Who Tells Your Story: On the Construction of Public Memory

Who Tells Your Story gathers contemporary analyses of monument and commemoration controversies from across the United States and the world. Sanford Levinson and the contributors in this volume ask whose stories get to be told, who gets to tell them, what happens when monuments disappear, and how these memorials impact national narratives. From the removal of Confederate statutes in the United States and those of Lenin in Ukraine to the efficacy of national holidays in furthering the causes they claim to celebrate, these essays dissect how the collaborative process of memorialization brings purported intention, private agenda, and final outcome into constant friction with each other. Who Tells Your Story is an accessible and provoking examination on public memory and what forces shape it.

Contributors: Zachary Bray, Deborah R. Gerhardt, Emily Bradley Greenfield, Randall Kennedy, Aleksandra Kuczyńska-Zonik, Larysa Kurylas, Sanford Levinson, Kimberly Probolus, Kermit Roosevelt III, Anna Saunders, Bruce Scates, Richard C. Schragger, and Agata Tatarenko