Lecture by Professor Michael J. Drexler
Thursday, November 13, 2025, 4:30-6:00 pm
HMH Great Room
This talk intervenes in memory studies and African American intellectual history by analyzing how the memory of slavery and John Brown’s legacy was contested within the symbolic and institutional space of Storer College, a historically Black school in Harpers Ferry. Drawing on A.J. Greimas’s semiotic square, I develop a typology of commemorative strategies—radical remembrance, strategic forgetting, sanitized commemoration, and erasure—while Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the field reveals how actors like Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, and W.E.B. Du Bois negotiated unequal access to institutional legitimacy and symbolic capital. A case study of Du Bois’s failed 1932 effort to install a John Brown plaque at Storer College illustrates the tension between radical memory and liberal respectability. The essay concludes by linking these historical contests to contemporary struggles over military base names, public monuments, and cultural institutions, showing how commemoration remains a site where racial politics and national narratives continue to be shaped, challenged, and constrained.
