DOI
https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004692978_006
Size or Duration
19 pages
Location covered
United States of America
Digital Publisher
Digital Commons at St. Mary's University
Document Type
Article
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Publication Date
2-24-2025
Collection
Faculty Scholarship
Format
Description
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. It warms our hearts and chills our blood. In the realm of protest, as this article will show, memory works through intentional language use. In the context of activism, acts of memory are often performative: they aim not just to restate the status quo, but to change something about it. This chapter operationalises J.L. Austin’s Speech Act Theory (1994, SAT) as a lens through which to examine how the contentious discourse of former President Donald Trump on January 6, 2021, particularly his “Save America” speech, has promoted false configurations of the past to shape the future. SAT facilitates an exploration of the role of discourse in the memory-activism nexus, defined as “the mutual entanglements and feedback loops between memory activism (contentious action to promote certain memories), the memory of activism (acts of remembrance about earlier social movements), and memory in activism (the role of memory in new acts of contention)” (Rigney 2021, 299). Discourse routines, including those of contention, reside in a culture’s collective memory, where they are nurtured, grounded, and animated to shape future memory. SAT provides a framework to see these in action, prompting analysis of the actual performance of a speech act, itself, the choices and intentions behind it, and its subsequent effects. This exploration of performativity in activism moves through a brief overview of the 2020 American electoral context, followed by a consideration of SAT in relation to the memory-activism nexus. An SAT analysis of Trump’s speech follows these sections before the chapter closes with concerns about the relationship between discourse and democracy.
Medium
manuscript
Recommended Citation
Hill, M. L. G. (2025). "Chapter 4 Performing Protest, Performing Memory: Speech Act Theory and January 6". In Memory and the Language of Contention. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004692978_006