Reconstruction without Reckoning?

 

In our final week in the archives, my group was mostly focused on narrowing down what items from the archives we were going to display given the space limitations. We were also trying to look at our collection from the point of view of someone who hadn't spent four weeks immersed in folders and boxes about the Crozier Center, Harlene Marley, and the Coordinate College for Women. What archival pieces needed more context, and how much did we want to let our viewers draw their own conclusions about what to focus on? We also faced the task of making some kind of narrative out of the often disparate photographs, Collegian articles, and pamphlets we had chosen. After several weeks zoomed in, suddenly we had to take a step back and reflect on what we'd done. Had we really uncovered something new, or brought the archives into the canon, as Assmann would say? Or had we reproduced existing stratification about who is remembered and how?

In chapter 6, "#MeToo, Black Feminism, and the Queenmakers," Yazdiha is thinking about reckoning, reconstruction, and reconciliation. She contrasts the strategic linking of identity and collective memory for achieving political goals, or "Kingmaking," with uncovering important past figures and events that have faded from memory or been purposely neglected, which she calls "Queenmaking". This work of reconstruction, or "restoring the branches of the neglected past," can go hand in hand with reconciliation, where social movements come together in coalition and recognize that they have similar goals. This is related to but separate from a moment of reckoning, which is when the imagined past and imagined future of two or more groups that previously had different perceptions of the present become the same. Yazdiha explains that reckoning occurred during the 2018-2020 #MeToo movement between Black and White feminists. In this case, the work of reckoning generated solidarity between groups, creating a shared reimagined past ("Resurrected role of Black women in major movements of American history and progress") and reimagined future ("Intersectional, global movement to eradicate interlocking oppressions around the world"). Where memory battles drive groups apart, the work of reconciliation and reckoning tries not to assert its own imagined past but forge a new one (reimagining) and thus create coalition and solidarity.

Reflecting on my group's work in the archive, I feel like we participated in reconstruction but didn't quite undertake the work of reckoning. In going about creating a display about the history of women and gender activism at Kenyon, we could have chosen to rely on or highlight the thoughts and intentions of its founders. A memory battle could be waged over how to represent and remember an already accepted figure of importance to Kenyon -- like Philander Chase, long celebrated as the founder of Kenyon College. We could have searched his letters and writing to ask if he intended women to be educated at Kenyon, or argue that his philosophy was staunchly against it (the latter seems more likely to me). This would be somewhat analogous to the battles between social movements using King's name, image, and writing to support their own goals. Instead, though, I think we were all interested in the everyday ways that students and women at Kenyon showed up for each other and changed the policies and culture of the college. In displaying photographs of the first class of women in 1969, the members of the Hannah More society, and Professor Harlene Marley, we participated in the work of reconstruction. We brought attention to the roles of figures less often recognized in the history of the college. I hoped that our display showed that the history of gender activism is not one that is tangential to Kenyon's history, but rather an essential part of it. We cannot fully understand our past without understanding the bravery and tenacity of those early women. At the same time, I think our work fell short of crafting a truly reimagined past, and crucially, a future of solidarity. As Dalia rightly pointed out, there is still more reconstruction of the past to be done, in finding and saying the names of influential Black women students and faculty at Kenyon. We did not fully undertake the work of reckoning. I think that the archives can be powerful in the work of uncovering neglected past, as guardians of information that is unknown but not quite forgotten. However, they operate within the same systems that lead to that neglect in the first place. Therefore, I would think that a work of reckoning could not rely on archives alone, and would have to reckon with how memory is stored and situated in addition to changing the content of the collective memory. 

References

Yazdiha, Hajar. 2023. The Struggle for the People's King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.