"You Must Remember This": Autobiography as Social Critique

More Than Fact and Fiction: Cultural Memory and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study

“…Understanding the study's current import requires an assaying of these beliefs and memories, exploring how and where they travel, the experiences they build upon, and the truths they proclaim 4 . Fact and fiction have long circulated about the study, and the misreadings have at times served important cultural functions.…”

Introduction: Researching Memory and Generation

“…Connerton claims that 'the practice of historical reconstruction can in important ways receive a guiding impetus from, and can in turn give significant shape to, the memories of social groups (Connerton 1989: 14). Hutton argues in a more radical way that historiography cannot be seen as a process freed from memory, but rather as an official version of memory which enjoys the sanction of academic authority (Hutton 1993;see also Assmann 1999;Crane 1997;Hall 1998). This does not mean that memory and history are synonymous, but rather that 'memory is history located in relatively subjective space; history is memory located in relatively objectified space.…”

Family Genealogy: A Sociological Imagination Reveals Intersectional Relations

“…Some are famous: President Obama’s (1995) Dreams from My Father is anchored in genealogical symbolism. Some public memoirs are from obscure figures like Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin, daughter of a southern white family who had owned slaves, largely participated in sentimentalizing slavery, and represented the Civil War as a noble ‘lost cause’ after the Confederacy’s defeat (Hall 1998: 446–9). In her book, The Making of a Southerner, Hall finds Katherine turned ‘autobiography into social critique’ and that her ‘writing embodies a promise: Change can occur – has already occurred – from within’ (455).…”

“…Hall argues that Katherine ‘made history a weapon for dismantling social memory, but she also used memory and autobiography to breathe life into history’ (465). Katherine Lumpkin’s exposure to the contradictions of class status, the acts of white women in racial oppression, and her unusual advanced education at the turn of the century reveals the dynamic ways that power and knowledge can come together in an intersectional analysis to use ‘lethal memories’ in the service of emancipation (Hall 1998: 465).…”

“…Mills emphasized that this quality of mind is evident among politicians, anthropologists, and other social scientists. Researchers outside of sociology who are interested in social identities and history have increasingly examined the endeavors of family genealogists; these include anthropologists (e.g., Carsten 2000, 2004; Wade 2002) educators (e.g., Tynes 2001; Warren 2001), cultural geographers (Nash 2002), historians (e.g., Hall 1998; Pleck 2000), and humanities scholars (e.g., Gardner 2003; Kuhn 1995). There has been sociological research that is explicitly focused on genealogical activity (Erben 1991; Gatson 2003; Hackstaff 2009a,b; Hareven 1978; Lucich 1996; Parham 2008; Stein 2009; Tyler 2005; Wolf 2007; Zerubavel 2003).…”