Theorizing Soil: Grounded and Engaged Projects of Racial Terror Memorialization

Abstract This chapter is a small, intimate window into the work of members of the Irondale Memorial Coalition, an Alabama grassroots organization convened in 2018 to document and memorialize the history of racial terror violence within the Irondale community. Focusing on the soil collection of the project—that is, the gathering of soil from the approximate site of the violence in jars bearing the name(s) of those lynched—the chapter theorizes how this simultaneously haptic and symbolic practice represents the effort to unsettle the given grounds of political representation that made such antiblack violence possible in the first instance. In other words, breaking physical ground for the sake of remembering what and who had been deliberately scrubbed from a collective consciousness operates as a mode of resistance to and refusal of sociopolitical terms of order whose contours continue to delineate between those whose lives are deemed worthy of remembrance and those not.