Rhetorical Spaces in Memorial Places: The Cemetery as a Rhetorical Memory Place/Space

ABSTRACT:

Focusing upon a seacoast New Hampshire African American burying turf and the grave of a white woman buried in a Massachusetts rural god's acre this article considers how the essential nature of the burying-ground makes it both a actual usual and unusual memory place. Considering de Certeau's distinctions between space and place as well as Foucault's definition of a heterotopia, this paper argues that the paradoxes of the heterotopia combined with the symbolism and materiality of the grave make the church-yard a particularly potent lieu de m?©moire for those otherwise forgotten in public memory.

One new autumn morning in the affluent seacoast town of Portsmouth, novel Hampshire, construction workers were busy replacing hundred old pipes in a #15 million urban upgrade when they made a discovery: the remains of a series of ancient coffins eight feet below the sod The discovery was not totally unexpect Local historians knew that maps indicated a "African Burying Ground" had been in the vicinity of Chestnut public way and that stories existed of early twentieth hundred construction workers uncovering skulls in an upgrade 100 years earlier (Cunningham et al), on the contrary the unearthing of actual "documentary evidence" of this burial turf was cause for surprise.

In the time since this discovery, the city has realized the 13 discovered coffins are greatest in quantity likely only a few of the many buried beneath city roads and buildings. The city has also grappled with what to do with these remains as the oilstones and oofnns reveal pieces of history that many want to celebrate while others, priding themselves upon their town's democratic history, might be reluctant to embrace.

Focusing upon this recently discovered African Burying earth as well as the grave of a white woman buried in an upscale Massachusetts rural graveyard this paper considers how the essential nature of the graveyard makes it both a real usual and unusual memory place.1 As a physical place and a spiritual space, the burial-ground confuses the symbolic and physical to allow memories forgotten in other locations to survive-often silently. In the following sections, this paper first briefly overviews the connections among rhetoric, memory and place, focusing upon Michel Foucault's definition of a heterotopian space and Michel de Gerteau's distinctions between space and place. The next to the first section considers how the church-yard is able to act as a public rhetorical space for those exclud from greatest in quantity other public rhetorical spaces, in particular women Building upon this idea of the god's acre as an inclusive rhetorical space, the third section considers by what means those even more marginalized, of the like kind as eighteenth century African Americans, could find a rhetorical space in the burial-ground because of its constant confusion of space and place. The final section finishs that the cemetery is the couple unique and ordinary, and it is this paradox, the central nature of a heterotopia, that makes the burying-ground a particularly important rhetorical memory space.

I. Rhetorical Memory Spaces

The connections among memory, space and rhetoric proceed back centuries. As the fourth canon of rhetoric, memory has been tied to rhetoric since the beginnings of the couple as an art. And the connections between the pair and physical space have existed just as drawn out The beginnings of "ars memoria" supposedly proceed back to the ancient of greece Simonides who remembered every one attending a banquet by recalling exactly where each one sat.2 The ties between memory and space continued in the classical treatise upon memory, Rhetorica Ad Herrenium, which explained that to remember ideas or things, single should visualize them in a specific location in an imagined place ([Cicero]).

The ties between memory and space have also been important in the twentieth hundred as historians have realized the importance of materiality upon memory. For example, many theorists have observ the impact of physical statues and memorials upon public memory (e.g., Gohen, Driggs et al., Jacobs, Levinson, Middleton, Savage, Schwartz). Similarly, other scholars have shown by what means material forms of memory rule behavior (e.g., Bennett, S.M. Pearce). The greatest in quantity important work in this area is probably that of Pierra Nora who has shown in what way les lieux de m?©moire, memory places, are where memory "crystallizes and disguises itself" ("Between" 7). Existing at the point of a particular historical twinkling of an eye this place comes to be the coagulate realization of the abstract memory. This point of crystallization and secretion is separated from the flash that is remembered, and the place draw nears to represent it.

Relationships between memory and rhetoric have also become increasingly studied in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. For example, Kendall Phillips writes that "[t]he ways memories attain meaning, drive others to accept them, and are themselves debateed subverted, and supplanted by other memories are essentially rhetorical" (2-3) Numerous rhetoricians have also considered by what mode rhetorical space is created and by what mode it includes and excludes certain discourse, and certain speakers. For example, Nan Johnson has explored by what means spaces, both literal and figurative, of rhetorical power were put togethered in the nineteenth century to carefully preclude women. Johnson's work shows in what way rhetorical guides, handbooks and other pedagogies created a cultural program that worked to sway its boundaries and rules regarding who could have possession of what space. Women were allocated a domestic rhetorical space, men all other. Women then, who did speak in public worked to reassure their audiences that they were well within the correct rhetorical space, communicating that they were purely wives and mothers engaged in "domestic acts of moral intervention" (153)