Lifting the Shadow

AMY SODARO is an associate professor of sociology at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. She is the author of Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence (Rutgers University Press 2018) and coeditor of Museums and Sites of Persuasion: Politics, Memory and Human Rights and Museums and Mass Violence: Perils and Potential.

"Lifting the Shadow is a path-breaking work and provides readers with eye-opening analyses of how three relatively recent U.S. memorial museums rethink and represent the complicated, violent, and often ignored history and repercussions of U.S. slavery and racism. This well-timed volume will be a valuable asset in the classroom for specialists as well as a public audience interested in issues of race, history, and representation." - Joyce Apsel (president of the Institute for the Study of Genocide) "How is the United States grappling with its difficult pasts and engaging with histories that make us uncomfortable? Lifting the Shadow examines the extraordinary memory museums that have been built in the early twenty-first century, museums that demand of the nation a reckoning with the difficult pasts of slavery and racism, museums that shape historical engagement in ways that would not have been possible before. Amy Sodaro shows us that despite the polarization and political retrenchment of our times, these museums point with hope toward new ways of living with difficult pasts and being in America." - Marita Sturken (author of Terrorism in American Memory: Memorials, Museums, and Architecture in the Post-9/11 Era) "Amy Sodaro’s accessibly written, thoughtful, and timely comparative study of three pivotal U.S. museums shows that they manage to link historical slavery with contemporary racial injustice to varying degrees. Most importantly, she argues that memorial museums have a responsibility in democratic societies, to not only point out and situate oppression in the historical past but highlight its ongoing structural embeddedness in our present." - Silke Arnold-de Simine (author of Mediating Memory in the Museum: Empathy, Trauma, Nostalgia)

• Introduction                         1          Race and Memory in the US: A Shifting Memorial Landscape                   2          Telling “America’s Story”: National Museum of African American History and Culture         3          “Shining the light of truth”: The Legacy Museum                                               4          “After a century of silence”: Greenwood Rising Historical Center                                             5          America’s New Memorial Museums6          Conclusion: Memory’s Present and Future                                              AcknowledgmentsNotesBibliography                                                                                                                   Index