Moving Backwards and Forwards: Multidirectional Memory in Political Speech
For this assignment, I chose a topic to research, then zeroed in on a single artifact in order to make a claim about that research topic. As I was looking for a research topic, I became interested in how the racialized, aggressive, or socially taboo ideas that are technically absent from political speech still exist in the minds of speakers and listeners. (For more on this, see my “Something New” entitled “The Dog Whistle”). I concluded that politicians can achieve this effect by both utilizing and building on listeners’ memories of different historical events, figures, and attitudes. Multidirectional memory allows politicians to encode their speech, creating the illusion of absence (or imbuing actual absence with weight and meaning).
