Say you’re researching your ancestry, and you hit a dead end: the genealogical trail goes cold. Is it really a dead end? Or might this open up new ways of understanding who we are and how we came to be? In other words: What do we mean when we say something exists in our historical memory? Can we actually remember historical events that you were not alive to see? 

On this week’s episode of “What Is X?,” Justin E. H. Smith talks to writer and critic Julian Lucas about memory, and historical memory in particular. Justin asks, what is the relationship between memory and the historical record? Julian defines "memory" as a presentist, personal relationship to the past, one that is mediated by places, objects, and ritual practices—it is an approach to history that brings it into conversation with the lives we lead today. Over the course of an hour, Julian and Justin discuss the uses and misuses of history (cf. corporate appropriations of MLK), occasional bad vibes of historical reenactments, the poetry of Derek Walcott, and what African diaspora memory practices can teach us about the contingencies of history. Most pressingly, they try to uncover the root of Justin’s childhood conviction that his grandfather was George Washington.