Memorials to Shattered Myths
Memorials to Shattered Myths

Author: Harriet Senie

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0190248394

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Memorials to Shattered Myths: Vietnam to 9/11 traces the evolution and consequences of a new hybrid paradigm, which grants a heroic status to victims of national tragedies, and by extension to their families, thereby creating a class of privileged participants in the permanent memorial process. Harriet F. Senie suggests that instead the victims' families be able to determine the nature of an interim memorial, one that addresses their needs in the critical time between the murder of their loved ones and the completion of the permanent memorial. She also observes that the memorials discussed herein are inadvertently based on strategies of diversion and denial that direct our attention away from actual events, and reframe tragedy as secular or religious triumph. In doing so, they camouflage history, and seen as an aggregate, they define a nation of victims, exactly the concept they and their accompanying celebratory narratives were apparently created to obscure.

Beyond the Quagmire
Beyond the Quagmire

Author: Geoffrey W. Jensen

Publisher: University of North Texas Press

Published: 2019-03-15

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 1574417584

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In Beyond the Quagmire, thirteen scholars from across disciplines provide a series of provocative, important, and timely essays on the politics, combatants, and memory of the Vietnam War. Americans believed that they were supposed to win in Vietnam. As veteran and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Philip Caputo observed in A Rumor of War, “we carried, along with our packs and rifles, the implicit convictions that the Viet Cong would be quickly beaten and that we were doing something altogether noble and good.” By 1968, though, Vietnam looked less like World War II’s triumphant march and more like the brutal and costly stalemate in Korea. During that year, the United States paid dearly as nearly 17,000 perished fighting in a foreign land against an enemy that continued to frustrate them. Indeed, as Caputo noted, “We kept the packs and rifles; the convictions, we lost.” It was a time of deep introspection as questions over the legality of American involvement, political dishonesty, civil rights, counter-cultural ideas, and American overreach during the Cold War congealed in one place: Vietnam. Just as Americans fifty years ago struggled to understand the nation’s connection to Vietnam, scholars today, across disciplines, are working to come to terms with the long and bloody war—its politics, combatants, and how we remember it. The essays in Beyond the Quagmire pose new questions, offer new answers, and establish important lines of debate regarding social, political, military, and memory studies. The book is organized in three parts. Part 1 contains four chapters by scholars who explore the politics of war in the Vietnam era. In Part 2, five contributors offer chapters on Vietnam combatants with analyses of race, gender, environment, and Chinese intervention. Part 3 provides four innovative and timely essays on Vietnam in history and memory. In sum, Beyond the Quagmire pushes the interpretive boundaries of America’s involvement in Vietnam on the battlefield and off, and it will play a significant role in reshaping and reinvigorating Vietnam War historiography.

Monumental Conflicts
Monumental Conflicts

Author: Derek R. Mallett

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-11-13

Total Pages: 423

ISBN-13: 1351346709

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Monumental Conflicts examines 20th century wars from the First World War to the First Gulf War, each chapter analyzing how public memory has evolved over time. The chapters raise fascinating questions about war and memory: Why are wars remembered as they are? What factors drive changes in public perception? What implications arise from remembering and commemorating a war or particular aspects of a war? What does public memory of a war say about us as a society? The volume is divided into three sections focusing on political evolution, negotiated memories of war, and national pride and covers international wars from Afghanistan to Vietnam and German deserter monuments to Vietnamese war tourism.

A Companion to Public Art
A Companion to Public Art

Author: Cher Krause Knight

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2020-03-24

Total Pages: 512

ISBN-13: 1119190800

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A Companion to Public Art is the only scholarly volume to examine the main issues, theories, and practices of public art on a comprehensive scale. Edited by two distinguished scholars with contributions from art historians, critics, curators, and art administrators, as well as artists themselves Includes 19 essays in four sections: tradition, site, audience, and critical frameworks Covers important topics in the field, including valorizing victims, public art in urban landscapes and on university campuses, the role of digital technologies, jury selection committees, and the intersection of public art and mass media Contains “artist’s philosophy” essays, which address larger questions about an artist’s body of work and the field of public art, by Julian Bonder, eteam (Hajoe Moderegger and Franziska Lamprecht), John Craig Freeman, Antony Gormley, Suzanne Lacy, Caleb Neelon, Tatzu Nishi, Greg Sholette, and Alan Sonfist.

Epic Events
Epic Events

Author: Sasha-Mae Eccleston

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2024-11-05

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0300263414

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An analysis of ancient Greek and Roman works alongside contemporary literature, exploring how these classics shape our understanding of the politics of time in America Ancient Greek and Roman cultures have been privileged as authoritatively timeless throughout American history. American leaders capitalize on this privilege when, during periods of crisis, they allude to these cultures to offer relief, to reestablish trust in the status quo, and to promote national unity. Analyzing texts that also draw on ancient Greek and Roman material to respond to these crises, Sasha-Mae Eccleston explains how contemporary authors and artists have questioned calls for unity that homogenize disparate experiences and ignore systemic inequality. Their engagements with the temporalities of the ancient material reveal how time structures membership in the national community. Reading, for example, Seneca's drama Medea, Homer's epics, and the verses of Sappho alongside Jesmyn Ward's novel Salvage the Bones or the poetry of Ocean Vuong and Juliana Spahr, Eccleston examines the temporal politics of major events and everyday life in the United States. Epic Events shows how ancient works that seem to insulate audiences from disaster can actually alert them to the frightening hierarchization of American life. Eccleston skillfully weaves together analyses of ancient material and contemporary texts that range from memorials, visual art, and literature to speeches and public health declarations to bring questions of race, class, and gender into dialogue with time in thoughtful, nuanced, and original ways.

The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Architectural Reconstruction
The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Architectural Reconstruction

Author: Zoltán Somhegyi

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-05-30

Total Pages: 507

ISBN-13: 1040017924

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This companion investigates the philosophical and theoretical foundations determining the conditions of possibility and the limits that make the conservation, readaptation, and transformation of past buildings legitimate operations. As increasing ecological and economic challenges question opportunities for new construction, the process of restoring, transforming, and readapting buildings for new or continued use is becoming an essential part of architectural practice. At the same time, the role of building conservation is changing from mere material preservation to being part of a broader strategy for social regeneration, eco-awareness, and inclusive urban planning. Chapters of this volume explore the complex set of considerations that inform decisions to merely preserve, accurately restore or variously reuse a building. They also look at the broader philosophical concerns such as ethical and aesthetic values, combined with ideas of heritage, history, and collective identity. Case studies on reconstruction after war, gentrification, the restoration of ancient edifices, reconstruction following the effects of climate change, and the use of technology solutions among many others, make this a timely and urgent volume. Adopting a broad transcultural perspective with contributions from five continents, the volume combines theoretical approaches with more practical, case study-based investigations and will be of great interest to upper-level students and academics working in the fields of architecture, conservation, urban design, aesthetics, and heritage management.

Architecture, Media, and Memory
Architecture, Media, and Memory

Author: Joel McKim

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-12-13

Total Pages: 173

ISBN-13: 1350037648

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Architecture, Media and Memory examines the wide range of urban sites impacted by September 11 and its aftermath – from the spontaneous memorials that emerged in Union Square in the hours after the attacks, to the reconstruction at Ground Zero, to vast ongoing landscape urbanism projects beyond. Yet this is not simply a book about post-9/11 architecture. It instead presents 9/11 as a multifaceted case study to explore a discourse on memory and its representation in the built environment. It argues that the reconstruction of New York must be considered in relation to larger issues of urban development, ongoing global conflicts, the rise of digital media, and the culture, philosophy and aesthetics of memory. It shows how understanding architecture in New York post-9/11 requires bringing memory into contact with a complex array of political, economic and social forces. Demonstrating an ability to explain complex philosophical ideas in language that will be accessible to students and researchers alike in architecture, urban studies, cultural studies and memory studies, this book serves as a thought-provoking account of the intertwining of contemporary architecture, media and memory.

Monumental cares
Monumental cares

Author: Mechtild Widrich

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2023-01-31

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 152616809X

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Monumental cares rethinks monument debates, site specificity and art activism in light of problems that strike us as monumental or overwhelming, such as war, migration and the climate crisis. The book shows how artists address these issues, from Chicago and Berlin to Oslo, Bucharest and Hong Kong, in media ranging from marble and glass to postcards, graffiti and re-enactment. A multidirectional theory of site does justice to specific places but also to how far-away audiences see them. What emerges is a new ethics of care in public art, combined with a passionate engagement with reality harking back to the realist aesthetics of the nineteenth century. Familiar questions can be answered anew: what to do with monuments, particularly when they are the products of terror and require removal, modification or recontextualisation? And can art address the monumental concerns of our present?

Who Owns the Dead?
Who Owns the Dead?

Author: Jay D. Aronson

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2016-09-06

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 0674972651

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After September 11, with New Yorkers reeling from the World Trade Center attack, Chief Medical Examiner Charles Hirsch proclaimed that his staff would do more than confirm the identity of the individuals who were killed. They would attempt to identify and return to families every human body part recovered from the site that was larger than a thumbnail. As Jay D. Aronson shows, delivering on that promise proved to be a monumentally difficult task. Only 293 bodies were found intact. The rest would be painstakingly collected in 21,900 bits and pieces scattered throughout the skyscrapers’ debris. This massive effort—the most costly forensic investigation in U.S. history—was intended to provide families conclusive knowledge about the deaths of loved ones. But it was also undertaken to demonstrate that Americans were dramatically different from the terrorists who so callously disregarded the value of human life. Bringing a new perspective to the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, Who Owns the Dead? tells the story of the recovery, identification, and memorialization of the 2,753 people killed in Manhattan on 9/11. For a host of cultural and political reasons that Aronson unpacks, this process has generated endless debate, from contestation of the commercial redevelopment of the site to lingering controversies over the storage of unclaimed remains at the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum. The memory of the victims has also been used to justify military activities in the Middle East that have led to the deaths of an untold number of innocent civilians.

Violence and Public Memory
Violence and Public Memory

Author: Martin Blatt

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-06-23

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1000902471

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Violence and Public Memory assesses the relationship between these two subjects by examining their interconnections in varied case studies across the United States, South America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Those responsible for the violence discussed in this volume are varied, and the political ideologies and structures range from apartheid to fascism to homophobia to military dictatorships but also democracy. Racism and state terrorism have played central roles in many of the case studies examined in this book, and multiple chapters also engage with the recent rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. The sites and history represented in this volume address a range of issues, including mass displacement, genocide, political repression, forced disappearances, massacres, and slavery. Across the world there are preserved historic sites, memorials, and museums that mark places of significant violence and human rights abuse, which organizations and activists have specifically worked to preserve and provide a place to face history and its continuing legacy today and chapters across this volume directly engage with the questions and issues that surround these sometimes controversial sites. Including photographs of many of the sites and events covered across the volume, this is an important book for readers interested in the complex and often difficult history of the relationship between violence and the way it is publicly remembered.