Making People into Ghosts

The retrospective legacy of Dr. J.G.M. Ramsey exists in a fragmented form, made up of a cloud of perceptions, meanings, and interpretations applied to him both in life and after death. Each shard of Ramsey’s shattered identity is a reflection both of the realities of his life and personhood and the desires and worldviews of those generating the interpretation. These disparate versions of Dr. Ramsey continue to haunt the present day, enacting meanings and ideas now severed from the agency that died with his physical body ³ . This analysis seeks to collect these fragmentary specters for interrogation, understanding them as individuals and as a collective for what they have to teach us about the historical retrospective process, and the more deliberate construction of the individual as a monument to a cause. The intimacy of individual analysis reveals the ways in which Ramsey signifies the broader processes of the Confederate Memory project, how legacies are altered for the purposes of constructing an acceptable identity past.

These shards of Ramsey are examined here in the context of their influences on the present: how Ramsey functions as an influential figure in his own right based on the events of his life, how his various constructed ghosts haunt present ideologies, and how he functions as a reflection of various attempts to construct an acceptable legacy for the Confederacy and its actors.

The closest approximation available to the abstract concept of the "real" J.G.M. Ramsey lies in the investigation of the material events of his life. While these shards are still interpretations of the man rather than any individual "correct" Ramsey, they are more firmly grounded in documented evidence of his activities and behaviors. Rather than being in whole or in large part constructed for ideological purposes, these shards are constructed in that they represent amputated aspects of a wider whole, facets whose meanings have changed in the absence of the broader context of one another.

The more ephemeral shards of J.G.M Ramsey are those which are either constructed whole cloth or so distorted from their inspiration that they no longer bear a meaningful resemblance to their origins and instead exist as a purely ideological meaning with Ramsey's name attached. Rather, they consist of a series of meanings and ideas that he symbolizes; he becomes a signifier which can be used as a shorthand to gesture at concepts often left otherwise unspoken or attempt to exorcize undesirable realities.

The signifier of J.G.M. Ramsey is most frequently paired with the Confederate cause signified. These shards, which gesture at meanings and interpretations favored by former Confederates and today's neo-Confederates, frequently act as dogwhistles for various violent and revisionist meanings and intentions. The project of Confederate memory is itself multi-faceted, containing within itself multiple (and at times conflicting) desires, motivations, goals, and methods. In the absence of a unifying singular dogma, meanings are constructed individually or by subgroups with varying tensions between them. Various retrospective imaginations of Ramsey as a spectral Confederate figure may be utilized by neo-Confederate agents as an example of these meanings personified.

The goal of this project has never been to wholly reconstruct some "true" form of J.G.M. Ramsey. The subjective nature of each of these faceted interpretations renders impossible the project of stitching the man together from the pieces of his corpse like an ideological Frankenstein. There is no singular Ramsey, only the remaining impacts of what he has done over the course of his life and what he has come to represent in the decades since his death. His legacy, like all legacies, is complex. His business habits reshaped the economic and social history of Knoxville. His academic pursuits have undeniably influenced the state of historical education across the entire state of Tennessee. His control over the lives of the human beings he considered his property has left lasting trauma well beyond the lifespan of his immediate victims. Beyond these material realities, he has come to symbolize a valorized ideal of Confederate glory that was, thankfully, never realized. The last half-decade has seen a massive increase in public and academic discourses surrounding legacy and how we as a nation choose to confront our past. This, too, is what Ramsey represents. The institutions that owe their existence to him must now struggle with the complexities of his legacy as it intertwines with their own. The state of Tennessee is at a crossroads between movements for progress and honest engagement with messy and uncomfortable truths about ourselves, and reactionary and revisionist movements seeking to limit education on topics seen as "controversial" enough to threaten to topple the system they criticize. Only time will tell the nature of our own ghosts.

For more visual analysis, or to view the full photographic collection developed over the course of this project, please visit the project gallery below. Bunny Griffin is a pseudonym used to delineate projects which have a more artistic tone from those which are more academic in their nature.

 https://www.bunnygriffinart.com/making-people-into-ghosts-reconstructing-the-legacy-of-j-g-m-ramsey