Nostalgic longings,memories of the "Good War," and cinematic representations in Saving Private Ryan

–This essay focuses attention on some of the polysemic and polyvalent dimensions of Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. The author argues that this film needs to be viewed as an intertextual fragment, where audiences, rhetors, and critics co-produce their interpretations of the rhetorical meaning of D-Day and the “Good War.” The essay advances the argument that critical memory studies help us understand how various representations and absences in the film allow for a number of different nostalgic and oppositional readings of the film. Because of the ambiguous nature of this cinematic representation, both supporters and detractors could claim that this was a realistic film that supported their own views on warfare.     

Public Character and the Simulacrum: The Construction of the Soldier Patriot and Citizen Agency in Black Hawk Down

This essay examines how the film Black Hawk Down functions rhetorically to reconstruct the legitimacy of political and military institutions and policy, and the possibilities for efficacious, responsible citizen agency within the post-September 11, 2001 context of increasingly unconventional warfare. Black Hawk Down reconstitutes popular perceptions of war and the appropriate response of citizens to it. It continues a pattern of contemporary war films established by Saving Private Ryan in 1998, reducing the patriotic purpose of war to surviving and protecting one's fellow soldiers. This pattern is developed through a hyperreal spectacle of war that both encourages audiences to empathize with the dominant “pro-soldier” message and discourages critical public discourse concerning justifications for and execution of military intervention policy.     

Witnessing and the Failure of Communication

This article examines the Romani Holocaust experiences by mapping out the silences that haunt this question. As a case study, the article uses the testimonial documentary Porraimos: Europe’s Gypsies in the Holocaust and argues that the Romani Holocaust question is entangled in a moral discourse described in Lyotard’s Le Differend. Bearing witness to the differend can give new insights into the understanding of the Holocaust, the conceptualization of Romani identity, and the framing of media witnessing. The article concludes with a discussion of the face and its relation to witnessing arguing that the affective feel of the differend that interpellates one as a witness is delivered through the face.     

Artists and the film archive: re-creation—or archival replay

Artistic engagement with the archive is on the increase and takes many forms. Archive-based artwork does not always contain or display its archival source. However, in some cases the archives themselves—rather than the information or evidence they hold—are utilised to form part or all of the work. This is particularly true where visual and audiovisual records are used creatively. The archival record is thus interpreted and re-created, giving rise to potential tensions and discord. Focusing on the film archive—and in particular on documentary film originally created and collected for the purpose of recording and accountability—the paper addresses this act of creative interpretation and re-creation. Firstly, it considers the use of archives in the creation and/or destabilisation of national identity and collective memory. Specifically, it examines the re-use of visual evidence of the Holocaust and its aftermath. Among others, it discusses the work of artist Eyal Sivan, whose use of archival material from the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann has caused great controversy. Secondly, Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura and its application to archives is used to highlight the conflict that such forms of creative engagement may bring to the archival arena and to questions concerning the role and responsibility of the archivist as access provider or gate keeper.     

In and Out of Movies: Incarnation and Personal Identity

Fiction, particularly movies, enjoys the license to abandon philosophical rigor and play free and loose with issues somewhat related to the traditional personal identity concerns of philosophers. Double-named characters appear frequently in movies raising issues of double-identity to deepen the intrigue of their narratives. This paper explores the 1947 American film noir Out of the Past, which depicts the double identity and subsequent incarnation/embodiment of its protagonist by his abandoned past as a private detective who has crossed his gangster employers. In addition, the essay reaches “outside” the film to discuss the use of incarnation in the application of such notions as star or role, by taking as an example, its star Robert Mitchum, which leads us to how forces largely independent of their wills, incarnate certain actors, setting them up outside their films for multiple identities.     

Selling Canada to Canadians: collective memory,national identity,and popular culture

Two media endeavours, the Heritage Minutes and the CBC documentary Canada: A People's History, hope to serve as a corrective to Canadians' lack of interest in their history and to bolster national identity. However, the producers do not want to appear propagandistic in a country where there is conflict about what the shape of the nation should be. They accomplish this by appealing to the “on the spot” authority of journalistic representation and the emotional immediacy of dramatic story-telling. They also emphasize the multi-cultural and multi-perspectival nature of Canada's past. Ultimately these efforts exist within a larger narrative about the “story of Canada,” where events of the past are framed in terms of their contribution or relevance to the present shape of the nation-state. In this way, these programs reveal their purpose and, as collective memory scholars might predict, press the past into the service of present aims.     

Identifying and Interpreting Prewar and Wartime Jewish Photographs in Polish Digital Collections

Prewar and wartime photographs of Polish Jews are historical documents and unique records. A worldwide interest in photographs presenting Jewish life in Poland on the eve of the Holocaust and during the war has been sustained by the traveling exhibit And I Still See Their Faces: Images of Polish Jews, which first opened in Poland in 1996. In recent years, some Polish archives and research institutes have begun digitizing their photography collections, including prewar and wartime photographs of Polish Jews and their communities. In this article, the author focuses on two main questions: the archiving and retrieval of digitized photographs and the identification and subject analysis of the digitized collections, including participatory or social “tagging.”     

Public Identity and Collective Memory in U.S. Iconic Photography: The Image of "Accidental Napalm"

Thirty years after the fact, the Vietnam War continues to haunt the collective memory of the United States. One of the primary embodiments of that haunting is the image of a naked girl running down a road toward the camera, screaming in pain and terror from the napalm burns on her back and arms. The photograph, often dubbed “accidental napalm,” provides a complex construction of viewer response that was uniquely suited to the conditions of representation in the Vietnam era, while it reflects a continuing struggle within public culture since that time. In this essay, we offer a close reading of the photograph as a performance of public judgment, and we explore its subsequent history of appropriation. We argue that the photograph functions as a powerful emotional and inventional resource for animating moral deliberation and democratic dissent as it mediates the “stranger relationality” central to public engagement. At the same time, the image also motivates dominant narrative responses that reinscribe liberal ideology to inhibit collective memory and public accountability. This ambivalence in the circulation of the iconic image is grounded in fundamental affinities between photographic representation, public culture, and mass media.     

A Holocaust Resource Center Becomes a Beehive

Summary

This contribution describes the beginning years of a Holocaust Resource Center and its collection development in a four-year public institution, the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. The authors argue that, with such preconditions as strong institutional leadership and commitment and with good “town-gown” relationships, Holocaust and Genocide Studies can be placed central to the liberal arts experience. Such centrality is particularly important given the repeated occurrence of genocide in this century. In view of uncertain fiscal support for public higher education, multiple ways must but can be found to develop Holocaust and Genocide book and media collections.     

The development of rhetorical theory in America∗

Expanding upon the Social Value Model of Rushing and Frentz, this essay argues that the fundamental values of the American Western myth exist in the paradoxical form of Individualism vs. Community. Four historical eras are discussed in terms of how the Western film rhetoric of each was patterned in response to threats to the myth. Early Westerns enacted a pattern of “dialectical emphasis” (of Community): classic Westerns, “dialectical reaffirmation “; sixties Westerns, “dialectical emphasis” (of Individualism). It is claimed that reaffirmation of the dialectical tension between the values best strengthens the archetype, and thus America's image of itself. In contrast, the current revival of Western rhetoric, as depicted in the political realm in the elections of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, and in the popular culture realm in The Electric Horseman, Urban Cowboy.,and “Dallas,” enacts a pattern of dialectical pseudo‐synthesis, and thus is seriously subversive of the fundamental archetype.     

“You Don't Play,You Volunteer”: Narrative Public Memory Construction in Medal of Honor: Rising Sun

Narrative and ludological analysis suggests that Electronic Arts’ Medal of Honor: Rising Sun constructs a narrative of World War II that selectively retells history and constructs an Orientalist representation of the Japanese Empire. The gaming environment exists as an interactive museum that immerses gamers into history so that they experience warfare in their homes. Combining newsreels, fictional letters from home, and interviews with veterans of the “Good War,” Medal of Honor: Rising Sun retells a history that omits details of Japanese internment or atomic weapons. The intertwined themes of personal revenge for the loss of a family member and historical revenge for the attack on Pearl Harbor guide gamers through an “educational” experience of the war. Finally, its failure to simulate violence means that Medal of Honor: Rising Sun invites a critical blindness to commemorating war.     

Movement as memory: Significant form in eyes on the prize

Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years ranks as one of the most successful public television documentaries ever produced. Although it originally aired in 1987, the series has since been shown widely in school and college classrooms, where it arguably has influenced many students’ understanding of the civil rights struggle and, more fundamentally, of the nature and form of “social movement” itself This essay draws upon Kenneth Burke's concept of “significant form” to examine how the documentary's design works to shape public memory of the civil rights struggle as a social movement. In addition to yielding insight into the rhetorical structure of a landmark television documentary, the analysis of form in Eyes on the Prize illumines how public consciousness of “social movement” can be created and perpetuated through narrative form.     

Epideictic Rhetoric in the Service of War: George W. Bush on Iraq and the 60th Anniversary of the Victory over Japan

This essay explores the relationship between epideictic discourse and war through the analysis of George W. Bush's August 20, 2005, address at the Naval Air Station near San Diego, ostensibly to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Allied victory over Japan. The case also serves as an exemplar for how Bush routinely interwove epideictic appeals with collective memories of World War II in order to promote the Iraq war and deflect criticism of his policies there. Bush praised the greatest generation and linked it to the current generation; blamed and dehumanized enemies of the past and present; advocated for war based on “lessons” from the past; and reinforced a shared identity to instill both obligation and confidence.     

Remembering and Disremembering: A Museum Perspective

Abstract Ken Waliaula’s essay in this issue, Remembering and Disremembering in Africa, acutely observes the interaction of individual memory with what has been remembered and “disremembered” (willfully erased) by local communities and larger national political structures in Kenya. His reflections on the way society deals with memory offer valuable insight into museum‐making. Exhibitions can accommodate the fuller range of complexity, meaning, and interpretation that is reflective of real history as experienced from the range of perspectives Waliaula describes. To create such exhibitions, museum professionals need to adopt methods of collection and curation that differ from the common practice of “telling the story” in favor of incorporating greater narrative variety that embodies the complex contradictions of events that become history. By doing so, museums may better equip their users to share interpretive authority and experience a greater sense of authenticity within the exhibition.     

Covering urban vice: the New York Times, "white slavery," and the construction of journalistic knowledge

Communication scholars have analyzed how such pivotal historical and political events as war, assassination, and the rise and fall of nations and political regimes have functioned to shape and shore up the legitimacy of particular news institutions. This paper explores the role played by an early twentieth-century sex-related social and moral panic over “white slavery” in transforming news practices. Beginning in 1907, stories proliferated in the U.S. mass media of White women kidnapped and sold into prostitution organized bands of immigrants, often alleged to be conspiring with top city officials. diachronic textual analysis of New York Times coverage of a 1910 white slavery investigation finds that reporters initially drew from a stock of sentimental narratives describe the investigation's findings. However, as the investigation grew increasingly problematic, the Times developed a detached orientation toward its object, similar to that demanded of professional journalists today. I examine how the Times engaged paradigm repair and significant historical revision to account for and defend its earlier articles on this controversial phenomenon.     

“Aliens” vs. Catalogers: Bias in the Library of Congress Subject Heading

Abstract

Aliens: It is the subject of conspiracy theories and nightmares, the name of a blockbuster science fiction/horror movie franchise, and also how the de facto national library of the United States refers to “persons who are not citizens of the country in which they reside.” In 2016, the Library of Congress announced that it would reconsider the usage of “Aliens” and its related terms in the Library of Congress Subject Headings, following a student-led movement to change the pejorative term “Illegal Aliens.” Yet, three years on, these terms remain in the LCSH. Using the “Illegal Aliens” controversy as a case study, this article explores how the LCSH works, its role in research, and its vulnerabilities to bias, and offers proposals for how librarians can help improve the situation.     

Science in American Life,National Identity,and the Science Wars: A Curators View

The simmering controversy over the Smithsonian's Science in American Life exhibition that led to the ensuing visitor study by the Institutional Studies Office is reexamined in terms of issues of American identity. A brief historical overview reveals that, for most of the twentieth century, the American scientific community received enthusiastic public support for its perceived service to national goals and ideals. In the past decade, however, after experiencing unexpected budget cuts to research, scientists have questioned the depth of that public support in what has become known as the Science Wars. Science in American Life was soon engulfed by that broader, often acrimonious debate about science and society which involved notions of pure and applied science. The role of American identity in the dispute over the exhibit is analyzed in terms of scientists' criticisms of three of the exhibition's case studies.     

“I Am Who I Am”: Black Masculinity and the Interpretation of Individualism in the Film Barbershop

This essay will provide further insight into how Black audiences interpret a popular culture text by focusing upon how a group of young black men construct Black masculinity as depicted in the film Barbershop. Interestingly, a rhetorical community of young Black men discussed the representations of the characters in the film from a perspective of Black individualism rather than reaffirming identity through a collective orientation toward the culture. This reading contrasts with much of the “ghettocentric” film literature by highlighting how a Black audience's interpretation of a text can focus on individualism rather than on cultural representations and stereotypes.     

Closing Circles,Opening Pathways

Summary

The reference librarian in the setting of a Holocaust library serves several unique functions. Together with survivors and their families the librarian assists in reaching closure in their search for information about relatives who perished in the Holocaust. The reference librarian also serves as facilitator for future generations in learning about the Holocaust and coming to terms with the past. The paper also describes the tools and sources that enable these processes to be accomplished.