Monumentality, Ruination, and the Milieux of Memory: Lessons from W. E. B. Du Bois

Abstract

This essay examines memorial style as a rhetorical “milieu” in which geographies of race and racism are constructed. To do so, I trace W. E. B. Du Bois’s turn-of-the-century encounter with antebellum plantation ruin as an instance of historic and still ongoing Black resistance to monumental stylistics that have long dominated Western memory. Situating Du Bois’s encounter with ruin in this lineage illuminates how monumentality can undergird supremacist modes of inhabiting space and race and opens onto alternative, ecological styles of memorial dwelling enabled and called for by Black experiences of the ruinous wake of slavery.