GLC@Lunch with Patricia Lott “After Ruin: The Crafting of Public Collective Memory of Racial Slavery

GLC@Lunch with Patricia Lott “After Ruin: The Crafting of Public Collective Memory of Racial Slavery in the Gradualist North"
Patricia Lott (GLC Visiting Associate Professor; Associate Professor of English, Ursinus College)
In this talk, Lott discusses her interdisciplinary book manuscript about the incomplete suppression of the U.S. North’s slavery past. The book, “After Ruin: The Crafting of Public Collective Memory in the Nineteenth-Century U.S. Northeast”, focuses on the protracted struggle between two irreconcilable tendencies among the region’s late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century publics: to discard or to preserve the collective memory of racial slavery. Lott argues that the North’s governing regimes exerted an obliterative force over public memory. She conceptualizes this force through the term “wastecraft”-the art and science of laying to waste, especially for self-serving and wicked purposes. "After Ruin" asserts that the power of wastecraft collided with the possibility of laying racial slavery to rest-that is, of ending bondage with finality and engraving the memory of the system’s regional life and death in commemorative cultures.