Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering

Sturken's deep reading of the Vietnam Memorial, as a national wailing wall is both compelling and convincing (Sturken, Tangled Memories 44-84). Sturken posits that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC that emphasizes the veterans and war dead authorizes the independent yet interrelated themes of heroes, sacrifice, and honor to come to presence for us. Conversely, the Vietnam Memorial concurrently symbolizes the condemnation of war. This duality of meaning makes the Vietnam Memorial site of both contestation and reification. Along the same lines, the AIDS Memorial Quilt is also seen to be both a sign of contestation and affirmation. The book also includes an extensive discussion of cultural moments such as the Kennedy assassination, the Persian Gulf War, the Challenger explosion, and the Rodney King beating (Sturken, Tangled Memories 122-144). Sturken argues that remembering form of forgetting, and exclusion (rather than inclusion) is just as important in the production of memory. Cultural meaning does not reside with the text of a particular object, such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial or the image of the Challenger explosion; so much as it is produced in the act of "consumption," wherein the viewer/citizen engages with its meaning. Hence, the fact that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the AIDS Quilt produce many conflicting interpretations does not make them any less effective as memory objects. [...], these objects attest to how the increasingly blurred boundaries of art, commodity culture, and memorials have promoted different kinds of engagement with the concept of an American public (Sturken, Tangled Memories 257-258). Marita Sturken in Tangled Memories looks at the ways American "culture" has been shaped and altered in the 1980s and 1990s as a response to the interrelated pressures put on it by the Vietnam War and the AIDS epidemic (Sturken, Tangled Memories 16-17). When dealing with both the Vietnam Memorial and the AIDS Memorial Quilt, Sturken writes that she, "...use[s] the term "cultural memory" to define memory that is shared outside the avenues of formal historical discourse yet is entangled with cultural products and imbued with cultural meaning" (Sturken Tangled Memories 3). Sturken argument is that both the Vietnam War and the politics of recognition relating to the AIDS epidemic have disrupted our conservative notions of community, nation, consensus, and even "American" culture (Sturken, Tangled Memories 3-6 and 257-259). Sturken examines the relationship of camera images (both motion and still) to the production of cultural memory, the intermingling of fantasy and reenactment in memory, the role of trauma and survivors in creating cultural comfort (Sturken, Tangled Memories 85-121, 177-178, and 258). Sturken's intervention is the unique comparison she makes between the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the AIDS Memorial Quilt (Sturken, Tangled Memories 1-17).