WRIGHT, Elizabethada A.

Fall 2005, pages 51 - 93

Rhetorical Spaces in Memorial Places: The Cemetery as a Rhetorical Memory Place/Space

ABSTRACT: Focusing on a seacoast New Hampshire African American burying ground and the grave of a white woman buried in a Massachusetts rural cemetery, this article considers how the essential nature of the cemetery makes it both a very usual and unusual memory place. Considering de Certeau's distinctions between space and place as well as Foucault's definition of a heterotopia, this paper argues that the paradoxes of the heterotopia combined with the symbolism and materiality of the grave make the cemetery a particularly potent lieu de mmoire for those otherwise forgotten in public memory.