This autoethnographic essay explores experiences of two White female media-scholars at the Newseum in Washington, DC, on August 10, 2013. It considers the Newseum’s role in how we remember and why we forget certain aspects of U.S. American journalism and the relationship between this institutional site of memory and our individual and collective identities. The self-reflexive, autobiographical methodological form allows the historians of media and culture to consider the calls of Barbie Zelizer, Carolyn Kitch, Janice Hume, and Alexander Dhoest for more conceptual clarity in our understandings of public, social, cultural, and collective memory and for new understandings of the negotiation and reception of media memory-texts and sites of memory.
Always Already Hailed: Negotiating Memory and Identity at the Newseum
Lori Amber Roessner, an associate professor at the University of Tennessee’s School of Journalism & Electronic Media, recently co-edited Political Pioneer of the Press: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Her Transnational Crusade for Social Justice (Lexington Books, 2018). She also is the author of two cultural histories, including the forthcoming Jimmy Carter and the Birth of the Marathon Media Campaign (Lousiana State University Press, 2020) and a number of other manuscripts and essays that have appeared in academic journals in her field.
Carrie Teresa is an assistant professor of communication and media studies at Niagara University. Her research interests include journalism, ethnomusicology, celebrity culture, and social identity. Her work on the black press has appeared in the American Historian, American Journalism, and AmericanPeriodicals and has won numerous research awards, including the American Journalism Historians Association’s Margaret A. Blanchard Prize. She published her first book, Looking at the Stars: Black Celebrity Journalism in Jim Crow America (University of Nebraska Press), in 2019.
The two authors contributed equally to this piece.
Amber Roessner, Carrie Teresa; Always Already Hailed: Negotiating Memory and Identity at the Newseum. Journal of Autoethnography 11 May 2020; 1 (2): 156–174. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/joae.2020.1.2.156
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