Narrating the past on fairer terms: approaches to building multicultural public memory

ABSTRACT Public memory serves as a foundation for national identity, so struggles to balance respect for difference with the need for common ground emerge repeatedly in struggles over how to remember the public past. Cultural pluralism and multiculturalism tend to articulate a politics of difference in which inequities are identified but common ground proves elusive. Yet, documentaries by African American filmmakers commemorating the 25th anniversary of the 1992 Los Angeles riots suggest ways of narrating the public past on fairer terms that accept difference while recognizing mutuality. Produced by the dominant white culture, LA92 uses an omniscient perspective and simple characterizations to label and denounce incompetence and villainy, suggesting a form of cultural pluralism in which identity groups live side by side, barely tolerating their inherent differences. In contrast, LA Burning and Let It Fall, films grounded in African American cultural traditions of intersectionality and double consciousness, address the tensions of cultural pluralism by integrating diverse perspectives without marginalizing any of them. Rather than distinguishing good from bad people, they distinguish just from unjust social relationships, establishing the possibility of multicultural public memory.