Chunk 1: War Commemoration and American Nationalism
Samantha Oliver
Works:
Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle. (1999). Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag. London: Cambridge University Press.
John Gillis (Ed). (1996). Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
John Bodnar. (1993). Remaking American: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in Twentieth Century America. Princeton: Princeton University Press
What role does the commemoration and memorialization of war play in the formation, consolidation, and maintenance of American nationalism and national identity? Marvin and Ingle, Gillis et al, and Bodnar each take up this issue, zooming in on particular aspects of commemoration and memorialization and arguing in their own way that war memory plays a crucial role in how a nation comes to think about itself and others. Marvin and Ingle approach war as a kind of national ritual, which American patriotism acting as a kind of civic religion whose primary symbolic totem is the American flag itself. War thus becomes an ultimate and necessary defense of that totem, with both war and the commemoration of war serving a particular galvanizing function that renews patriotic commitment to the nation. The commemoration of war, they argue, has become even more important in the absence of traditional triumphalist warfare in the post WWII era. Gillis et al take a wider approach, arguing that commemoration of any kind has political implications for the formation of national identity. Gillis traces the rise and development of national memory as a key shaper of national identity, showing how the need to commemorate fills a contemporary desire to break with the past by distancing it from the present – in other words, commemoration functions to segment the past from contemporary times. A series of case studies supports these assertions in a variety of wars and contexts. Bodnar echoes this sentiment, focusing on the constructed nature of commemoration to show the way in which these remembrances are inherently shaped by political actions and serve specific political goals. Activities of war commemoration are frequently sites of culture conflict, where different stakeholders argue over who has the authority to shape public memory. He argues that while commemoration appear to be preoccupied with the past, memory work really serves the present and the future. While these scholars take different approaches to the stuy of commemoration and national identity, they converge around several key ideas. First, that there is something particular about war commemoration that plays a specialized role in national identity. Second, that commemoration is a site of tension on multiple levels (local/national, vernacular/official, etc.), and that commemorative meaning can change over time. Third, though nominally focused on the past, commemoration work above all serves the present and the future, to varying degrees and effects, and is always political in nature.
globecultureform 