Chapter 4: Same Space, Different Imagination: Using Critical Spatial Analysis in Social Studies Education

The public landscape tells a story of how a community and nation want to be remembered and what they might want to forget. The iconography in monuments, memorials, and building names showcase who is important, the values treasured, and the historical foundations of a people and a space (Harris, 2010; Young, 1992). Throughout the United States, iconography tells a story of triumph, exceptionalism, and progress, but a growing collective is asking, “For whom?” We see this tension in an example from Richmond, Virginia. The Robert E. Lee monument stands tall along Monument Avenue, a street that has been historically lined with Confederate iconography until this past year. With growing media coverage of police brutality toward Black and Brown men and women, Richmond’s mayor heeded the call and ordered four Confederate monuments removed from Monument Avenue (Morris, 2020). The Lee monument remains, yet it has become a “reclaimed space” with protest art surrounding the statue (Moreno, 2020). The images of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd have been projected onto the statue, and others have used the “memorial as performance” (Alderman et al., 2020) with dance routines, voter registration, and community cook-outs on the monument grounds (Moreno, 2020). A site that most white folx¹ passed through without intentional reflection of the space’s meaning became a site of countermemory, a space of active imagination, where those who have been “othered” in the space historically worked to remake the space into one of truth-telling and empowerment.