PhD Candidate Tylar Campbell at AAA 2025, New Orleans: “Soundcestral Remembrance”
Image courtesy Tylar Campbell, 2025.
PhD Candidate Tylar Campbell recently presented a poster at the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association in New Orleans. Congratulations Tylar!
Soundcestral Remembrance: Fugitive Memory, Congo Square, and the Resistance Against Historical Erasure
Abstract: This presentation focuses on urgent memory work at Congo Square, a landmark of Black cultural history in New Orleans that embodies both resistance and erasure. I advance the framework of Soundcestral Remembrance—the practice of sustaining cultural memory and ancestral presence through sound, rhythm, and gathering. Drawing on multimodal narrative anthropology and ongoing fieldwork, this case study interrogates how Congo Square operates simultaneously as a site of remembrance and a battleground against systemic erasure.The November 2025 AAA conference coincides with the anniversary of November 23, 1997, when the Congo Square plaque was installed following decades of advocacy by the Congo Square Preservation Society. Today, preservation faces renewed threats amid political efforts to dismantle Black historical recognition and weaken national memory infrastructures. Through attention to sound, embodied memory, and community space-making, this project demonstrates how African diasporic memory traditions endure despite erasure, foregrounding rhythm as a vehicle of cultural continuity, resistance, and survival. By situating Congo Square within current attacks on Black history in the United States, this work highlights anthropology's critical role in documenting, safeguarding, and amplifying cultural memory in what Katherine McKittrick calls "terrains of struggle"—engaging with preservation, erasure, and resistance as live, urgent issues rather than historical inevitabilities.
