Fourteenth International Conference on the Inclusive Museum

Abstract

We consider preserving and narrating contested histories of decentralized urban warfare by developing a driving tour of key sites in US Civil War siege of Jackson, Mississippi, in July, 1863. This proposed inclusive, accessible, decentralized driving tour would occupy the commemorative space between isolated singular monuments to individual, collective, or unknown soldiers and interior museum exhibits and narratives detached from the physical landscape of battle. Unlike battlefields and skirmishes in rural settings, urban warfare is more inclusive of the impact of war on civilian populations of freed and enslaved African-Americans, poor and elite women and children, and other populations not otherwise involved or represented in military campaigns. It serves as a microcosm of the impact of siege warfare on a civilian population. Not only would this serve as a counter-narrative to the legacy of memorials and commemorative monuments under fire in most states, but it serves as an opportunity to preserve endangered historic sites in a changing urban landscape. Finally, the siege tour sites can be viewed as chronotopes, Bahkin’s “points in the geography of a community where time and space intersect and fuse.” Chronotopes thus stand as monuments to the community itself, as symbols of it, as forces operating to shape its members’ images of themselves.” These are “places where the knots of narrative are tied and untied . . . . [Places that] make narrative events concrete, make them take on flesh, cause blood to flow in their veins.”