1. Camera Images and National Meanings -- 2. The Wall and the Screen Memory: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial -- 3. Reenactment and the Making of History: The Vietnam War as Docudrama -- 4. Spectacles of Memory and Amnesia: Remembering the Persian Gulf War -- 5. AIDS and the Politics of Representation -- 6. Conversations with the Dead: Bearing Witness in the AIDS Memorial Quilt -- 7. Bodies of Commemoration: The Immune System and HIV
Summary
This fascinating investigation into the production of American cultural memory focuses on two of the most traumatic and contested events in recent U.S. history: the Vietnam War and the AIDS epidemic. Each, Marita Sturken argues, disrupts our conventional understanding of nationhood, identity, and American culture. She brilliantly compares the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the AIDS Quilt as key sites where cultural memory is produced and debated. While debunking the characterization of the United States as a culture of amnesia, Sturken shows that remembering is itself a form of forgetting, and memory an inventive social practice
Notes
Bibliography: p303-350. _ Includes index
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 303-350) and index
