S E1341: In Class with Carr, Ep. 340: “Maps, Museums and Manifestos”

This week, Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lonnie Bunch announced his retirement after a nearly four decade affiliation with its network and ending his seven year tenure as the first African American and first Historian to lead the institution founded in 1848. A decade ago this month, the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened. Bunche’s efforts leading both institutions provide a lens through which to consider ongoing contests over relationships between integrating various national identities into larger Social Structures of state affiliation, citizenship and belonging.

In an era where white nationalist nativism in the United States increasingly aligns with global white supremacist political movements, Bunch’s structural attempts to integrate various competing narratives of collective memory often inflamed U.S. white nationalist ideologues and extremists determined to use high-stakes cultural battlegrounds to cement an emerging minority rule.

This collision of narrative and space echoes Paul Goldberger's recent reflection on the World Trade Center's 25th anniversary in The New York Times, where he observed, "You can destroy something in an instant, but it will take a generation to rebuild it, and even then it cannot ever be the same."

The Africana Studies Framework allows us to examine both competing ideas of Governance and underlying Social Structures in which they exist. How do we recognize both interpretive differences and undeniable realities? How can we use Movement and Memory to build self-determining Governance formations? And what can and will emerge in the wake of a shifting world system?

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