Sturken, Tangled Memories - The Vietnam War, The Aids Epidemic, And The Politics Of Remembering

Abstract

Tangled Memories is a challenging piece of cultural criticism that explores how a nation remembers its past and what the political battles over the construction of those memories mean for the present. The book operates on two levels. First, it has a rather dense theoretical discussion of the relationship between memory and history. Sturken, assistant professor at the Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California, uses psychological theory, mostly Freudian, of how an individual remembers and forgets to suggest that a culture and/or a nation selectively shapes its memory of past events to define itself and give meaning to those events for the present. These events might be specific, such as the Kennedy assassination or the Challenger disaster, or in a series like the Vietnam war or the AIDS epidemic. In either case, they produce artifacts that both memorialize and become the focus of debates on the meaning of these events.