What better way to start a course on cultural
memory
in America than with a French theorist? Nora's
article is a necessary
inclusion due to the prevalence with which he is used by the authors of
some
of the other texts we will be studying. The theories presented here are
widely cited in
scholarship
of memory, largely so that they can be disputed. Nora argues that
"history is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to
suppress and destroy it." History has come to replace a
previously (naturally) existing environment of memory (milleux de
memoire) by fixing the past to certain sites (lieux de
memoire): the archive, the memorial, the theme park, etc. A culture
in which history (which for Nora is exclusively a written practice) has
not
attacked and replaced memory would not require designated sites of
memory, as memory would be suffused throughout the society. "We speak
so much of memory," Nora writes, "because there is so little of it
left." The stark opposition between "real" memory and (by
implication) unreal sites of
memory is problematic for many, and Nora has been relentlessly critiqued
in the fifteen years since his article appeared in Representations.
While the article is concerned with memory in Nora's native France, it has
proven useful to Americanists also.
"Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular'" is included to
help students think about what "popular culture" actually is, and,
importantly, who produces it and to what ends.
Hall regards the culture of working class people as neither wholly
imposed from above by governmental containment and manipulation nor
entirely autonomous in resisting impositions from the state
and/or cultural elites. Instead, Hall
argues, pop culture is the product of a dialectic of containment and
resistance (albeit heavily weighted against resistance). He
writes, "Transformation [of traditions] is the key to the long and
protracted process of the 'demoralisation' of the poor, and the
're-education' of the people. Popular culture is neither, in a 'pure'
sense, the popular traditions of resistance to these processes; nor is it
the forms which are superimposed on or over them. It is the ground on
which the transformations are worked." Popular culture must be seen
alongside and in
conversations with the forms of cultural production, and we must
appreciate "lines of alliance, as well as lines of cleavage" across class
boundaries. In Hall's opinion, "there is no
whole, autonomous 'popular culture' which lies outside the field of force
of the relations of cultural power and domination." So working
class people are influenced by capitalist cultural production, but they
are neither "cultural dopes" nor "blank screens" that the dominant culture
can simply indoctrinate. Through this argument, Hall aims to break down
the containment vs. resistance dichotomy to view culture as "a sort of
constant battlefield."
Some scholars now argue that the movement
of people and capital in globalised postmodernity has rendered
the nation-state "no longer an appropriate socioeconomic unity for
analysis" (Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: 6). However,
collective memory - state-sponsored and otherwise - is often still
couched in the rhetoric of nation and patriotic nationalism. Anderson's
influential book, like Nora's article
(see above), has provided ideas and language for many scholars interested
in
studying
the function of narrative and memory in shaping consciousness
of community across "homogeneous empty time." Anderson reveals some of the
formative elements of nationalism, exposing the inventedness of nations,
including the United States. In two additional chapters added to the
second edition - "Census, Map, Museum," and "Memory and
Forgetting," - Anderson gives particular attention to the use of
memory in imagining and reifying nations.While recognising
the continuing importance of ideas about the nation in shaping
cultural memory (and of cultural memory in forming, changing, and
contesting the meaning of the nation), it is important to also consider
"imagined communities" which are not bounded by the idea of
nation. The displacements of people wrought by modernity and
postmodernity have created situations in which we must take care
to think transnationally, to encompass diasporic consciousness of race,
gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and so forth. These issues may not
have been on Anderson's mind when he wrote Imagined
Communities, but his vocabulary remains useful in
considering them. Anderson's
text can be taught both with and against, and is vulnerable to
criticisms, particularly for its "top down" assumptions, but it is an
important book that will help inform our thinking throughout the semester.
Studies of collective memory often presume that the culture of a given period reflects the contents of the "national psyche" or "collective consciousness." Sturken reverses this assumption and examines the role of cultural memory in producing "concepts of the 'nation' and of an American people" as Americans interact with technologies of memory and produce meaning from them. Using film, television, photography, memorials and monuments, the discourse of popular science, and, most interestingly, the body, Sturken explores the construction and contestation of memories about the Vietnam War, the First Gulf War, and the AIDS epidemic in the United States. She stresses that visual images with the capacity to reach many Americans are very influential in shaping an "imagined community" of experience and memory.
Sturken seeks to debunk the notion that the postmodern U.S. is an
"amnesiac" society, or that increasing state control of memory practices
has seen "real" memory replaced by what Michael Kammen (Mystic Chords
of
Memory) disparaged as "pseudo-memory." She also argues that history
and memory are not oppositional but entangled, each moulding and in turn
being moulded by the other. Issues of great interest to American
studies - race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation - are displayed
in their relationship to memory-making, both "official" and
otherwise. This is a fascinating interdisciplinary
understanding of how contests over historical memory and the meaning of
the nation (and who gets to participate in the nation) are played
out.
Linenthal's book, part history, part ethnography, examines the
fashioning of an "imagined bereaved community" within the U.S. and beyond
following Tim McVeigh's April 19th, 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah
federal building in Oklahoma City. Linenthal interrogates the
participatory impulse that arose as many Americans, however distant from
the tragic events in Oklahoma, sought to create a sense of ownership and
community by offering their own memorials to the dead. The Unfinished
Bombing skilfully raises many issues which ubiquitously surround the
process of memorialising tragedy and loss: debates and contests over what
and who is to be memorialised; who is to decide what form and tenor
the memorial process will take. The media's role in shaping a national
grief is analysed, as are some psychoanalytical issues which arise from
the popular desire to interact with the bereaved, to express sorrow via
objects and messages left at the Murrah fence at the site of the
bombing. Linenthal charts the commercialisation of memory in responses to
the Oklahoma City bombing, too. Most notably, he follows the story of the
fireman (Chris Fields) and the baby (Baylee Almon), and the iconic
photograph taken of them on April 19th, 1995. This is an important book
which reveals much about the politics and poetics of loss and memory in
contemporary U.S. culture.
This collection of essays deals with contests over memories of
World War II in the pacific from a plethora of angles. Often, and
unsurprisingly,
analyses of memory and the Pacific war have established a binary between
the United States and Japan. The focus within the U.S. has been on how
the majority have remembered Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima/Nagasaki, and,
more recently, with the development of Asian Americanist critiques, how
Japanese-Americans have remembered and lived with
the memory of internment. A number of the articles here help us not only
to study U.S.-Japanese relations of
remembering, but also problematise the dominant binary of memory of the
Pacific war by focusing on how the conflict has been remembered in
countries such as Korea and Guam. Such essays also provide opportunity
for us to consider World War II and post-war politics in light of
coloniality and postcoloniality. This is an important move toward helping
fulfill American studies' pretensions towards incorporating and developing
a more trans- and
inter-national perspective. Essays on the syllabus include Vicente M. Diaz's
"Deliberating 'Liberation Day': Identity, History, Memory, and War in
Guam," Toyonaga Keisaburo's "Colonialism and Atom Bombs: About Survivors
of Hiroshima Living in Korea," and Marita Sturken's "Absent Images of
Memory: Remembering and Reenacting the Japanese Internment." Perilous
Memories is a fine tool through which to extend our perspective on how
one of the most globally important events in history has been understood
in multiple sites of reconstruction, remembering, and
struggle.
Spuzzum is included for a number of reasons. Firstly, it
provides us with an opportunity to study the interface between written and
oral constructions of history; secondly, in dealing with the history of
Euroamerican (EuroCanadian, more properly)-Aboriginal relations it opens
up
issues of
postcoloniality within North America - in this case Southwestern British
Columbia; thirdly, the book is itself a work of memory, based not only on
written historical accounts but on Laforet's twenty years of conversation
with the now late Annie York, a Nlaka'pamux woman who lived much of the
twentieth century in the Fraser Canyon area. The book offers us a
micro-level analysis of the importance of place and change to subjectivity
and memory, dealing as it does with the period from first contact between
the Nlaka'pamux and European settlers to the Second World
War. "Representations of the past," Laforet writes, "function as charters
for social reality in the present." She tracks the shaping of the
remembered past in the present, encompassing events such as the discovery
of gold, and a short war between white settlers and the indigenous
peoples. This book will form the centrepiece for the section on
Native American (or First Nations) cultures and memory and
orality. American studies often fails to pay enough attention to Native
Americans in its discussions of race, so Spuzzum is my course's
attempt to draw some attention to this.
Historian David W. Blight's copious study of memories and
narratives weaved around the American Civil War in the fifty years after
the surrender at Appomattox is included here as the largest of several works
on the syllabus which consider race and memory in relationship to slavery
and emancipation. Through examining the discourse of activists and
veterans,
politicians and poets, freed slaves and white supremacists, Blight charts
the ways in which narratives of black emancipation and equality were
subjugated to reconciliation between whites who had opposed one another
North and South. Memories of slavery and the Civil War have, of course,
been enormously important in the past 140 years of American history, and
continue to be so. Blight's book, though perhaps overly long, provides a
readable and informative
overview of the first fifty years of entangled and oppositional narratives
of the nation and its racial dynamics. This account lacks any
theoretical development, and it is reasonable to suggest that Blight's
narrative is too neat, as onlt two versions of the Civil War's meaning are
given any serious attention. Despite this, the wealth of materials
covered make this a valuable resource, and other readings will seek to
complement and enhance the ideas laid out here.
This book deals with "remembering" in a double sense, one that
is
common in memory studies at present. Loffreda's study of how the people of
Laramie, Wyoming, dealt with the shock and repercussions of the brutal
anti-gay murder of University of Wyoming student Matt Shepard in 1998
explores not only how Shepard and the crime against him were remembered,
but also how local people sought to re-member (put back together) their
lives and those of the community. This is a book to which I have to
confess a degree of personal attachment, having spent two years in
Laramie, become friends with the author, and also witnessed the
townspeople's sense of indignation at the
misrepresentation of their town in the press - particularly the press on
either coast. Loffreda charts memorial
ceremonies, the response of the LGBT community within the
university, the trial of Russell Henderson and Aaron
McKinney. In doing so, she subtly displays the paths by which
Matthew himself became lost in this process, transformed into an
icon - of gay rights for some, of the ignorance of smalltown America for
others, of God's vengeful distaste for
homosexuality for others still. In these contests over the meaning of
his awful death, then, Matthew Shepard was both remembered and
forgotten. This beautifully written book gives us the
opportunity to think about memory and sexuality, memory and
place, memory and the law, and memory and media.