The Exhibit That Bombed: The Enola Gay Controversy and Contested Memory
In March 1994, a heated argument erupted over a planned exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. The exhibit, scheduled to open in the spring of 1995, the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, would focus on the legacy of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The centrepiece of the exhibit was supposed to be the restored Enola Gay, the airplane which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The exhibit generated an outcry amongst veterans, members of Congress, and others who felt that it depicted the Japanese as victims in World War II and questioned the morality behind the decision to drop the atomic bomb. After five rewrites and nearly a year of intense argument between the museum, veteran organisations, and Congress, the exhibit was cancelled and replaced with a drastically scaled down and less graphic exhibit. Unlike other instances […]
Continue Reading‘You will find us still in cages’: Re-narrativizing African American History at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice
The Equal Justice Initiative’s (EJI) National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, re-dramatizes America’s national narrative by leading visitors on a journey not from slavery to freedom but from slavery to mass incarceration. Rather than focusing on the ‘feel-good story’ of ‘courageous civil rights activists’, writes EJI founder Bryan Stevenson, ‘we want to tell not only the story of how destructive and traumatising slavery was but also the story of how it evolved’.[1] As opposed to the many Black history museums that centre an uplifting and progressive narrative, the EJI memorial foregrounds the continuation of racial violence and oppression in the United States. The idea is not to show how far we have come, but how far there is yet to go. However, the EJI’s focus on racial violence risks contributing to what Elizabeth Alexander calls the public ‘consumption’ of ‘Black bodies in pain’.[2] Visual vocabularies established by […]
Continue ReadingMemory as Superpower in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer
Acclaimed author and essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates remarked in an interview that “much of the country’s history is premised on forgetting, not remembering certain things.” [i] His statement refers to the repression of the slave past and its erasure from American narratives of freedom and progress. In his debut novel, The Water Dancer, Coates underscores the centrality of remembering the painful past and the power of memory in the acquisition of freedom and liberation. Coates’s historical novel, which draws on the tradition of the slave narrative and employs many of its narrative tropes and plot devices, is part of a corpus of works that (re-)turn to the past and take up the subject matter of slavery—a literary movement that pointedly reemerged in the post-Civil Rights era and that continues into the present. Black American novelists began to confront and engage with the history of slavery and its legacies some three decades before […]
Continue Reading‘The Place, The Circumstances, The Remembrance’: The Performative Nature of Irish-American Civil War Memory and Memorialisation
In one of 2020’s notable moments, this November saw centenary commemorations at Westminster Abbey’s Unknown Warrior grave. Consecrated through the burial of an unknown British serviceman from World War One on 11 November 1920, the site has also come to represent the war dead of subsequent conflicts. In America, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier will mark the centenary of its first burial next year in 2021, although unlike Britain, the crypt includes Unknown Soldier tombs from World War Two and the Korean War.[i] At the home of American military and civic memory in Arlington National Cemetery, the memorial is itself an object of interest, with frequent visitors observing in stony silence as Sentinels of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier keep watch and change guard come rain, shine, snow or terrorist disaster.[ii] The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is not the cemetery’s first, or indeed only, grave of […]
Continue ReadingMemorials and Popular Memory Special Series
The past four years have highlighted the influence of memorials and popular memory in American culture. From the toppling of Confederate statues to the decolonisation of school curricula, many Americans have fought to establish a more inclusive and nuanced memorial landscape. This series illustrates how widely “memory” is both interpreted and engrained in American life, as it manifests in physical memorials, film, novels, to name a few. To kick off the series, Dr Catherine Bateson explores memorials to Irish American Civil War Veterans and the (often) performative nature of commemorating marginalised groups. We then delve into an extremely pertinent theme: the memory of slavery and racial violence against Black Americans. Isabel Kalous analyses Ta-Nehisi Coates’s novel, The Water Dancer as a representation of slave memory. Shona Thompson then takes a different approach to memories of racial violence by analysing the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the […]
Continue ReadingLive Human Exhibits: The World Columbian Exposition as a Space of Empire
A theatricalised space that prompts visitors to immerse themselves into spectacles of what was construed as racial otherness, while acknowledging notions of Western cultural superiority and investing in public approval of US imperial efforts abroad—that was the fundamental idea underlying the Midway Plaisance, an amusement park committed to displaying human beings in elaborately set up ‘ethnic villages’ at the 1893 World Columbian exposition in Chicago. The following event staged on the fairgrounds is a paradigmatic example of the political agenda motivating the exposition: a group of Samoan men march together, wearing traditional attire, which includes a loincloth, a helmet, and necklaces. They carry a wooden sword, signaling their status as warriors. The nakedness of their upper bodies underlines their erect posture and athletic constitution. While the marchers look straight ahead, they are surrounded by a crowd of onlookers, mostly white bourgeois women, who gaze upon their bodies with fear and […]
Continue ReadingPlaying With, Not Against, Empires: Video Games and (Post)Colonialism
Video games can be understood as a medium characterized by remediation and convergence: they often take elements from other media, adapt them to their medial specifics, and add their own unique aspects, thus creating new, playable versions of cultural material. Such adaptations apply to certain plot elements, character archetypes, or specific genres, but they also hold true for long-standing myths and narratives. The Western, for instance, becomes a genre not only through formal characteristics like the existence of cowboys, saloons, or horses but also by peddling core myths of the American national imagination, such as the myth of the frontier or the idea of the rugged individualist—elements that, accordingly, can be found in Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902) or John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) just as much as in Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption series (2010, 2018). These narratives transport particular ideologies—or, rather, they can be understood as concealing an […]
Continue Reading“They Need Us and They Want Us”—Erecting the Empire in the Vietnam War
In the view of the late Amy Kaplan, the practice of US imperialism is denied and projected onto other nations in the discourse of American culture studies (13). Whereas the research in this field only marginally engages with the idea of the US being an imperial force, a cursory look at US political rhetoric, literary productions, and Hollywood blockbusters of the last decades discloses that the United States indeed seems to employ an imperial mindset. A close investigation of US-based representations of West-East encounters—during the Cold War period, for instance—reinforces Kaplan’s assertion that “US culture was from its origins grounded on ‘an imperium’” (22) and that US imperialism would “go unrecognized as an American way of life” (23). The difficulty of understanding that US culture was and still is, according to Alyosha Goldstein, formed by colonialist practices within and outside the United States can be explained by a closer look […]
Continue Reading“Eternal Confusions in Another World”: American Captives and Imperial Vulnerability in Algiers
“We are Distressed for you, O our BRETHREN, We are Distressed for you!” (3) Puritan minister Cotton Mather thunders in the opening of his “Pastoral Letter to the English Captives, in Africa” (1698). The letter addresses American captives in North Africa,[1] but Mather’s concern for their personal safety is only second to his preoccupation that they may “Renounce the Christian Religion” and become “wretched Renegado’s [sic]” (4-5). Mather’s pronouncements are a fitting introduction to the short readings of the Algerian captivities I propose in the following pages: Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive (1797) and Maria Martin’s Captivity and Sufferings of Mrs. Maria Martin (1806); first and foremost, because Mather inaugurates the conjunction between apostasy and confusion, which Tyler and Martin ultimately turn into a triangulation of apostasy, confusion, and empire. Barbary figures such as the Muslim pirate or the renegade, when met face to face, prove to be far closer […]
Continue ReadingA Brief Consideration of the American Empire Through Modern and Contemporary Poetry
For centuries, one of the roles of the poet has been as oracle, acting as witness, interpreter and seer about societies and individuals. Poetry serves to illuminate, even if—especially if—the truths unveiled reflect the shadowed soul of a people. Contemporary American poetry offers ample examples of the frictions and contradictions of the American empire seen through the lens of its verse-makers, presenting a plexus and literary voice to and for those muted by traditional imperial power constructs, and a sacred space from which to reveal, protest, and change the society it reflects without artifice. As part of the Spaces of Empire series, this essay will examine the American empire, its ethos and conflicts, within the nation itself as well as in the global landscape, primarily through the lens of modern poetry of the last century, with particular attention to the juxtaposition of form and content. Poetry and the […]
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