Eric Aoki

Memory and Myth at the Buffalo Bill Museum

Few places tell the myth of the American frontier more vigorously than the Buffalo Bill Museum does in Cody, Wyoming. Traveling to the museum through the ‘Western’ landscape of Wyoming into the foothills of the Rockies prepares visitors for the tale of Western settlement. This narrative, which works to secure a particular vision of the West, draws upon the material artifacts of Cody’s childhood and his exploits as scout, Pony Express rider and showman. The museum retells the story that Cody first told to millions at the turn of the twentieth century in his Wild West arena show. In this paper, we argue that the museum privileges images of masculinity and Whiteness, while using the props, films, and posters of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West to carnivalize the violent conflicts between Anglo Americans and Native Americans.

Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting: The Reverent Eye/I at the Plains Indian Museum An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2002 convention of the Western States Communication Association.

Museums, memorials, and other historic places are key sites in the construction of collective memory and national identity. The Plains Indian Museum in Cody, Wyoming is one such space of memory where the (pre)history of “America” and its native peoples is told. Based on the view of texts as experiential landscapes, it is argued that this museum works to absolve Anglo-visitors of the social guilt regarding Western conquest through a rhetoric of reverence. This rhetorical mode invites visitors to adopt a respectful, but distanced observational gaze. A concluding section assesses the social and political consequences of memorializing in this mode.

Ways of (Not) Seeing Guns: Presence and Absence at the Cody Firearms Museum

Boasting over 6000 objects, including replicas of a western hardware store, a frontier stage stop, and a late nineteenth-century industrial factory, the Cody Firearms Museum, located at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, is “the largest and most important collection of American firearms in the world.” 1 The museum, which creates a decidedly visual space through its near-exclusive engagement with looking, employs an aesthetic of domestication and sterility to frame firearms for museumgoers. Even as it transforms guns into inert objects of visual pleasure, the museum cannot fully erase the history of violence and colonial conquering in which guns played a starring role. The museums rhetorical effectivity/affectivity, then, turns upon the unique play of presence and absence.

Popular Imagination and Identity Politics: Reading the Future in "Star Trek: The Next Generation.".

Through an analysis of the popular syndicated television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, this essay begins to theorize the relationship between collective visions of the future and the identity politics of the present. Focusing on the tension between the shows Utopian rhetoric of the future and its representational practices with regard to race, gender, and sexuality, it is argued that The Next Generation invites audiences to participate in a shared sense of the future that constrains human agency and (re)produces the current cultural hegemony with regard to identity politics. The closing section calls for critics to continue politicizing mediated images that appeal to popular imagination and to develop and implement a pedagogical practice of counter‐imagination.

Counter-Imagination as Interpretive Practice: Futuristic Fantasy and The Fifth Element

This essay concerns the relationship between popular cinematic visions of the future and present day identity politics. We argue that despite its futuristic setting celebrating technological progress and multiculturalism. Luc Bessons 1997 film The Fifth Element constructs sexual and racial difference in a manner that privileges and naturalizes White heterosexual masculinity. The essay offers counter-imagination as an interpretive practice that destabilizes the categories of sexual and racial difference as they are negotiated within appeals to popular imagination.

An Interpersonal and Intercultural Embrace

SUMMARY Using Onos (1997) “letter” format to share ones multiplicity of “voices,” I discuss the negotiation of interpersonal and intercultural factors of a gay, transcontinental, HIV serodiscordant relational connection with my late partner and a multicultural relational connection with my current partner. In this letter, I work to open paths of inquiry and understanding of our connections by intersecting relational “differences” (e.g., ethnicity, nations of birth, social class, HIV status, and religion/spirituality) with relational “similarities” (e.g., attraction and love, age status, shared gay identity, shared languages, and educational privilege). Finally, I address our learned and practiced skills for sustaining relational healthiness.

Memory and the West Reflections on Place, Practice, and Performance

The research collected in this special issue demonstrates that memory is mobilized symbolically and materially, spatially and temporally. It is fully embodied and often works affectively.

(Re)Imagining the West: The Whitney Gallery of Western Art’s Sacred Hymn

In 2009, the Whitney Gallery of Western Art (WGWA), located within the Buffalo Bill Historical Center (BBHC) in Cody, Wyoming, was redesigned—its art rehung and its vision of the West reimagined. The newly designed gallery replaced the structuring principles of history, artist, and genre that had governed the previous layout and design of the gallery with a thematic structure that elicits a series of affective dissonances. In this essay, we argue that the redesigned Whitney Gallery of Western Art performs a sacred hymn that—in repositioning Buffalo Bill Cody as its orchestrating figure—resolves discordant images and narratives of the West, harmonizes diverse themes into a single vision, and reconstitutes national identity in terms of the Western sublime.

Collective memory and sacred space in post-genocide Rwanda: Reconciliation and rehumanization processes in Mureithi’s ICYIZERE

ABSTRACT We assess Mureithis 2009 documentary, ICYIZERE: hope (Motion Picture, Josiah Films), as a document of representational space and collective memory. We argue that the post-genocide reconciliation workshop represented in the film embodies and constructs a sacred/secular space. The reconciliatory space is produced through (1) negotiations of dialectical tensions between past/present as well as individual/collective memory, and (2) (re)presentations of rehumanization within the workshop whereby participants (and audiences) can (re)interpret the Other. We analyze the rehumanization process in the documentary via identity widening theory (Ellis, D.G., 2006, Transforming conflict: Communication and ethnopolitical conflict. Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers) and empathetic human interaction. Finally, we detail how the documentary situates participants within a transformative space of negotiated memories of the genocide with current day reconciliation efforts.