Marita Sturken

Memory, consumerism and media: Reflections on the emergence of the field

This article situates the emergence of the field of memory studies in relation to several areas of study: cultural studies, media studies, communication and visual culture. It considers key concepts of those fields — memory practices, technologies of memory, mediation and consumerism — in relation to memory studies. Finally, it reflects on some cautionary aspects of memory studies as it moves forward as a field of study.

Desiring the Weather: El Nino, the Media, and California Identity

Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom. Don DeLillo, White Noise

Comfort, irony, and trivialization: The mediation of torture

This article examines the interrelationship of torture and comfort as a key feature of the United States project of American Empire, examining how the U.S. practice of torture is mediated in American culture, in particular through the distancing strategies of domestication, trivialization, kitschification, and irony. It uses as a framing concept Roger Silverstone’s notion of ‘proper distance’, in particular its formulation of the relationship of mediation to morality, to examine the mechanisms in American culture that enable a level of comfort with the practice of torture. Through an examination of the image icons of the Abu Ghraib prison and the representations of torture at Guantánamo Bay prison, including popular culture representations, trivializing rhetoric, artistic engagements, and kitsch souvenirs, this article analyzes the tensions of proximity and distance that mediate the U.S. practice of torture.

The New Aesthetics of Patriotism

Among the many changes in American society signaled by the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency is a new aesthetic of American patriotism. This can be seen, in one way, in the fact that Barack and Michelle Obama have begun to change the art that is displayed on the White House walls, which has throughout the history of the nation consisted of images of famous Presidents, landscapes of the American West, and innocuous still lifes. According to the Wall Street Journal (Chozick and Crow, 2009):

The objects that lived: The 9/11 Museum and material transformation

This essay analyzes the September 11 Memorial and Museum at Ground Zero in New York through the framework of memory and materiality. The 9/11 memorial and museum are both sites through which the material transformation of 9/11 is mediated—through preservation, re-creation, and fetishization and through narratives of absence, presence, and remains. I examine the meanings of material transformation in the dust that emerged in the wake of the twin towers’ fall, the design focus on absence, the material objects on display in the museum as survivor objects, and the merchandise for sale in the museum gift shop. The museum is a project of many contradictions in its varied roles as a historical museum, a tribute to those who died, a tourist destination, a patriotic nationalist project, and the repository of unidentified remains. This essay aims to reveal how 9/11 is defined through narratives of exceptionalism and material transformation.

Feeling the Nation, Mining the Archive: Reflections on Lauren Berlant's Queen of America

This essay engages with Lauren Berlants 2007 book, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, as a key text in the trajectory of cultural studies scholarship and the emergence of affect theory. It analyzes Berlants concepts of infantile citizenship, the affective relationship to the nation, the intimate public sphere, the emergence of a national sexuality, and the counter-practices of “Diva” citizenship. The essay argues that Queen of America is a pivotal book in cultural studies scholarship for understanding nationalism, political agency, and the individual, intimate impact of mass culture.

Tourists of History: Souvenirs, Architecture and the Kitschification of Memory

Technologies of memory take many forms, from photographs to architectural designs, from docudramas to memorials, from talismans to souvenirs, from diaries to the body itself. The aesthetic styles and designs of these memory technologies can span a broad range of taste categories and stylistic intents, from the sentimental object of loss and mourning to the angry political statement of an AIDS quilt panel. Such distinctions of taste are, of course, deeply tied to class-based notions of what constitutes appropriate taste in relation to memory and loss. They are also crucial to understanding the relationship of memory and politics. It is the case that the aesthetics and forms of cultural memory both enable and limit the memories that circulate through them. The aesthetics of technologies of memory are thus deeply political.