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| 1 |
ID:
116449
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| Publication |
2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The New Orleans Katrina Memorial is located at the upper end of Canal Street, an inexpensive and relatively short trolley car ride from the city's tourist hub in the French Quarter. Despite its ease of access, and close proximity to the more famous cemeteries to which tourists regularly make pilgrimage, the memorial is little visited and largely unknown, even to many of the city's own residents. In this it stands in stark contrast to the National September 11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan, which drew its millionth visitor less than four months after its opening on September 12, 2011. Recent work in political theory on memory, mourning, and memorialization-as well as Ancient Greek concerns about the same-point to the ways in which the manner of remembrance, grieving, and commemoration employed by a democratic polity help to shape political outcomes. In what follows, I trace the history and design of the New York City and New Orleans memorials to suggest the ways in which they embody and perpetuate national strategies of remembrance and forgetting, in which injustices perpetrated against the polity are prioritized over injustices perpetrated within it. Drawing on John Bodnar's distinction between national and vernacular commemoration, I nevertheless conclude with a counter-intuitive suggestion: that while on a national level the public's relative ignorance of the Katrina Memorial is indeed indicative of a polity more concerned with injustices perpetrated against it than within it; on a local level the erection and subsequent forgetting of the Katrina Memorial is a manifestation of a mode of vernacular memory, mourning and commemoration with far more democratically-productive potential than its counterpart in New York City. In particular, I argue that it cultivates, and historically has cultivated, a more forward-looking, progressive, and polyphonic response to loss than the type of dominant national narratives embodied by the 9/11 Memorial. Whereas the latter continually replays the loss in ways that rob the polity of its capacity to move beyond its initial response, the former acknowledges and incorporates the loss while steeling the community for the challenges ahead.
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| 2 |
ID:
120845
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| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article explores the changing ways in which Australians and Vietnamese remember and memorialize their involvement in the Vietnam War and how these processes intersect with notions of reconciliation and historical justice in postwar contexts. It uses the Battle of Long Tan of August 1966 as an entrée into these considerations and questions whether heritage-making and memorialization processes can facilitate the achievement of reconciliation between parties formerly in conflict. Not surprisingly, the Australian and Vietnamese veterans of the battle and the two states, the Commonwealth of Australia and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, have different motivations for wanting to remember Long Tan. On the Australian side, a sense that reconciliation and atonement are needed is often reflected in official government and veterans' statements about the war and Australia-Vietnam relations, in the memorialization process at Long Tan and in the involvement of Australian veterans groups in local economic development and community building in Vietnam. On the Vietnamese side, where the Vietnam War played out as a civil as well as an international war, efforts by those who actively supported the former Republic of Vietnam based in Saigon and among the overseas Vietnamese (Viet kieu) to memorialize their engagement in the conflict have been frustrated. The usefulness of the notion of seeking historical justice is therefore questioned in post-civil war situations where people are locked into fixed histories and are unprepared or unable to revisit and retell personal and collective memories and histories.
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| 3 |
ID:
167661
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article investigates how commemorating practices are deployed to fix and affirm sovereignty and its ordering. Through conceptualizing commemorating practices as ‘national symbolic order’, this article focuses on Cairo’s monument of the Unknown Soldier as a tangled cluster of shifting attempts to signify urban space. Built shortly after the 1973 war, the monument expressed an approach to nationalist symbolism that was in line with how the Sadat regime came into its own because of the war. The article traces the influences on the style of the monument and the narrative of its construction. Ironically, six years later, the same monument became the resting place of Sadat after his assassination on the same site. How is urban space implicated in the construction of a national symbolic order? How is politics as death and mortality navigated and scripted in city space? In answering these questions, the article relies on interviews with the designer of the post-independence Monument of the Unknown Soldier conducted in 2015 and 2016, and his photographic collection. It proceeds in four sections discussing the significance of the October war of 1973 in shoring up the legitimacy of Sadat, imagining the monument, constructing the monument and, finally, the monument’s mediation of death and sovereignty. From the materiality and entanglements of one site, the article analyzes ‘state-making’ via ‘city-making’ after 1952 and well into 1970s. Ultimately, it follows the hesitations of deploying a national symbolic order in post-independence Egypt and of attempts at shoring up a shaky state apparatus in a common political space.
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