Marianne Hirsch

How can individuals and communities heal from long-standing legacies of structural violence and inequality that have shaped the project of diversity and inclusion? My illustrated talk will describe and analyze The Zip Code Memory Project, a pandemic–era experiment in transformative inclusivity, based in New York City.i In the Fall of 2021, I was part of a small group of academics, artists and activists (Diana Taylor, Susan Meiselas, Lorie Novak, and Laura Wexler) who created the Zip Code Memory Project as a way of finding reparative ways to memorialize the devastating losses resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic while also acknowledging its radically differential effects on different Upper New York City neighborhoods.  Once Lenape lands, the area we focused on attests to a history of repeated dispossession and inequality as well as resistance and renewal. In the United States, Zip Codes are postal codes, but they also mark the uneven distribution of prosperity, precarity and hope in neighborhoods across a country that, to date, has lost over a million people to the pandemic and has seen life expectancy drop significantly, if differentially, over the last two years. Zip Codes that house larger Black, Latinx and undocumented populations have suffered far greater losses of subsistence, health, education and life, and their populations had greater infection and mortality rates. Crowded apartments, and the inability to work from home compounded these effects. Women, especially, were called on to offer disproportionate amounts of care during this moment, losing jobs and livelihood, and the disabled lost essential support. The deep legacies of systemic failure, inequality and neglect that the pandemic revealed so starkly demanded accountability and transformation. We believed that economic recovery would fall short without the communal work of mourning, acknowledgment and memory that are part of personal and social recovery, but that, at the same time, memory work must be accompanied by a continued struggle for social and economic justice.  And we recognized that the effects of lockdown and isolation needed to be repaired through connection, community and touch. Attentive to the logics of separation they enact, we set out to form partnerships with community and arts organizations to activate the Zip Codes differently, opening up spaces for communicative and reparative acts. As academics, we were able to apply for and to secure a grant that would support the project and were able then to invite community members from Harlem, Washington Heights and the South Bronx to gather for a series of art-based workshops that provided a space for collective mourning, community-building, care and repair. Through what we believed to be the restorative power of artistic collaboration and community, we aimed to create a kind of inclusivity that could allow us to work together while also acknowledging the inequalities among us – inequalities and injustices we could attempt to combat and redress as allies joining together. Thus we aimed to create a pause, a safe space, where loss could be acknowledged and felt; where we coud share our stories; experience how and where, in our bodies, we carry the uncertainties, anxieties and fears the pandemic provoked. Accompanying each other in the work of remembering and grieving, in momentous and intimate instances of pain and of joy, we hoped to find ways to heal and grow together. Most importantly, we wagered that the trust-building workshops in which we participated could enable us to acknowledge our shared vulnerability and interconnection as humans living in bodies and in time, and thus together to imagine some small ways toward transformative justice and renewed hope in our neighborhoods. Our small group workshops were supplemented by public Zoom roundtables on “Reparative Memory,” “Why Zip Codes?” and “Long Harm”; by public gatherings and performances that brought a larger community together to mourn and to organize; and by an art exhibition “Imagine Repair” at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. The workshops, roundtables, performances and exhibitions provided a stage on which participants could communicate their responsibility to bear witness to an extraordinary historical moment and to contribute to a growing demand for transformative justice.  Building on some of our small group of organizers’ recent scholarly and artistic work on memory, this project participates in a turn in memory studies from the past to the future, and from trauma to vulnerability, care and repair. The project builds on the writings and teachings of Augosto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading,” Elizabeth Spelman’s Repair, Judith Butler’s writings on vulnerability, Diana Taylor’s work on the politics of presence, and on the work of memorial artists like Carrie Mae Weems, Doris Salcedo, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Hank Willis-Thomas, Susan Meiselas, Maria José Contreras, and others. In my talk, I will analyze the project’s assumptions, successes and failures, using it as a case study to think about vulnerability, repair and the work of justice. I will offer some thoughts on the implications of the transformative inclusivity we envisioned for the work of responsibility, diversity and inclusion more broadly, asking what memory studies has to offer this long-range project on both sides of the Atlantic.