Key Details: The Importance in Constructed Narrative

By

 This week marked our final visits to the archives, where we added the last finishing touches to our projects. My group mates and I made many trips to make adjustments and refine our work as our project had evolved and taken a new life under our modified focus. We reimagined how we would structure our timeline, discussion, and key moments. When we initially decided to shift our focus, we broke our approach into three categories: Kenyon during the war, commemoration of the war, and its presence today. These categories were instrumental in guiding our research, helping us decide where to look, what to search for, and what to prioritize, especially given our limited time. Through extensive reorganization, we were able to fit as much relevant information as possible, covering a wide range of topics with just four clear labels. 

From our readings this week, we covered Yazdiha’s discussion of the importance of restoration and reconciliation when remembering and giving proper recognition to our past. Through these processes, we recover the details to our past that would have been otherwise trodden over, reconstructing a more accurate narrative. She emphasizes bringing voices and perspectives into frame which otherwise might not have been heard. This involves her idea of reckoning, which delivers a platform to these voices from those in more privileged positions. 

The Kenyon archives, though extensive, do not capture completely every detail from the times they aim to immortalize. Many key players, contributors and components are left out of history’s narrative. Even so, the archives can be used to reconstruct the narratives that have been left out of the greater collective memory through what they do contain. The archives allowed us to recover the stories of the formation of Kenyon’s Lambda Dekes, a forbidden and determined secret society on campus during the Civil War. Through the artifacts we discovered, we learned the details of their early history, but not all the artifacts offered such clarity. A singular article described to us the theft of Pierce’s flag, commemorating the lives of Kenyon students lost during the war, but no other information could be found. As such, we were left to speculate on the details and explanations of the event. The contrasting experiences we had with the two different elements of our display demonstrated to us the importance of gathering information to create narrative. Otherwise we are left with only our assumptions, which is a proven dangerous mistake when constructing our history and therefore our greater collective memory. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Junzo Shono: How We Remember Gambier

By
Image
When I entered the Special Collections room, I had no idea where to start or what to do. We were given large files of several notable Kenyon alumni, and it was overwhelming. Without a clear understanding of the responsibilities we were tasked with, we each selected a different file without giving reason or pause as to who we selected. For one reason or another, Junzo Shono’s name caught my eye. I had never heard of the man, but after taking a class on Japanese Literature last fall, I was curious as to who he was and his involvement with the College. Junzo Shono, an acclaimed Japanese writer, first came to Gambier in 1957, where he spent a year in the College capturing and describing the mundane moments of everyday life (Creel, 2022). He would eventually publish these memories in the form of a novel titled “Gambia Taizaiki” (Sojourn in Gambier. He was born in Osaka, Japan on February 9th, 1921, and studied at Osaka University of Foreign Languages for four years, and later studied at Kyu...
Read more

Archival and Canon Memory: Understanding Our Present Through Our Past

By
Image
  This week, one of the many artifacts my group examined, was an old issue of The Collegian. The main story of this issue was the reconstruction of the Brown Family Environmental Center. This edition of the Collegian was significant because it detailed certain transformations being made to the center that would give it more focus on academics and incorporating student education as a part of the BFEC. For example, the article focuses on the construction of a new building that will operate as a hub for both student labs, as well as environmental education programs for the public, which the BFEC is now well known for. This article is also historically significant as it was written right after the BFEC was renamed to the Brown Family Environmental Center. It is important to examine sources like these, as they offer what the earliest perspectives and actions of what the BFEC were, which is interesting to compare to modern activities of the environmental center. This week we also read an...
Read more

Hope, Suffering, and The Kenyon College Campus Guide

By
Image
  Attached above is a screenshot of “The Kenyon College Campus Guide”, which is a near-comprehensive list of buildings that have belonged to the College and Village of Gambier since 1824. Although my group is curating something about the future of the Hill, our first meeting mainly involved discussions of its past. To this end, we tried to develop a picture of what the Hill physically looked like in the past 100 years by reviewing photographs of buildings, construction plans, and the Campus Guide, which you can see above. If you were to review the entire guide, you’d see that under the name of every building is a description of when it was built, what it was used (or being used) for, and when (if) it was destroyed. In the context of this week’s reading, these descriptions call the terms “communities of memory” and “communities of hope” to mind. According to Bellah et al. (1985, 2011), a “community of memory…tell[s]...stories of shared suffering” and orients us towards “future co...
Read more