The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) opened in 2004 and the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) opened in 2016, both featuring exhibitions on the painful and traumatic chapters of US national history, which had previously been largely excluded from the National Mall. Both museums are testament to a discourse, which opened up in the new millennium at the center of national memory. This convergence in memory represents a smallest common denominator, which includes that this history could no longer be ignored and should to remembered. However, this is where convergence and political consensus about national memory ends. How these histories have been remembered and memorialized has diverged significantly.
The NMAAHC emulates narrative strategies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), whereas the NMAI eschews museum exhibition narrative strategies commonly used in memorial museums dedicated to violent and traumatic pasts. Further, the NMAAHC presents African American history in a way that integrates with patriotic ideologies dominating the National Mall. In contrast, the NMAI aims at subverting conventional rhetoric of historical exhibitions, presenting postmodern and circular historical narratives that marginalize the more traumatic aspects of Native American history such as forced removal.
While the addition of the NMAI and the NMAAHC might indicate otherwise, I argue that memory space on the National Mall is a limited resource and therefore competitive. This limitation is literal since the real estate of the nation's monumental core is closely guarded and contested as Kirk Savage has demonstrated. More importantly, memory on the Mall is also figuratively restricted in what may or may not be remembered. Memory of painful histories that contradict the nation's founding mythologies regarding the Founding Fathers or regarding key ideologies of the Founding Era is not possible to date.
For example, the NMAAHC's historical galleries frame memory of slavery and segregation to make it compatible with the national discourse on the National Mall. The narrative frames African American history as continuous progress of liberation and ever-expanding civil rights culminating in the presidency of Barack Obama, while ignoring racial inequity in the present. Likewise, the NMAI avoids any serious discussion of genocide on the American continent. Both museums also do not include memorial spaces dedicated to the remembrance of victims of U.S. history inside or outside of their buildings.
In summary, while the addition of the NMAI and the NMAAHC may be mistaken for evidence of multidirectional memory, memory on the National Mall in fact remains highly competitive. Memory and memorials that fundamentally question the national imagination and dominant ideologies of the United States are not (yet) possible on the Mall.
