THE AIDS MEMORIAL QUILT AND THE CONTEMPORARY CULTURE OF PUBLIC COMMEMORATION CAROLE BLAIR AND NEIL MICHEL This essay situates the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt within the vigorous culture of national commemorative building in the late twentieth-century United States, a culture that found its first articulation in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. We begin with an assessment of ways in which the AIDS Memorial Quilt appropriated and extended the rhetoric of the VVM in terms of the two memorials’ modes of democratic representation, their troubling of the boundaries between contexts of invention and reception, and their differential coding of the public and private. We take up later memorial projects, specifically the Oklahoma City National Memorial and the September 11, 2001, commemorative projects, to suggest how the rhetoric of the AIDS Quilt can be marked as a harbinger of prac- tices to come and how its progressive rhetoric has been turned in some later com- memorative works to very different ends. T he AIDS Memorial Quilt marks the lives and deaths of tens of thousands of individuals. It represents the deaths of hundreds of thousands of others it does not name explicitly. It creates spaces for moving rituals to remember the dead. AIDS Quilt displays often have been attended by events and demonstra- tions that advocate for those who continue to live with HIV-AIDS. It some- times moves the otherwise uninvolved visitor to tears. 1 The AIDS Quilt executes, in other words, multiple rhetorical feats and gives rise to a great many Carole Blair is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Neil Michel is a partner at Axiom Photo Design in Davis, California, and the Director of eMedia at Prosper Magazine. The authors would like to express their appreciation to Chuck Morris for his invitation to participate in this project and to Bill Balthrop for reading and com- menting on a draft of this essay. © 2007 Michigan State University Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 10, No. 4, 2007, pp. 595–626 ISSN 1094-8392