Stanton's The Lowell Experiment

As we’ve found, constructing memory is a difficult task.

Stanton continues this trajectory through The Lowell Experiment, which discusses the concerns that arise during the development of a “second life” for the city of through commercial heritage (5). If heritage is “history processed through mythology” (26), it is clear that Lowell risks nostalgia by desiring to see the past as part of a cohesive narrative of economic and social progress. A variety of terms, including “pastness” (xi) and “striving” (175) indicate this concern.

The importance of the dialogue between past and present is heightened, as, in comparison to sites like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Lowell is a living city with residents that must live and work within “memorial” space. Participation in the construction of meaning is not as simple as a tourist reflecting on their experience as they walk through a museum for, in Lowell, can a formalized narrative of the successful movement of the working class into the middle class professions exist beside the new influxes of Southeast Asian residents who have largely been unable to complete this leap? Where are the places for those displaced by the move from manufacturing to intellectual capital (comparing the photographs of page 51 to 111)?

The “garden of the machine” meets the Acre, in other words (48).

Possible discussion directions include considering the interaction between the Southeast Asian immigrant groups and the “Euro-American” residents in light of the front-door back-door conversation on Bruner, as well as the seemingly codependent relationship between cultural production and capitalism (as seen in the revitalization of Lowell or, alternatively, in the phenomenon of the museum gift shop).

In addition, Stanton appears to indicate in her epilogue that there is room for both nostalgic and pedagogical space within the park, but how effective are the pedagogical displays in reality? She shows a grudging skepticism earlier in the book on page 62 when she says, “perhaps a series of small recognitions of our own privileged places within [global capitalism] might eventually combine to produce action and change.”

For me at least, the use of double qualifiers to evaluate the relevance of Lowell to present day labor activists represents a systemic critique of the purpose of museum space as a whole. (In other words, "The Book that Stanton Didn't Write")