Americans live and work in the midst of architecture and abundance made possible by exterminated and enslaved people. Yet our connection to the lives of these people remains relatively absent from our written history. Slave narratives are very rare: only about one hundred survive today. Of those, only a few are first-person accounts by former slaves who ran away and freed themselves, the most prominent being that of Frederick Douglass. In researching the slave narratives that shaped the plot of her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison notes the problematic nature of firsthand accounts of slavery. They frequently avoided the most gruesome details of the experience: “Over and over the writers pull the narrative up short with a phrase such as, ‘But let us drop a veil over these proceedings too terrible to relate.’” How does she rend the veil to offer readers a glimpse into antebellum slavery?

This book grew out of questions about the nature of memory—how the past lives on in the present, and the extent to which our personal and collective memories shape our futures. Many years ago I began thinking about how our relationship to the past affects our sense of what is possible, and how memory affects our ability to achieve those possibilities. As I learned more about the tortured history of North America and nations attempting to transition to democracy, these concerns began to take a more explicitly political shape. In this volume, I ask which relationships to memory enable, or threaten, democratic possibilities.

My purpose in this preface is to offer the reader a clear sense of why I take these themes to be so deserving of closer consideration. The questions about memory that animate this book are political and theoretical. They are also personal—though my own memories are not the explicit theme of the chapters that follow. That said, I begin with an unconventional preface that includes a description of my own encounters with memory in an American context.

“Convictions are greater enemies of truth than lies.” Friedrich Nietzsche's words bear repeating. In the preceding chapters we found agreement with them through South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which granted amnesty to perpetrators for gross human rights violations on the condition that they fully disclose the truths of their atrocities. Likewise, through an encounter with James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, they rang true in the willful disavowal of the legacy of white supremacy in the United States. In the context of this chapter, the racial dimension of the exorbitant convictions of black people who fill our prisons at an unprecedented rate represents greater enemies of truth than lies.

Our journey began in fifth-century Athens BCE. The start of the century witnessed the punishment of Phrynichus, a tragedian who was fined for daring to stage a play that reminded the audience of the capture of the Ionian city of Miletus. At the century's end was a public prohibition of memory that served as a precondition of democracy: Athenian citizens were required to swear an oath that they would not remember all they had suffered under the Thirty Tyrants. This enforced amnesia gave birth to fraternal twins: the model amnesty of Western history and its model democracy. We glimpsed how the amnesia that is the hinge on the doorway to democracy is found in political speeches and sensibilities insisting that the dead should bury the dead and that the present is but a blank slate.

This chapter examines South Africa's transition to democracy by way of its landmark Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Much intelligence has been channeled toward technological innovations that proved remarkably efficient in the mass extermination of people and other living things. We might ask whether the human capacity to craft a “science” of politics that avoids restaging the tortured history of the last century has advanced as far as the science driving the media that aid our blissful temporary forgetting of it. Sounding a more positive note, Martha Minow writes, “The mass atrocities of the twentieth century, sadly, do not make it distinctive. More distinctive than the facts of genocides and regimes of torture marking this era are [sic] the search for an invention of collective forms of response.” Minow is right that the range of responses to mass atrocity are distinctive. Yet, with respect to the forms of present-day atrocities, there are dangerous contemporary variations on old themes. While chattel slavery may be a thing of the past, the institution of slavery persists under the euphemism of “human trafficking” where upward of thirty million people are in bondage today.

An intriguing friction between democracy and memory reveals itself in ancient Athens, the cradle of the democratic idea. In 403 BCE, after the oligarchy of the Thirty Tyrants, the transition to democracy was made possible by a decree forbidding any recollection of the Thirty. The prohibition on memory conjoined to the pardon of the Thirty came with an oath that bound Athenians to publicly promise that they “shall not recall the misfortunes.” This event is widely understood as the model amnesty in Western history. The amnesty of antiquity had amnesia at its root in both practice and etymology. The coincidence of amnesia, amnesty, and democracy would not be confined to antiquity. Over two thousand years later, President Woodrow Wilson took the stage at the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg.

In Confederates in the Attic, Tony Horwitz offers a disturbing observation: “When Spike Lee's movie on Malcolm X launched a wave of ‘X’ clothing, a counter symbol quickly sprouted on T-shirts and bumper stickers across the white South. It showed the diagonal cross of the rebel flag beside the words ‘You Wear Your X, I'll Wear Mine.’” The distance between the two X's suggests an enduring racial divide between opposing relationships to the past. Malcolm X spoke to this correspondence in 1964 when he declared: “We didn't land on Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock landed on us.” In this chapter I make the case for James Baldwin as a thinker who disabuses readers of willful innocence about the complex legacy of segregated memory in America. I explore how present publics inherit the challenges of desegregating memory that Baldwin identified. I then assess the extent to which his contributions will help those seeking to address the threat segregated memory poses to trans-racial democratization.

In what became known as the Corpus Christi massacre, on June 10, 1971, roughly eight thousand student protesters marched on Mexico City's central square to oppose the government of President Luis Echeverría. A secret police unit called the Falcons (Halcones) attacked the marchers, allegedly killing at least twenty-five people—some that day and others after torture and interrogation. Echeverría ruled the country from 1970 to 1976 during what is often referred to as the “dirty war”—a term used to describe the government's clandestine efforts to crush dissent. Echeverría's government and his party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), allegedly used wiretaps, rape, torture, genocide, and extra-judicial death sentences to silence opponents. The media were coopted to prevent the actions of the government from becoming public. Since then, the Mexican government's human rights commission has uncovered numerous stories of horrific acts perpetrated by the secret police, and there is evidence that children born to imprisoned mothers were stolen and that the Falcons were explicitly trained to kidnap, torture, and rape on behalf of the government.

In 1935 W. E. B. Du Bois argued that American segregated society relied on a segregated memory. By “searing” the public memory of African American struggle, white supremacist historiography had “obliterated” the black experience. The tourniquet of racist power that prevented black history from bleeding into the story of America's birth and growth stems from the nation's unmasterable slave past. In 1951 James Baldwin contended that this erasure makes Americans heirs to a “dangerous and reverberating silence” that is “the inevitable result of things unsaid.” When Barack Obama gave his revealing speech on race in America, he juxtaposed what he called “the white immigrant” story with the memories aired in black barbershops and beauty salons.

The king gouged out his eyes for all to see. After killing his father and sleeping with his mother, Oedipus found his future was fated. In thinking he could escape his past, he ended up right where he began: his mother's bedroom. His sons, Polyneices and Eteocles, then fought each other for the throne. In an act of treason, Polyneices raised an Argive army against his native Thebes. The fratricide of civil war ended with both brothers dead. This is the memory that Athenian audiences likely took with them to the festival of Dionysia where they saw Sophocles's Antigone performed.

The play opens. The setting is postconflict Thebes, and its people desperately seek “forgetfulness of these wars” (166). Creon, the city's unproven king, has forbidden the burial of Polyneices—leaving his corpse to rot in flagrant defiance of the city's religious laws. Polyneices's sister Antigone defies the king's order by burying her brother anyway. This outrage sets the stage for a power struggle over whom, what, and how Thebes will remember.

Written around 441 BCE, the drama was staged in democratic Athens as a tragedy. As a public spectacle, tragedy was far more than a means of escapist entertainment; it was civic education.