What is it about?
In daily life, memory performs a staggering array of tasks. It offers reassurance, validation, legitimation, and approval. It transgresses boundaries and polices them. It confirms understandings and undermines them. This regularly happens through the work we do with words in private and in public. Often in public speech, memory is performed not just to restate facts but to change something about them. This article explores how Donald Trump performs memory, particularly in his “Save America” speech from Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to change the fact of his 2020 election loss. His attempts to do this, by unhitching words from their usual meanings, poisons memories of the past in order to create false memories for the future.
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Why is it important?
Such poisonings of memory by unhitching words from meaning undermines our day-to-day communications, breeding suspicion and distrust because words no longer seem to mean what they did before. This is dangerous for democracy, which requires trust in our language, in our memory, and in each other, for the rule of law to flourish.
Perspectives
The rule of law rests upon the foundations of collective memory and civil discourse.
Mary Lynne Gasaway Hill
St. Mary's University of San Antonio, Texas
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Performing Protest, Performing Memory: Speech Act Theory and January 6, February 2025, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004692978_006.
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