memorial Day 210 homes 5, 23, 34, 60, 77, 110–11, 142, 158, 161; historic 28; Hull-House 171; Jesmond Old Cemetery 158; Petersen House 9, 107–12, 115; Poesten Kill 140–3, 145

Index horrors 21, 45, 63, 211–14 Houmas House and Gardens, Louisiana 24, 26, 32, 34 houses 9, 22, 26, 28, 37, 41, 49, 56, 108, 111–12, 115, 152, 162, 245, 248–9; enslaved laborers constructing the 24; haunting of the 28; historic 9; history of the 26; the material culture of the 24; original boiler 47; tours of 20, 24, 26, 36 “How Buildings Mean” 94 Howard, Frank T. 97 Hudson River 140, 142, 144–7 Huffschmid, Anne 58–9 Hull-House 171 human experiments 40, 44 Human Interface Technologies Team 254–5 human practice 132, 134 human victims see victims humiliation 62; and loss of personhood 59; national 7, 41–2, 46, 51; playing a role in unifying the Chinese nation 46; sentiment of 49; and victimization of the Chinese 50 icons 90, 98–9 identities 13, 26, 60, 90, 123, 168–9, 172, 190, 193–7, 200, 230, 243, 246; common 102; community 91, 101; cultural 73, 131; individual 204; paradoxical 74; personal 98; poetical 10 illocutionary 206 illocutionary force 206–7 Illustrated Buffalo Express 112 imagery 44–5 images 45, 60–1, 83, 97, 121, 239, 246, 261; blurry 45; disconnected place 239; disseminating 221; iconic 55; imaginative place 254; satellite 80, 178 Imperial bodies 129, 132–3, 135–6 Imperial code 121, 129, 132–3, 136 Imperial Confucian body 126 Imperial Japanese Army 3, 7, 40, 46 Imperial space 122, 135 indigenous history 143, 245, 250 indigenous people 237–8 “industrial amnesia” 10, 142–4, 147 industrial revolution 142 inequality 22, 37 infrastructures 3, 141–2; colonial 140, 145; underground 147; urban 2, 9, 143

275

Ingold, Tim 125, 128 inscriptions 154, 159, 162; corporal 59; cultural 134; monumental 162; prosaic 157 interactions 6, 8, 116, 122, 124, 128–9, 134, 136–7, 191, 194, 223, 226, 228, 239, 245; bodily 187, 190, 193, 195, 199; intimate 120; space-visitor 196 international press 60; see also media; see also newspapers interrelationship 9, 120–2, 124, 127–8, 136; between body and space 121–2, 127–8, 130; collective 130 interviews 23, 27, 33, 209, 255 investigations 109, 116, 120, 122, 124–5, 136, 221 “ISIS” 224 Islamic State in Iraq and Syria 224 Jackson, Andrew 90 James River, Virginia 34 James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act 2010 79 Japan 40–1, 43–4, 46; defeat in World War II 40; and the Imperial Japanese Army 3, 7, 40, 46; and the use of poison-gas 45; World War II atrocities 41, 46 Jelic´, Andrea 11 Jencks, Sarah 9 Jesmond Old Cemetery, Newcastle-uponTyne 158 Jewish Holocaust 204, 210, 220, 225, 243 Jewish Museum in Prague (I) 205 Jewish Museum in Prague (II) 205 Jewish Museum in Prague (III) 210 Jewish Museums 197, 206, 209, 212; Berlin 196; Prague 204–5, 210 Jim Crow laws 24 John Deere Tractor Company 19 Jones, Phil 12 Kennedy Center 113–14 Kent State University 10, 169, 173–4, 175, 176 kidnappings 61 killings 174, 176, 204; associated with the Holocaust 209; communicating the scale of 211, 214; mass 211 King, Martin Luther Jr 255, 257 Korean War Veterans Memorial 255 Kraftl, Peter 129, 133, 170 Kunstmann, Wally 62, 64

276

Index

“La Dignidad” grandstand 64 La Tercera 60 “Lamenting the Dead: The Affective Afterlife of Poets’ Graves” 10, 151–64 landfill 81, 83 landscapes 10, 26, 70, 72, 74, 82–3, 98–9, 101, 168–73, 175–80, 236, 238, 254, 258, 260; architectural 59; com­ memorative 10, 169, 171, 173, 176, 180; creating 80; cultural 8; emotional 10, 56; heritage 91; idea of 170, 180; intellectual 13; liminal 76; memorial 8, 11, 22, 67, 72–3, 76, 79, 83, 99, 102, 169, 171–4, 178–80, 221; museal 3; out-of-the-way 81; pedagogical 171–2; permanent and material 3, 175, 259; physical 102; plantation museum 24; rural 26, 238; transforming 199; urban 90–1, 99–100, 102; virtual 224 Lane, Barbara Miller 259 Latin America 58–9 The Leap Motion (infra-red sensor) 226 learning 24, 141–2, 144–5, 169–70, 179, 220, 245; and education 169; emo­ tional 2, 12; experiential 169; openended 227; preferences 21; public 2 Lee, Robert E. 90, 94–8, 101, 171, 253 Lee Circle 93–4, 95 Lee Memorial, New Orleans 8, 93, 96–7, 102 Lee Monument 93–4, 96–8, 100–2 Lee Square 99 Lee Statue 8 lighting 3, 42–6 Lincoln, Abraham 9, 107–18; assassina­ tion 9, 114–17; body of 115; death of 111; demythologizing of 117; pre­ sidency and assassination 3, 107, 114–16; public space commemorating 113; reputation 110; tomb 110 Lincoln Group of the District of Columbia 113 Lincoln Memorial 110, 113, 257 Lincoln Museum 112 lists (Bohemian and Moravian Jewish victims of the Holocaust) 94, 204, 212, 214 literary community 157, 164 literary pilgrims 151, 161, 164 Liu, Peng 9 living areas 123, 130, 132 living memorial landscapes 73, 76, 80, 110, 114 Living Memorials Project 73, 75

LMP see Living Memorials Project locutionary force 206–7 Long Island 79–80 Long Yu (Empress Dowager) 121 The Lost Cause of the Confederacy 24, 92–3, 98, 158 Louisiana 8, 24, 26, 32–3, 90, 92, 98, 102 Louisiana’s River Road 23, 34 Lovett, Sarah Breen 12, 247 Lozoya, Johanna 7 Magnolia Plantation and Gardens 19, 26, 30, 31–2 Magnolia’s Ninth Annual Fright Night 20 Magnolia’s Slavery to Freedom Tour 30 Maidment, Brian 157 Mapping the relationship between landscape, affect, and public pedagogy 173 maps 145, 158, 257; New Orleans 93; of rivers 143; satellite view 144 markers 98, 102, 174–5, 178 marriage ceremonies 34 Marsh, Tim 227–8 martyrs 109–10 MASS Design Group 5, 199 mass shootings 75, 211 material 2–3, 23, 69, 95, 122, 127–8, 130, 153, 164, 193–5, 228, 260; cultural 228; environmental 189, 192, 259; historical 45, 51 Maternity Waiting Homes project 2016 (Malawi) 5 Matthews, Samantha 152, 157 May 4 Memorial at Kent State University 175 McLeod Plantations 27, 32, 34 media 41–2, 57–8, 60, 77–9, 92, 96–8, 102, 109–10, 152, 168–9, 197, 221, 224, 227–8, 230–1; digital 227; social 163, 221, 224, 231 memorial (proposed) at Fort Laurens State Historic Site, Ohio 177–8, 179 memorial architecture 1, 4–6, 8–9, 11, 90–1, 98–100, 189, 198–9; changes over time 10; early explorations in 198; post-modern 2; in public space 102; traditional 12 Memorial Association of the District of Columbia 111–12 memorial designs 1, 76; competition 72; original 72; traditional 1 memorial ecologies 8, 75, 83

Index memorial environment 71, 213 memorial geographies 172 memorial grounds 72 “memorial grove” 72 memorial ideology 73 memorial installations 71 memorial jurors 72 memorial landscapes 8, 11, 22, 67, 72–3, 76, 79, 83, 99, 102, 169, 171–4, 178–80, 221 memorial museums 207, 220–3, 225 memorial narratives 188, 193, 195, 222, 225–7, 231 memorial objects 43, 50 memorial performances 208–9 memorial services 113, 144, 175 memorial sites 8, 69–70, 73, 97, 169, 172, 174, 207–8, 255; greening 72; living 76; local 11 memorial spaces 2, 8, 12, 41–2, 69, 91, 99–100, 168, 176, 178, 189, 199, 222; atmosphere at 197; commemorating processes of ongoing transformation 83; designing 188; experiential 225; large 259; marking pasts both tragic and mundane 83; meaningful 176; new 43 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe 198 memorial trees 70, 72–3, 76 memorialisation 1–2, 11, 42, 67, 69, 73, 77, 90, 92, 94, 178, 180, 204, 206–9, 211–15; architectural 206; Confederate 99; defamiliar 214; experience 213; performance 209; performative 208; of Unit 731 40, 49, 51; Western practices of 2 “Memorializing Lincoln’s Life Where He Died” 9, 107–18 memorials 11–12, 69–70, 72–4, 94–8, 109–10, 151–6, 161–4, 174–6, 196–200, 204, 206–7, 209–10, 213–15, 255, 257–9; annual 176; Chinese 43; Confederate 8, 98–100, 103; con­ temporary 1, 175; designing 188; encountering 91, 154; genocide 211; Good Deeds Chairs 176; graveside 162; green 73, 75; living 73, 76, 80, 110, 114; May 4 Memorial at Kent State University 175; national 112–13, 199; new 47, 79, 155, 178; pedagogical 180; permanent 176, 204; public 55; traditional 252; war 42, 95, 214

277

memory 1–4, 6–13, 40–2, 47–9, 55, 57, 67–70, 74–6, 82–3, 108, 141–4, 162–3, 187–95, 197–9, 231; alternative place 76; architectural 65; autobiographical 193; cohesive 225; complex 97; constructing 190, 192–3; cultural 3, 73, 141, 159, 195, 220, 237; ecologies 8, 69, 81; embedded 236, 238, 240; embodied 141, 143; historical 1; indigenous 12; institutional 10; intergenerational 10; methods 255, 262; official 51; place-based 47; political 55; procedural 193; processes 58–9; public 107, 153, 159; research 12, 252; sacred 81; shared 46; short-term 131; social 7, 55, 58; toxic 69 Mesopotamia 254 Micieli-Voutsinas, Jacque 2–3, 5, 22, 41, 44, 46, 70–1, 73, 82–3, 152, 162, 164, 188, 197–8, 222–3 Middleton Place 29, 33 migration 10, 126, 140–1 military 61, 63, 95, 98, 253; cemeteries 152; coup d’états 7, 56, 59–60, 92 Milligan, Christine 223 Milner, Jacqueline 237, 249 Mind in Architecture: Neuroscience, Embodiment and the Future of Design 4–5 Ming dynasty 9, 121 Modern Art Projects 246 Mohican ancestral burial sites 143 monitoring 77–8 Montealegre, Jorge 58, 60 Montecino, Marcelo 55, 59 monument grounds 93 monuments 43, 51, 90, 92–102, 112–13, 152, 154, 156, 158–9, 162, 171–2, 178–9, 198–9, 252, 257; antifascist 51; Confederate 8, 90–1, 93–4, 97; funer­ ary 153; grand 159; mass-produced 102; original 94; public 101; removed 97; socialist 198; tabular 151; tallest 96 more-than-representational 3, 5, 21, 172, 206–8, 211, 213–15, 236, 239–40, 260; approaches 3, 11, 21, 120, 122, 239; architecture 11, 206; elements 5; encounters 220; experiences 172, 239; heritage studies 188; methodologies 23; performances 209; phenomena 13; registries 206; spaces 1, 3, 22, 108, 222; theories 42, 188, 239 morialization, of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 67

278

Index

movement: Black Lives Matter 97; Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions 224; civil rights 92, 98, 257; directional 255; embodied 21, 229; protest 97–9, 164, 174–5, 224; virtual 253 movies 24, 254; Dukes of Hazzard 97; Gone with the Wind 24 Museum of Modern Art 254 museums 2, 9, 21, 23–4, 40–1, 43–7, 49, 109, 111–13, 171–2, 178, 220, 226, 252–4, 258; Anne Frank House 254; Auschwitz Concentration Camp in 360° 48, 257–8, 260; base­ ment 115; Big House 20, 24, 34, 37; British Museum 254; commemorative 97; Forbidden City 9, 120–7, 129–31, 133–6; Ford’s Theatre 3, 9, 107, 108–10, 112–18; Fort Laurens State Historic Site, Ohio 177–9; genocide 211; historic 237; Hull-House 171; Jewish Museum Berlin 196; Jewish Museum Prague 204–5, 210; Lincoln Museum 112; Museum of Modern Art 254; National Museum of Natural History 254; National Sep­ tember 11 Memorial & Museum 22, 70, 72, 74–5; new 48, 113, 204; Petersen House 9, 107–12, 115; plantation 6, 21–4, 26, 28–9, 34–5; South African Apartheid Museum 220, 228; Unit 731 Museum 40–2, 44, 49, 51; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 48, 222, 255, 257–8 myths, re-inscribing universalizing 144 names 11, 33, 55, 63, 79–80, 92, 152, 158, 162, 187, 204, 210–15; com­ memoration of 11, 206, 209, 214–15; list of 212, 214; place 140; stacked floor-to-ceiling 212 Nanjing Massacre National Memorial Day 47 “narrative economy” 74 narratives 71, 77, 80, 100, 102, 116, 122, 133–4, 198–9, 221–2, 226, 230, 238, 240, 246; authoritative 2, 222; complex 69; economic 200; embodied 195; exclusionary 8, 69; hegemonic 68; heritage 101; historical 101; memorial 188, 193, 195, 222, 225–7, 231; nationalist 79; one-sided 23; Palestinian memory 231; projected 188

Nash, Woodrow 37 National Cultural Heritage Sites, China 40 national heritage sites 222 National Mall 110, 114, 116, 171, 252, 255, 256, 257, 258–9 National Museum of Natural History 254 National Park Service 107–8, 113, 115–17 National Register of Historic Places 175 National September 11 Memorial & Museum 22, 70, 72, 74–5 National Trust of Australia 12, 236 National World War II Memorial 172 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act 143 Nature Tram Tour 20 Nazi government 259 necropolitics 70 New China-era body 121–6, 133, 136 New China identity 121, 123, 125 new exhibition hall (China) 40–2, 44–51 New Orleans 90–5, 97–102; and the abolition of slavery 92; becomes a laboratory for Reconstruction policies 92; Confederate memorials expressing competing cultural values in built form 8; and the extension of black suffrage 92; map of 93; and the symbolism of the Lee Memorial in 8 New York City 74, 82, 176; banns new plantings of Callery pear trees 73; parks department 75; terrorist attacks on 67 New York State 9, 67, 140, 142, 146 New York Times 109, 113 Newcastle Chronicle 154–6 Newcastle-upon-Tyne 10, 151, 153–4, 156, 158, 161–3 newspapers 56, 60–1, 92, 108, 111–12, 154; Buffalo Morning Express 112; El Mercurio 60; El Universal 61; Illustrated Buffalo Express 112; La Tercera 60; New York Times 109, 113; Newcastle Chronicle 154–6; The Times-Picayune 112; Washington Post 113–14; The Winona Clipper 112 nineteenth-century 37, 115, 152, 154; culture 152; photographs 37; poets 154 Norberg-Schulz, Christian 187 NPS see National Park Service

Index Oak Alley (Southern Louisiana) 26, 33, 36, 228 oak trees 19, 23, 36 Occupation 12, 221, 225, 228, 231; Aboriginal 244, 246; of Palestine 225, 228, 231; post-colonial 237 Occupy Movement 224 Oculus Go (Headsets) 255, 256 One Hundred National-Level Patriotic Education Sites, China 1997 40 Osborne, Tess 12 Our American Cousin 114 paintings 31, 133–4, 237 Palestine 12, 225–6, 230–1; communicat­ ing alternative and counter-narratives of the situation regarding 221; exhibition 227; memory narratives 231; situation 221, 225; and the use of virtual reality to convey the narrative of Occupation through spatial experiences 228 Palestinians 221, 225–6, 228–9, 231 Palimpsest Performance (art series) 236, 240, 241, 243, 244, 246 Pallasmaa, Juhani 187 paramilitary violence 92 participants 231, 245, 253, 255, 257–61; enabled 255; experiencing heritage space 260; lifelong 129; workshop 256 Partido Unión Democrática 57 PCBs see polychlorinated biphenyls PECs see plantation edutainment complex pedagogy 169–70, 176, 180 Pérez-Gómez, Alberto 187, 195 performance 2, 5, 21, 23, 120, 123, 176, 206–9, 211–15, 237, 240, 242–3, 245, 260; art 242; centres 212; guide 26; maps 207; theatrical 31 performativity 11, 73, 122, 206–9, 211, 213–15, 239; affective 209, 212; architectural 3; role of 11, 206–7 perlocutionary force 206–7 Petersen family 69, 108–9, 111 Petersen House 9, 107–12, 115 philosophers 5, 123–4 photographs 26, 56, 60, 107, 258, 260; of military violence 60; nineteenthcentury 37; old 143; taken after Lincoln’s body was removed 115; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 222

279

physical sites 208, 220, 231 Pinkas Synagogue, Prague 11, 204, 206–7, 209–15 Pinochet, Augusto 7, 55–7, 60, 63 place names 140 plantation websites 28, 33 plantations 19, 22–3, 27–35, 98; ante­ bellum 6, 35; edutainment complex 6, 19, 23–4, 26–8, 30–1, 35; haunted 28; Magnolia Plantations 19, 30–1; McLeod Plantations 27, 32, 34; museum landscapes 24; museums 6, 21–4, 26, 28–9, 34–5; quintessential 34; tourism 28 plaques 50, 214; commemorative 94; describing the South as the Con­ federate States of America 96; and the Holocaust 214; indicating the use of Unit 731 50 plates, commemorative 64 plays 114, 117; A Christmas Carol 114; Come from Away 114; One Destiny 116; Our American Cousin 114 Plumwood, Val 237 poems 155–6, 164 Poesten Kill 140–3, 145 poetry 32, 157, 159, 171 poets 10, 58, 151–2, 154–8, 163–4; dead 151–2, 155, 158; nineteenth-century 154 political boundaries 146 political conflict and protest 7, 97, 99, 221–2, 224, 230–1 political economy 34 political force 135 political kidnappings 61 political narratives 12, 221 political protest 97–9, 164, 174–5, 224 political violence 56, 109, 116, 118, 220, 222; in Latin America 58; motivated 115; and sites of atrocity 220 politics 3–4, 7–9, 11, 23, 42–3, 55–6, 68, 78, 100, 108, 141–3, 189, 197–8; affec­ tive 5–7, 11, 43, 51; of atmospheres 197–8 Pollard, Ingrid 238 polychlorinated biphenyls 146 population 59–60, 63, 143 Post, Chris W. 10 post-colonial 144, 236, 238, 246; post-colonial guilt 245; see also white shame; history 237; occupants 238; settlements 246

280

Index

post-Reconstruction South 94, 96 post-traumatic stress disorder 78 Potter, Amy E. 6–7 power 6, 9, 11, 49, 51, 56, 90–1, 96, 100–2, 169, 190, 197–8, 200, 238, 242; eternal 96; political 92, 140, 169; structures 51; struggles 99–100, 102 Prague 205, 210; Jewish Museum 204–5, 210; Pinkas Synagogue 11; synagogues 212; top tourist sites 209 Preservation Virginia 28 press 60, 180, 223; see also media Prior, Colleen 9 prisoners 55–6, 58–9, 63 prisons 58–9 privileges 5–6, 65, 78, 249 production 41, 114; annual 114; lace 173; mass 131; rice 19; social 43 projects 40, 71, 140–1, 199, 231, 250, 254–5, 257–8; accumulative exhibition 246; capitalist 77; contemporary art 237; decade-old 145; infrastructural 145; memoryscapes 255; science 145; unmaterialized 258; virtual heritage 227–8, 252 propaganda 169, 171, 231 protest 97–9, 164, 174–5, 224 protest movement 97–9, 164, 174–5, 224 psychological healing 93 PTSD see post-traumatic stress disorder public debates 98, 100 public health documents 146 public monuments 101; see also monuments public pedagogy 10, 168–73, 176, 178, 180; affective 177; landscapes of 10, 168; moved into the studies of everyday landscapes 171 public servants 80 public spaces 61, 94, 99, 102–3, 169–70, 175, 180, 226 public squares 98–9 Pumpkin Patch Berkeley’s Twilight Ghost Tour 32 purposes 170, 178; bureaucratic 109; cultural 227; original 76; political 5, 125–6, 136; sacred 204 Qing dynasty 9, 121 qualitative data on plantation museums 23

race 71, 90–2, 99, 122, 169; distrust of 257; histories of 100; inequality 37; relations 35, 99; supremacy 98 racism 35, 98 rail tracks 48 railroad stations 94 re-enacting, wounding and healing following 9/11 bombings 83 re-enacting Lincoln’s assassination 116 Re He Palace 121 re-inscribing universalizing myths 144 Read, Peter 237 reconstruction 24, 45, 48, 92, 255, 260; efforts 71; fictionalised 154; historical 48; policies 92 Reconstruction government 92 recovery 79, 81, 164; literary 154; workers 72 Red Cross 63 Red Guards 124, 135–6 ‘referential meaning’ 91, 94–5, 97–8 refugee tents 230 regeneration 72, 74; consoling 70; seasonal 72; urban 162 regime 60, 171, 210; communist 40, 43, 46, 57, 171; emotional 63 region 23, 35, 98–9, 102, 114, 142; local 169; plantation tourist 23 Reichstag 258 relationship 1–4, 6, 11, 13, 42–3, 121–4, 126, 128–30, 135–6, 168–9, 173, 189, 206–9, 237–9, 242–3; contemporary 1, 3; contemporary China-Japan 40; deep spiritual 237; experiential 222, 228; indigenous 144; inter-cultural 250; mutual 134; nature-culture 73; social 126 religion 29, 71, 130, 169 religious buildings 211, 214 religious non-conformists 162 religious studies 109 remembrance 10, 55, 57–8, 82, 95, 152–3, 163; affective 207; defying 142, 144; digital 252; forced 81; Kent State University 174 representations 12, 20, 24, 91, 121–3, 211, 255; abstract narrative 196; cultural 124; hyper-realistic 228; nonhuman 70; place-based 71; of slavery 20; symbolic 121, 195; virtual 261; visual 131, 133 research 5, 10, 108, 120–2, 129, 153–4, 189, 193, 196–7, 221–2, 224–6, 231, 236, 252–3, 260–1; archival 178;

Index background 225, 230; chemical warfare 7, 40; empirical 189; germwarfare 40; interdisciplinary 5; methods 125, 143; qualitative 70; scholarly 21 Reserve Officers’ Training Corps building 174 residuals 124–5, 132, 135; cultural 133; historical 120, 130 resilience 46, 69, 71, 74, 76–7; collective 69; distributed 76; national 75; “Never Forget” 69; tree’s ecological 75 revenue 23, 27, 31, 34–5; alternative streams 35; total annual 28 revolutionary 135; changes 92; sense 123 Rice, Anne 90 right-wing parties 57 rights 55, 64, 243; human 60; political 82; tribal 144; white person’s 100 rituals 10, 236, 240, 242–3, 246, 260 Robson, J.P. 158–9, 160, 161 Roman Empire 258 Rome 164 Ronald Reagan National Airport 259 routes 19, 23, 113, 228, 259; monumental parade 259; showing Booth’s escape 113 ruins 40, 70, 142; aesthetic post­ industrial 142; blood-stained 67; grasscovered 67; imperial 9; industrial 143; infrastructural 147 Ryan, Honi 243, 244, 245–6 sacred remains 81–2 sacred spaces 207 Sacrifice and Stone of Remembrance 152 sacrifices 79–80, 98, 152 sandstone slab 244 sandy granules 128 sanitation workers 81, 143 Santiago 5, 7, 55–7, 60–1; and the Estadio Nacional of Santiago 3; and the ouster of President Salvador Allende 3 Sargasso Sea 140, 145, 147 satellite images 80, 178 scaffolding 187, 190, 194–5, 197; cognitive 197; meaningful 187; role 190; social 194 scale 3, 11, 162, 204, 209, 211–12, 214; human 72; inhuman 259; intimate 152; transgressed 179; urban 172 scalpels 44–5 scenarios 55, 64, 133; particular 253; reconstructed 44–5

281

scenes 19, 240, 259; abstract 240; crime 9; depicted 133; multiple 133; narrative 133 Schacher, Alan 240–3, 246 Schade, Louis 111 scholars 3–4, 6, 13, 102, 144, 168, 170, 172, 187, 192–3, 197, 252–3, 261; emerging 5; pedagogical 169 scholarships 1, 3, 43, 188, 194, 196; growing 198; interdisciplinary 5; international 221 school fieldtrips 27–8 scripts 71; normative 82; original 76 Second Gulf War 224 secrecy 57, 59, 101, 254 security 59, 71, 80, 82, 131, 196, 209; and insecurity 71, 196; national 71, 80 security rebuilding campaigns 71 sedimented archives 144 Seeger, Pete 67, 82 segregation 92, 100 Selected ephemeral events 32, 33 self 22, 68, 99, 170, 195–7, 200, 213, 236, 240, 243, 246; identity 4; narrative 196; sacrificing 79; social 189; socio-political 11 self-censorship 60–1, 63 sensations 4, 21, 45, 124, 126, 128, 141, 238; bodily 122, 125; corporeal 240; physical 247; provoking 129, 133 sense of immersion 212–13, 226, 228–9, 253, 260 sentiments 8, 33, 46, 49, 100, 153, 155, 161, 164, 176; clichéd 156; deep 99; political 6; pro-slavery 8 servants 29 service-learning 169, 177–8 settler colonialism 10, 179 sewer systems 5, 9–10, 140–3, 145–7; combined 142; infrastructure 143; piped 141 shame 21, 109, 145, 245 Shen Yang Palace 121 Shirley Plantation 29 Shirley’s Scavenger Hunt 29 shootings 75, 109, 169, 175–6 Shriner’s Temple 95 shrines 109, 111–12, 117, 204; hallowed 156; perpetual 111 silence 7, 55–61, 63–4, 80, 153, 244, 246, 249; breaking the 221; complete 61; dwellers of 7, 55, 57, 59, 61, 63, 65; heavy 57; long 245 silent denunciation 45

282

Index

sit-ins 224 sites 6–7, 9–10, 20–3, 26–8, 34–5, 47–9, 75–6, 97–9, 114–17, 152–3, 161–3, 172–6, 178–80, 236–40, 242–50; Abraham Lincoln assassination 9, 114–17; affective commemorative 178; archaeological 252; architectural 3, 7; assassination 108; burial 153–4, 157; commemorative 2, 172, 222; cultural 260; educational 24; embedded memories of 12, 236–7, 239–41, 243, 245, 247, 249; former imperial 9; geographical 70, 75; heritage 3, 50, 97, 101–2, 122, 172, 239, 253–4, 260; historic 9, 20–1, 35, 41–2, 48–9, 51, 108, 115–17, 179, 238, 254; indigenous 143; industrial 253; interpretation of 117; John F. Kennedy assassination 108, 113; memorial 8, 69–70, 73, 97, 169, 172, 174, 207–8, 255; multi-sensual 2, 134; multi­ functional 23; museological 71, 220; national heritage 222; One Hundred National-Level Patriotic Education Sites, China 1997 40; original 7, 41, 47–50; permanent 222; physical 208, 220, 231; plantation 23; sacred 95, 143; tours 177; visitors 2, 6, 9, 70, 115, 137 skills 21, 170, 191, 198; critical thinking 116; embodied 194; representational 170 slave cabins 19, 31; antebellum-era 19; original 34 slavery 6, 19–20, 22–3, 26, 29–31, 34–5, 37, 92–3, 98, 100, 110–11; disconnect­ ing from present-day struggles of racial inequality 37; history of 27, 257; race-based 6, 99; representations of 20; sites 27 Slavery Walking Tour 33 slaves 6, 19, 24, 28, 98 social activism 79, 198–9, 223–4, 231; #blacklivesmatter movement 224; #metoo movement 224; Arab Spring 224; Occupy movement 224 social geographies 99 social media 163, 221, 224, 231 social practices 26, 68, 169, 237 societies 6, 91, 96, 172, 195; civil 56; contemporary 6, 68, 176; embodied 125; modern 121; white 100 sociocultural patterns 11, 189 sociocultural scaffoldings 190, 194

sociological 123; body 120, 123–6, 136; studies 123; terms 120 sociopolitical order 68 soldiers 62, 67, 177; common 92; fallen 80; not-so-unknown 178 solitary confinement 60 Solnik, Claude 79–80, 82 songs 156, 161–2, 164; anti-war 67; collections of 162; lyrics 67 songwriters 159 Sons of Confederate Veterans 94, 102 soup kitchens 171 South Africa 12, 229; Apartheid regime 220, 224–5 South African Apartheid Museum 220, 228 South Carolina plantation 19, 29–30, 32–4 Southern Plantation and Imperial Palace 2 Southern resistance to cultural and political change 96 sovereign power 68, 80 space 2, 10–12, 95–8, 100–2, 116–18, 120–37, 151–3, 168–70, 187–9, 191–3, 195–7, 212–14, 222–3, 241–3, 258–60; affective 124, 130, 172, 175, 196, 198, 222; architectural 120, 125, 129, 136, 187, 190–2; and architecture 127; community gathering 117; con­ temporary 135; cultural/social 120; educational 10; expansive 83; hybrid 81, 173, 246; imaginative 121, 130; intimate 2; liminal 76, 80; meaningful 195, 207; modern 48; museum 43, 115; notion of 102; original protest 174; pedagogical 168, 172; physical 94, 96, 116, 208, 211, 213, 238, 259; religious 213; restored 113; social 102; spiritual 211; transferential 222, 228; unrestored 113 spatial 1, 12, 37, 74, 91, 100, 152, 189, 192, 221, 223, 225–31; affordances 189, 195; amnesia 69; analysis 41; awareness 5; communication 222, 229; cues 190, 196, 200; design 2–3, 11, 41, 46, 120, 223, 231; dialogue 47; embodied 189, 199; encroachment 228; narratives 3, 71; politics 99; settings 11, 196 spatial experience 65, 225; designed 223; strong visceral 247; virtual activist 224 spatial functionality 41

Index speech 55, 58, 257–9; free 55; hate 231; “I have a Dream” 255, 257–8 Speer, Albert 257–9 Spinoza 12, 239 Springsteen, Bruce 176 St John’s Church 151, 154, 156 St. Lawrence River 146 St Nicholas Cathedral 159 staff 1, 4, 28–30, 33–4, 41, 47, 50, 70–2, 109, 116–17; members 29, 33, 40; professional 109; struggle 115; tourism plantation 28 Stanicˇ ic´, Aleksandar 11, 198 state control 68, 80 state legislature 92 state militia 92 State Pollution Discharge Elimination System permit 142 state power 98–9 Staten Island Landfill 81 statues 94–7, 100–1, 252; full-figure bronze 94; sixteen-foot 95 Stockbridge-Munsee Community Band 140 stolperstein (stumbling stone) 58 stone 28, 67, 152, 156, 158–9, 254; burial 162; corner 73; native 178; original ledger 155; original tabular memorial 154 Stone, Bob 254–5, 261 Stonehenge 254 stories 28, 31, 42, 44, 46, 73, 76, 115, 117–18, 143–4, 147, 176, 199, 246–7, 249; forgotten 144; remembering 248; small 153 storytellers 2, 116 strawberry festivals 31 strikes 224 students 3, 6, 10, 13, 30, 64, 74, 116, 168–9, 173–4, 176–7, 179–80; dehumanizing 169; groups of 174; Kent State University 10, 174–6; killing of 177; public history 13; thirty-five Syracuse killed on Pan Am Flight 103 10, 169, 173–4, 176, 177 subjects 9, 44, 58, 130, 143, 151, 163, 195, 214, 221, 260; binding 22; complex 115; contemporary Chinese 9; embodied human 64; political 7; sovereign 76; traumatic 223 subterranean architecture 142 Sumartojo, Shanti 188, 192–3, 196–8 Suri, Charu 4

283

survival 10, 46, 74, 79, 144; eel 146; pressures 135; resilient ecological 82; strategies 57 survivor trees 8, 67, 69, 71–7, 79, 81, 83; acting as “active co-constituents in memorialization” 73; implants 75; original 75; saplings 74–5, 79 symbolic power 8, 67, 69, 72 symbols 8, 69, 72, 74, 170; concrete 100; cultural 121; emergent national 78; important cultural 72; passive 8, 69; timeless 101 synagogues 11, 204, 207, 209, 211–15; buildings 209, 215; walls 210, 212 Syracuse 176; community showing empathy for those lives lost and a per­ sonal promise to prevent such violence in the world again 177; and the Good Deeds Chairs Memorial 180; memor­ ial landscapes 180; moving forward with participation, creation, and mobility 176; students (35) on Pan Am Flight 103 10, 169, 173–4, 176, 177 taxonomies 71 teachers 27, 64, 74, 170 technological recreation 45 technology 80, 102, 131, 198, 252–4, 260–1; digital 220; feral 145; immersive 253, 255; low-cost 226 temporality 41–2, 47; in shaping visitors’ embodied experience of the two exhibition halls 41; and spatial functionality 42, 47 tension 26, 33, 35, 47, 110, 135, 143, 237; physical 199; political 46; productive 82; racial 98; social 199 terrorism 7, 56, 63, 71, 73, 210; domestic 75; embodied long-term social-political 57; international 69, 75 terrorist attacks 8, 67, 69, 71–2, 82; and the Age of Terror paradigm 75; satel­ lite images of the World Trade Center dust cloud 80; of September 11, 2001 8, 67, 69, 71–2; uncontained nature of the 80 theaters 9, 109–10, 112, 114–17, 168; live 114, 117; original 108, 114; restored 113 Third Reich 257 threats 60, 63, 71, 74, 78, 80, 115, 143, 164 Thrift, Nigel 4, 6, 37, 43, 102, 170, 223 ticket sales 25, 28, 31

284

Index

Till, Karen 49 The Times-Picayune 112 Tivoli Circle 93–4 Tobin, Chris 236, 246 tombstones 158, 160 tour guides 23, 26, 50 tourist dollar 6 tourists 9, 22, 35, 46, 108, 111–12, 114, 129, 131–3, 152, 259 tours 19, 22–4, 26–8, 30–1, 35, 37, 254, 261; alternative 30–1; cemetery 159; guided 27; immersive 254; performing 23; plantation museum 22; seasonal 27; slavery-focused 30; sold-out 19; special 30 toxic landfills 8, 67, 69, 71, 73, 75, 77, 79, 81 toxicity 10, 77–8 toxins 77–8, 80, 140, 146–7 tragedies 77, 108, 110, 175–6; aftermath of 77; commemorating the 174; national 162 Trajan (Roman Emperor) 96 trauma 3, 7, 22–3, 35, 44, 46, 50, 59, 68, 70, 74–5, 82, 223, 225; of 11 Septem­ ber 2001 70; cultural 8, 67–9, 71, 75, 82; memorializing 43; national 46; ongoing 22; original 75; rein-habiting past 83; slow 78 Trauma and the Memory of Politics 68 traumatic 4, 58, 237, 250; events 8, 22, 67, 69; feelings 7, 153, 162; intersec­ tion between peace and war 68; memories 51, 58; past 8, 22; reminders 98 trees 19, 26, 44, 67, 69–70, 72–6, 247, 257; 400-oak tree “memorial grove” 72; ancient 20; beautiful 31; com­ memorative 72; eucalyptus 247; historical 7; pear 73; pine 249 Tyneside Songs 158–9, 163 UDC see United Daughters of the Confederacy UDI see Unión Democrática UIC see University of Illinois—Chicago Underhill, Charles 112 Union Civil War veterans 112 Unión Democrática 57 Union forces 92 Unit 731 40–2, 44, 49, 51; Biological Warfare Headquarters of 44; exhibi­ tion hall 42; history of 44; pedagogical and political connotations of 41

United Daughters of the Confederacy 94, 102 United States 8, 19–20, 22–3, 35, 90, 92, 96, 100, 140–1, 171–2, 199, 259; cities 100; Forest Service 72–3, 75; govern­ ment 80; history 110–11; Holocaust Memorial Museum 48, 222, 255, 257–8; homeland 82; military power 71–2; National Mall, Washington 110, 114, 116, 171, 252, 255–9; National Park Service 107; South 6, 8 units 3, 7, 40–51; chemical warfare research 3; development 7, 40; new 42–3, 47, 51 Unity (game engine) 12, 226, 228, 255, 257–8 Universidad de Chile 64 university campuses 10, 168–9 University of Illinois—Chicago 171 urban subterranean 143 values 2, 21, 49, 63, 97, 100, 122, 126, 169, 189, 191–2; cultural 8; multi-cultural 123; political 71 Vega, Ronald 74–5, 79, 122 Vega’s Survivor Tree 73 Velvet Revolution 210 vendor of commodified history 6, 24 verses, dedicatory and memorial 157 Vesely, Dalibor 187 victimhood 41, 71 victimization 7, 45, 51, 68, 78, 80 victims 8, 40–1, 43, 45–6, 50, 58, 68–9, 73, 77–8, 80–2, 109, 156, 204, 211–12, 223; of bombings 176; individual 204, 211; injured 175; innocent 60; lists of 212; of Nazi persecution 204; seven­ teenth-century plague 162; submissive 28; of terrorism 73 video 193, 230–1, 255, 257–61; games 227, 253–4; projections 12, 226–7; walls 115 Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, DC 171, 174, 175, 255 viewers 133–4, 223, 226, 228–30, 236, 240, 247, 259 Vimalassery, Manu 143–4 violence 7–8, 10, 55, 57–9, 61, 65, 67, 69, 71, 75, 77–8, 82–3, 177, 179, 211; acute 78; attritional 83; erasing 72; historical 49; military 60; ongoing 80, 146; physical 98; war 82 virtual environments 12, 223, 226–7, 229–30, 252–5, 257–9, 261; created

Index using the Unity game engine 226; for heritage 253; interactive 12, 226; presentation of digital online footage in 229 virtual heritage projects 227–8, 252 virtual memory environments 12, 220–1 virtual reality 3, 5, 12, 252–5, 258, 260–2; Anne Frank House 254; and aug­ mented reality 254; British Museum 254; components 255; elicitation inter­ views 262; environment 254–5, 260–1; headsets 255, 261–2; and memorials 252–62; model 258–9; National Museum of Natural History 254; use of 253–4, 262 visitors 20, 25; destinations 9, 107–8; disengaging with the painful histories of African enslavement 6; educating 33; experiences 20, 116, 207; feature the alley of oaks 25; greeting 20; lit­ erary 157; to museums and historic sites 21; shaping experiences of 41, 43, 188; upper-class 35 The Void 247 Volavkova, Hana 204 VR see virtual reality walking tours 175, 245 walls 11, 62–3, 108, 110–11, 115, 128, 131, 133, 143, 162, 169, 204, 210–11, 213, 226; adjacent 226–7; churchyard 151; glass 47; internal 11, 44, 204; painted white 50, 213 war 35, 40, 45–6, 65, 68, 80, 92–3, 98–9, 109–11, 204, 224; crimes 47; destruc­ tive 110–11; memorials 42, 95, 214 Washington DC 12, 96, 107, 110, 114–17, 171, 174–5, 255, 259; growth 108; and the Kennedy Center 113–14; metropolitan area 114, 117; and the National Mall 252; and the Washing­ ton Monument 96, 257; and the Washington Post 113–14 wastewater systems 140, 142–3, 146–7 water 67, 140–2, 145–6, 244–6, 248, 254, 257; bodies 141, 144, 146; carriage systems 141; damage 210; pumps 243; river’s mill-churning 142; springs 243; trapped body of 245; vats 127 water buckets 245 Waterton, Emma 120, 135

285

Watson, Steve 3 weddings 34 Wembury Commercial Dock and Railway 1909 254 Western Australia 245 Western practices of memorialization 2 Westover, Paul 155, 164 “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” 67 White House 107 White House Council on Environmental Quality 77 White League Democrats 92 white oaks 72–3 white shame 245 white supremacy 8, 35, 97–8 Whitney Plantation 27, 36, 37 The Winona Clipper 112 women 50, 62, 65, 68, 158, 230; contributing their lives to defining the United States 171; enslaved 35; risking their lives and health 79, 171 Woodford Academy 12, 143, 236–7, 239–41, 243, 245–9 work 5–6, 22–3, 94–5, 99–100, 154–5, 163, 172–3, 206–8, 224–6, 236–7, 239–40, 242–6, 249–50, 252–3, 255; creative 236; radical 180; scholarly 230; strategy 189 workers 64, 77, 110; cleanup 79; downtown 116; overseas 162; postal 80; undocumented 80; wastewater 143 workshops 255, 258–9, 261; attendees 255, 258, 260–1; international 12; memory method 252; participants 256 World Trade Center 8, 68–70, 75, 77, 80–2; commemoration 68; debris 68, 81; memorial plaza 79; memorial site 69, 74, 79; newly destroyed 68; visitors 71 World Trade Center Families for a Proper Burial Inc. 81 World Trade Center Health Program 80 World War II 7, 20, 40, 214, 257 wounds 44, 70, 74, 82 WTC see World Trade Center Wylie, John 125, 163, 170 Wynants Kill 140, 143 Yang, Jie 4, 9, 40, 43, 51, 143 Yanow, Dvora 1–2, 44, 48, 71, 122, 196 Young, James 209 Young, Sen. Milton 113