"Rather, places of memory and the processes associated with their establishment demonstrate the complex ways that nationalist imaginaries, power relations, and social identities are spatially produced." (K. Till, "Places of Memory", p. 290)
So many questions from this visit -- as K. pointed out, here the landscape (the grass, the fields, the stones) is not the stage for the memorial, it
is the memorial. And then these statues, these monuments and markers that dot the battlefield, they are like the stitches that draw this fabric into the present. And then the way that movement
through the landscape becomes an act of memorial as well -- the ultimate form of memorial. And then finally, the tension of a 'national' memory -- that even as this site becomes enrolled in a very specific national imaginary (Lincoln's words on that field, in that field, and his constant stress upon the
we) it also depends upon the articulation of specifically non-national imaginaries and identities (this monument case in point). And then a last question: The work of Donald DeLue, commissioned in a short period of time to design monuments for the 'South', in a moment in which the legacy of the Civil War was being once more played out.
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