Spark’s new series confronts history’s “unfinished business”
By Reena Hamad
“History in a Time of Forgetting,” a new Spark Magazine series introduced in October, examines how political pressure, institutional choices and gaps in historical records affect whose experiences are preserved and remembered.
Spark, published by the University of Michigan’s Philip J. Bowman Center for Scholarship to Practice, brings academic research into public discussions of historical and contemporary issues. This series emerged in connection to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and brings renewed attention to federal efforts to promote a narrower account of American history.
Co-curators Camron Amin, professor of Middle East and Iranian diaspora studies, and Jennifer Brady, managing director of UM’s Inclusive History Project, use “regimes of forgetting” to describe the systems that make historical knowledge harder to preserve or share. These pressures, they explain, can extend beyond government policy to institutions and communities, operating through restricted access to records, neglecting archives or fear of consequences for discussing difficult histories.
In Josclynn Brandon-Mayes’ essay in the series, she discusses her research into Indiana University’s Groups Scholars Program and the way it taught her that official archives preserve records but cannot fully capture what that history meant to the people who lived it. She argues that Black students, staff and alumni have long kept their campus history alive through informal “sanctuary spaces,” such as the office of a longtime Black staff member, a group chat or a Homecoming conversation.
As institutions scale back diversity programs, she writes, passing that memory to each new generation becomes an act of continuity and resistance.
Elisa Alfonso’s essay argues that Bad Bunny’s Feb. 8 Super Bowl LX halftime show, which drew criticism from people who said the Puerto Rican artist was not ‘American enough’, sparked a national conversation about Latino history and belonging in the U.S. Alfonso traces the salsa featured in the show back to the working-class barrios of New York City, where queer and Black musicians and dancers helped shape the genre. Although the performance rarely acknowledged those influences directly, she writes, remembering them is a way to “resist communal and cultural erasure.”
Closer to Dearborn, David Porter’s “Making a Fluid Monument” looks at how the Detroit River can serve as a “fluid monument,” a living site of memory where many communities’ stories can be told – unlike statues and plaques that tend to preserve a single narrative. He discusses how the university’s Detroit River Story Lab has spent six years working with community storytellers on both sides of the river, through projects such as the Detroit River Stories podcast and a tall ship program that has taken more than 3,500 young people on more than 150 sailing trips.
These are just a few of the essays in the series, which also explores immigrant experiences, historical romance and the lasting effects of epidemics. Across these subjects, contributors consider what is lost when histories are overlooked and how individuals and communities can help preserve them.
The series also prompted an Oct. 20 webinar featuring moderators Amin and Brady, alongside contributors Elisa Alfanso from the University of Utah, David Porter for the University of Michigan, S. Shani Saunders from the University of Pennsylvania, and Tenisha Tevis from Oregon State University. The discussion gave panelists the opportunity to elaborate on their work, their personal connections to it, and ways to participate in preserving history through thoughtful inquiry and active engagement with personal history.
In essence, the project showcases that whether through an oral history interview or a conversation with a community member, preserving the past depends on people choosing to share. For readers, the series offers a reminder that their own experiences can contribute to the history future generations inherit. Keeping that history open to additional perspectives allows mainstream accounts to be questioned, complicated and expanded.
As Amin and Brady write, “history is always unfinished business.”
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