Confederate War Grief Transformed: the Openness of Memorials to New Meanings

Abstract

Civil War memorials in the United States represent the difficult national memory of a still contested internecine war over slavery, social equity, and public values. Today there is a heated debate about physical monuments honoring Confederate leaders and soldiers. For many, the original social memory has disappeared and meanings attributed to them have shifted from association with war dead, or the cult of the “lost cause,” to symbols of slavery and white supremacy. Their forms are open to new interpretations connected to human subjectivity and situatedness. Do these confederate memorials glorify racism or absorb the historical memory of grief? This paper examines the ongoing Confederate war memorial debate as evidence of the powerful role of monuments in the city and their changing meaning.

Keywords

• Social memory
• memorialization
• War memorials
• US Civil War
• Slavery