Juliet Hooker is Professor of Political Science at Brown University. She is a political theorist specializing in racial justice, multiculturalism, Latin American political thought, and Black political thought. Prof. Hooker is the author of Race and the Politics of Solidarity (Oxford, 2009) and Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos (Oxford, 2017), which was a recipient of the American Political Science Association’s 2018 Ralph Bunche Book Award for the best scholarly work on ethnic and cultural pluralism, as well as the 2018 Best Book Award of the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. She is currently working on a book tentatively titled: Black Grief/White Grievance, which explores the role of grief and grievance in contemporary racial politics in the United States.

Overview

The Charleston massacre of 2015 and the killing of a white counter-protester at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville in 2017 brought the links between contemporary white nationalism and confederate memorialization to the forefront of national debate. After decades of inertia and continued construction of new confederate memorials, many cities and universities have now chosen to remove or relocate such monuments. Political theorists have had surprisingly little to say about the question of confederate memorialization. The few that have done so have focused on the procedures for decision-making processes about removal, and on the potential civic effect of such debates. This talk explores an alternate approach to the question of confederate memorialization focused on their political function. I argue that we should consider the question of confederate memorials in terms of the problem of political loss, and white political loss in particular. When we apply this frame to the issue of confederate memorialization, we are led to ask: what is the loss being mourned or managed via these symbols? What kind of civic lessons about the character of democratic politics are being conveyed by these memorials? I argue that confederate memorials reflect racial nostalgia for white political mastery and they thus foment political imaginations shaped by mastery rather than equality that are detrimental to democracy.