Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies, Nov 18, 2012
This essay explores the commemorative site of Fleury-devant-Douaumont (Fleury), a village destroy... more This essay explores the commemorative site of Fleury-devant-Douaumont (Fleury), a village destroyed during the battle of Verdun in 1916. We argue that Fleury offers a creative rhetoric of imagining otherwise by rendering a doubled demand on the imagination. It provokes visitors to attend to the fact of war’s overwhelming destructiveness. And simultaneously, it urges them to imagine the counterfactual, the “not having happened”—Fleury as a tiny and vibrant community as it would have been in the absence of war. In doing so, Fleury’s rhetoric opposes itself to a stance that sanitizes, justifies, or glorifies war.
In the wake of the First World War, a new form of commemoration emerged internationally, but in e... more In the wake of the First World War, a new form of commemoration emerged internationally, but in each case focused upon a new kind of national “hero”—the unknown soldier or warrior. The first instances appeared in France and Britain in 1920, followed by the United States in 1921, and Belgium in 1922. Other nations followed suit over the years, with
We forward a reading of the World War II Memorial, taking several peculiarities of its dedication... more We forward a reading of the World War II Memorial, taking several peculiarities of its dedication ceremony as hermeneutic prompts. We contend that the Memorial&amp;amp;#39;s rhetoric affirms contemporary U.S. imperialism under the revered sign of World War II, “speaking” more about the present than about the past. We argue that this interpretation forwards important issues for memory studies, about assessing
In the wake of the First World War, a new form of commemoration emerged internationally, but in e... more In the wake of the First World War, a new form of commemoration emerged internationally, but in each case focused upon a new kind of national “hero”—the unknown soldier or warrior. The first instances appeared in France and Britain in 1920, followed by the United States in 1921, and Belgium in 1922. Other nations followed suit over the years, with
This essay situates the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt within the vigorous culture of national... more 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 ...
States, a culture that found its first articulation in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. We begin wi... more 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 practices to come and how its progressive rhetoric has been turned in some later commemorative works to very different ends.
Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies, Nov 18, 2012
This essay explores the commemorative site of Fleury-devant-Douaumont (Fleury), a village destroy... more This essay explores the commemorative site of Fleury-devant-Douaumont (Fleury), a village destroyed during the battle of Verdun in 1916. We argue that Fleury offers a creative rhetoric of imagining otherwise by rendering a doubled demand on the imagination. It provokes visitors to attend to the fact of war’s overwhelming destructiveness. And simultaneously, it urges them to imagine the counterfactual, the “not having happened”—Fleury as a tiny and vibrant community as it would have been in the absence of war. In doing so, Fleury’s rhetoric opposes itself to a stance that sanitizes, justifies, or glorifies war.
In the wake of the First World War, a new form of commemoration emerged internationally, but in e... more In the wake of the First World War, a new form of commemoration emerged internationally, but in each case focused upon a new kind of national “hero”—the unknown soldier or warrior. The first instances appeared in France and Britain in 1920, followed by the United States in 1921, and Belgium in 1922. Other nations followed suit over the years, with
We forward a reading of the World War II Memorial, taking several peculiarities of its dedication... more We forward a reading of the World War II Memorial, taking several peculiarities of its dedication ceremony as hermeneutic prompts. We contend that the Memorial&amp;amp;#39;s rhetoric affirms contemporary U.S. imperialism under the revered sign of World War II, “speaking” more about the present than about the past. We argue that this interpretation forwards important issues for memory studies, about assessing
In the wake of the First World War, a new form of commemoration emerged internationally, but in e... more In the wake of the First World War, a new form of commemoration emerged internationally, but in each case focused upon a new kind of national “hero”—the unknown soldier or warrior. The first instances appeared in France and Britain in 1920, followed by the United States in 1921, and Belgium in 1922. Other nations followed suit over the years, with
This essay situates the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt within the vigorous culture of national... more 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 ...
States, a culture that found its first articulation in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. We begin wi... more 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 practices to come and how its progressive rhetoric has been turned in some later commemorative works to very different ends.
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