Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of RememberingAnalyzing the ways U.S. culture has been formed and transformed in the 80s and 90s by its response to the Vietnam War and the AIDS epidemic, Marita Sturken argues that each has disrupted our conventional notions of community, nation, consensus, and "American culture." She examines the relationship of camera images to the production of cultural memory, the mixing of fantasy and reenactment in memory, the role of trauma and survivors in creating cultural comfort, and how discourses of healing can smooth over the tensions of political events. Sturken's discussion encompasses a brilliant comparison of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the AIDS Quilt; her profound reading of the Memorial as a national wailing wall—one whose emphasis on the veterans and war dead has allowed the discourse of heroes, sacrifice, and honor to resurface at the same time that it is an implicit condemnation of war—is particularly compelling. The book also includes discussions of the Kennedy assassination, the Persian Gulf War, the Challenger explosion, and the Rodney King beating. While debunking the image of the United States as a culture of amnesia, Sturken also shows how remembering itself is a form of forgetting, and how exclusion is a vital part of memory formation. |
Contents
1 | |
Camera Images and National Meanings | 19 |
The Wall and the Screen Memory The Vietnam Veterans Memorial | 44 |
Reenactment and the Making of History The Vietnam War as Docudrama | 85 |
Spectacles of Memory and Amnesia Remembering the Persian Gulf War | 122 |
AIDS and the Politics of Representation | 145 |
Conversations with the Dead Bearing Witness in the AIDS Memorial Quilt | 183 |
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Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of ... Marita Sturken No preview available - 1997 |
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AIDS epidemic AIDS Quilt American culture artifacts battle body camera image cells Cleve Jones commemoration concept context cultural memory dead death debate defined depicted discourse disease display docudrama documentary Edited evokes experience Figure forgetting gay community gender Gulf War Syndrome healing Hollywood human iconic immune system individual Jac Wall Jones killed kind Kovic lives male masculinity Maya Lin meaning metaphors Michael military Monument mourning movie NAMES Project narrative panelmakers participation Persian Gulf Persian Gulf War person with AIDS Photo photographs Platoon political popular produced quilt panels Quoted reenactment remember represent representation Rodney Rodney King role sexual social soldiers specific status story symbol T-cells television tion traditional University Press victim Viet Vietnam Veterans Memorial Vietnam War Vietnam War films Vietnamese viewers virus War films Washington Mall Washington Post women World writes yellow ribbons York Zapruder film
Popular passages
Page 10 - ... technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and a way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality" (Foucault 1988: 18; italics mine).
Page 8 - I have sought to suggest that this value attached to narrativity in the representation of real events arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary.