Concurrent Session 1-C

Location

Bryant Hall, Room 209

Start Date

14-3-2025 9:45 AM

End Date

14-3-2025 11:00 AM

Description

  • Memory at the End of History
    Ned O’Gorman, Professor of Rhetoric and Public Culture, Department of Communication, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
    U.S. memorialization studies as we know it owes its existence almost entirely to an eruption in scholarship that took place as the Cold War was coming to an end: Edward Casey’s Remembering was published in 1987; Pierre Nora’s “Between Memory and History” published in Representations in 1989; Michael Kammen’s Mystic Cords of Memory in 1991; the first English translation of Maurice Halbwach’s On Collective Memory in 1992; John Bodnar’s Remaking America and Barbie Zelizer’s Covering the Body that same year; and James Young’s The Texture of Memory in 1993. The list could be amplified. All forwarded in one way or another a view of memory that was “collective,” “public,” or “social.” As Barry Schwartz summed up the Durkheimian position in 1996, “We remember not as individuals but as members of local and national communities.” Yet, at the very same time American public culture was celebrating the global triumph of liberal individualism. Francis Fukuyama famously wrote of “the end of history” as George H. W. Bush celebrated a “thousand points of light.” The West was at the cusp of a global cultural triumph; the ideological struggle of the Cold War ended in the victorious crowning of liberalism and capitalism; what had been contested for decades, precisely the opposition between the collective and the individual, was decisively decided in favor of individualism. In this paper, I want to look back at the paradoxical emergence of memorialization studies in the late 80s and 90s to query the ethical and political possibilities and limits of memorialization studies today. Central to my paper will be an examination of the various ways the “collective,” “public,” and “social” was grounded theoretically at this crucial moment when neoliberalism was structurally and theoretically undermining the very basis of such communal frames.
  • Chair: David A. Messenger, Chair and Professor, Department of History, University of South Alabama

Relational Format

Conference proceeding

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Mar 14th, 9:45 AM Mar 14th, 11:00 AM

Concurrent Session 1-C

Bryant Hall, Room 209

  • Memory at the End of History
    Ned O’Gorman, Professor of Rhetoric and Public Culture, Department of Communication, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
    U.S. memorialization studies as we know it owes its existence almost entirely to an eruption in scholarship that took place as the Cold War was coming to an end: Edward Casey’s Remembering was published in 1987; Pierre Nora’s “Between Memory and History” published in Representations in 1989; Michael Kammen’s Mystic Cords of Memory in 1991; the first English translation of Maurice Halbwach’s On Collective Memory in 1992; John Bodnar’s Remaking America and Barbie Zelizer’s Covering the Body that same year; and James Young’s The Texture of Memory in 1993. The list could be amplified. All forwarded in one way or another a view of memory that was “collective,” “public,” or “social.” As Barry Schwartz summed up the Durkheimian position in 1996, “We remember not as individuals but as members of local and national communities.” Yet, at the very same time American public culture was celebrating the global triumph of liberal individualism. Francis Fukuyama famously wrote of “the end of history” as George H. W. Bush celebrated a “thousand points of light.” The West was at the cusp of a global cultural triumph; the ideological struggle of the Cold War ended in the victorious crowning of liberalism and capitalism; what had been contested for decades, precisely the opposition between the collective and the individual, was decisively decided in favor of individualism. In this paper, I want to look back at the paradoxical emergence of memorialization studies in the late 80s and 90s to query the ethical and political possibilities and limits of memorialization studies today. Central to my paper will be an examination of the various ways the “collective,” “public,” and “social” was grounded theoretically at this crucial moment when neoliberalism was structurally and theoretically undermining the very basis of such communal frames.
  • Chair: David A. Messenger, Chair and Professor, Department of History, University of South Alabama