TCLF’s latest conference, Leading with Landscape IV: Transforming North Carolina’s Research Triangle, was held on April 13, 2018, at the James B. Hunt, Jr., Library at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Topics explored include the regionally unique coupling of human and natural systems, how the area’s campus landscapes are serving as “incubators” for innovative planning and design solutions, new projects that are re-evaluating the region’s monuments and memorials, two revered public landscapes—Moore Square and Dix Park—and much more. To learn more about the conference: https://tclf.org/sites/default/files/microsites/raleigh2018/index.html
Panelist – Panel II: The Research Triangle’s Emerging Public Realm and the Story of The New South
W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Ph.D., William B. Umstead Professor of History and Chair, Department of History, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
The Commemorative Landscape of the Triangle: From Exclusion to Inclusion
The American South, for most of its history, has had no experience with multi-racial or democratic pluralism. Southern society was explicitly organized to create and perpetuate racial and gender hierarchies. To a greater degree than anywhere else in the United States, the authority of the state invasively bolstered the perpetuation of exclusionary, anti-democratic institutions and practices. The organization and use of public space in the South necessarily reflected the logic of this undemocratic, hierarchical ordering of society. Not only were civic spaces conceived to naturalize but also to perpetuate the socio-political order. Although seemingly contradictory, the use of public space to make hierarchies of power in the region timeless, inevitable, and natural, went hand in hand with a conscious effort to ground those hierarchies in history. Thus, elite southerners cluttered the civic spaces of the South with commemorative art and structures that complemented a historical narrative consonant with their interests. The silences and absences on the civic landscape of the South were by design, not happenstance. African Americans, American Indians, and others fashioned counter-narratives but they typically had no means to use the built landscape to express or perpetuate their historical memory.
This presentation will outline the creation of civic commemorative landscapes in the South, the counter-traditions that developed to contest the commemorative landscape, and the legacy of an inherited landscape that remains dense with artifacts of hierarchy in an era of nascent pluralism.
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