15 - Elmira and the Post-War Geographies of Black Monumentalizing

Summary

This chapter uses Elmira, New York, as a case study in the fraught and overlapping geographies that both inform and come to embody post-war monumentalizing. It takes Elmira as one example of a conversation surrounding Black histories and Black memory taking place across the United States after the Civil War. These conversations reached backward to illuminate Black histories and forward to anticipate Black futures. Spaces like Elmira demonstrate how Black citizens thought of the monument not only as an instrument of white supremacy or a genre of critique, but also as a medium for imagining Black futures. In tracing the genealogies of monumentalizing made visible in Elmira through the African American activist John W. Jones and the white writer Mark Twain, this chapter shows how certain dynamic monumental landscapes manifest post-war intersections of race and memory that continue to be arbitrated today.