Visibility, Performance, and the Representation of Identity at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial

Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject Sociology - Culture, Technology, Nations, grade: 1.3, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg (American Studies), course: American Cultures of Memory, language: English, abstract: The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, which, since 2011, is located in the southwest of the National Mall in Washington D.C., was designed and built by Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin. It commemorates the civil rights activist that was murdered in 1968, the history of the civil rights movement of Afro-Americans, as well as the issues the movement dealt with and propagated. It was, like many other memorials throughout the USA, also subject to criticism, regarding its design, layout, material, expressiveness, the choice of its creator, and thus also its overall ¿Americanness¿.

In this paper, the focus will be on the questions of how this memorial works and why it works in a specific way. A memorial can serve many different purposes, such as to grieve, remember, recognize, celebrate, support, help to forget, heal, confront, equalize, understand, educate, acknowledge, etc. It will be argued that memorials are not only about the physical site, the monument or the venue in general, they are also to a huge extent about a number of external or complementary factors, such as the visitors or spectators of the site in question, and their respective performances with regard to the site of memory. Thus, a memorial never has a fixed meaning or message ¿ to a certain extent, a memorial is always a floating signifier with meanings in constant flux, depending on its current social environment and various power relations.

The visibility and interpretation of such ¿lieux des mémoire¿ is of course also heavily dependent on contemporary discourses, as well as individual and national identity. The terms identity, performance, visibility, and the site¿s ¿Americanness¿, or in other words, what the afore-mentioned topics tell us about American culture in the general sense, and a presumed American ¿culture of memory¿, will be at the center of this paper about the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial.