Vietnam Veterans Memorial Research Articles

The Health of the State: Modern US War Narrative and the American Political Imagination, 1890–1964 by Jonathan Vincent

Reviewed by: The Health of the State: Modern US War Narrative and the American Political Imagination, 1890–1964 by Jonathan Vincent Alex Vernon Jonathan Vincent. The Health of the State: Modern US War Narrative and the American Political Imagination, 1890–1964. Oxford UP, 2017. xii + 312 pp. $78.00. One of the pleasures in teaching my American War Literature course at the introductory level—for many students, the only literature course of their college careers—is how evident it becomes to them that the texts we study matter. The students are quick to realize that the way we talk about war—particularly the stories we tell—influences how we think about soldiering and war, how we make personal and collective decisions. It has real consequences. [End Page 569] The relationship between stories about past wars and the ongoing exigencies of the nation-state during the so-called long modern period of American letters is the subject of Jonathan Vincent's excellent new book, The Health of the State. As Vincent describes the book in his introduction, "it traces, in the rhetorical space between self and society, between past and present forms of historical consciousness, between public and private registers of civic authority, critical evolutions in attitudes toward political associations that modern war discourse so persistently induces, deepening and thickening the interdependence between modern citizens and state power. And it is a story of didactic futurists that modernist writing makes legible in the most vivid of ways" (7). One of the great strengths of The Health of the State involves how thoroughly it interweaves the evolving ideological ideas regarding the role of the nation-state; societal attitudes toward war, preparedness, and a professional military; and, of course, literature (Vincent's book focuses almost entirely on novels, with a handful of essays and short stories). How does a society rooted in allegiance to the local and to liberal laissez-faire individualism, with a foundational distrust of state power, transform into a society that embraces the regulatory principles of a standing military? And how has literature contributed to and critiqued this transformation? Vincent smartly calls out the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier as the supreme symbol of the nationally incorporated self, where allegiance to the local and insistent individualism are superseded by a nameless body interred in federal land. Had his study gone beyond 1964, it might have noted that the country's first national war memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, appropriated for the nation-state an approximately century-old practice of local memorials listing the hometown dead. Vincent has immersed himself in primary and secondary material, from historical figures writing about war, citizenship, and the state such as Samuel Huntington and Emory Upton, to contemporary literary critics such as John Limon and Margot Norris in addition to the literary texts. Indeed, The Health of the State is as much a work of recovery as it is of sharp analysis. Anyone researching or teaching American war literature would be wise to consult this book. Looking for something to pair with The Red Badge of Courage? Try Ellen Glasgow's The Battle-Ground—or, even more lost on today's readers, the Civil War novels of Mary Johnston. For African American perspectives, in addition to Claude McKay's Home to Harlem, there's Jessie Redmon Fauset's There Is Confusion. One of the advantages of Vincent's method is his equal and integrated treatment of texts by [End Page 570] veterans and those by civilians, by men and by women, by whites and by blacks. War is everybody's business, and war narratives contribute to the social imaginary regardless of their source. The heart of the book is its first part, which covers representations of the Civil War beginning in the 1890s, when the United States found itself increasingly on an overseas war footing, through the wake of the Great War. As Vincent argues, the stakes go beyond military preparedness: "Writers in the early ferment of the Progressive Era embraced [the Civil War's] socializing prospects, particularly its story of collective sacrifice" (16). "They exploited it," he explains, "for its many models of social amalgamation, for its visions of self-integration and political intensification...

Ernest Hemingway: Artifacts from a Life ed. by Michael Katakis

Reviewed by: Ernest Hemingway: Artifacts from a Life ed. by Michael Katakis Kirk Curnutt Ernest Hemingway: Artifacts from a Life. Edited by Michael Katakis. New York: Scribner's, 2018. 212 pp. Hardback $35.00. Scholars fortunate enough to have visited the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston understand what a treasure trove of material awaits discovery there. Not simply a repository for manuscript drafts and discards and correspondence—as valuable as those are for the simple reason that most of them remain unpublished—the collection also includes photo album upon photo album of images that few have ever flipped through, much less catalogued or requested permission to reproduce in a biography or critical study. Along with a large variety of keepsakes and ephemera, these goodies are hardly the typical flotsam and jetsam that your average pack rat accumulates over time. (It goes without saying that nary a description of the collection exists that does not describe Hemingway as a "notorious" pack rat). Rather, these objects, whether a scrap of paper, a ticket stub, or an expired passport, lend a material immanence to Hemingway's life nearly six decades after his death. Yet not every Hemingway aficionado can make his or her way to Columbia Point. In recent years, the collection has scanned bits and pieces for online access, most notably five volumes of Grace Hall Hemingway's scrapbooks on Ernest covering 1899-1917. Unless one is only interested in the writer's childhood and adolescence, though, the scrapbooks are fun but prefatory. They can only begin to challenge the visual stereotypes that stamp the culture's limited sense of Hemingway's iconicity, whether his beefy brio, that late-stage white Papa beard, or the omnipresent wine bottle. Most of these signifiers come from a handful of widely reprinted photos, from the 1924 image of the emerging author with his hands stuffed in his pockets outside the Paris apartment at 113 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs to Yousuf Karsh's famous 1957 close-up portrait of the literary lion in a turtleneck sweater thick as a Bundt pan around his throat. There is so much more to the man to discover, though. The omnipresence of photos like these are one reason that Michael Katakis's handsomely designed Ernest Hemingway: Artifacts from a Life is such a game-changer. Hemingway scholars know Mr. Katakis as the formidable gate-keeper to estate permissions; what they may not know is he is also a talented writer, editor, and historian in his own right, with books on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Native American photography, and expatriation to his credit. As a curatorial guide to the collection, he offers in this coffee-table book an [End Page 134] arresting tour of cornerstone Hemingway moments that feels both fresh and visually intoxicating, punctuated with thoughtful commentary from Hemingway Letters Project director Sandra Spanier, Carol Hemingway, former Kennedy Library director Tom Putnam, as well as "text panels" by Declan Kiely and a preface and afterword respectively from Patrick and Seán Hemingway. Thankfully, Katakis eschews a strictly chronological organization, which can feel stultifying in its familiarity to those who study the biographical arc. Instead, he divides the book into thematic sections ("Beginnings," "Key West, Cuba, and Spain," "Artifacts from a Life," and "Endings") that collectively create the appearance of that crucial modernist device, the collage-like juxtaposition. This strategy—dare I call it cubistic?—emphasizes the contrasts in Hemingway's life and recreates the experience of scouring photo- and scrapbooks, where the randomness at any moment can transport us into the thickness of an associative memory. The verso to the table of contents, for example, features a Spanish Civil War-era Hemingway, looking slightly frazzled and unkempt with the tail of his necktie straying from his sport coat, staring warily off-center of the camera aperture (viii). Set against this photo (which also serves as the book cover) is a small reproduction of the writer's 1944 World War II noncombatant identity card. Even with a thinner hairline and a white beard, ursine but clearly combed, Hemingway appears healthier if not younger in this latter photo, if only because he...

Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Reviewed by: Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War by Viet Thanh Nguyen Geoffrey C. Stewart Nguyen, Viet Thanh. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016. Pp. 374. $27.95 US hardcover. How do we as individuals, societies, and nations remember war? That is the central question animating Viet Thanh Nguyen's groundbreaking book Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. By critically deconstructing the myriad memories of the American period of the war in Vietnam, from roughly 1965 to 1975, constructed by the people, communities, and states that were drawn into its destructive maelstrom, he not only demonstrates the complexity of the project of remembering on both a personal and collective scale, but makes a compelling argument for the establishment of a "just memory" of the war in Vietnam that will help bring an end to what he sees as America's near-century of perpetual conflict. According to Nguyen, a just memory is an ethical practice that involves both the "dialectic" of "remembering one's own"-generally the heroes—and "remembering others"-the enemy or victims-in war, as well as recognition of one's own inhumanity (19). Since it is our ability to construct a memory of war, particularly around its dead, that demonstrates that "nothing ever dies," a quotation from Toni Morrison's Beloved (269), such an inclusive and self-critical approach to remembering America's wars is essential for the American people to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and continue to fight costly and destructive wars of their government's own making. Viet Thanh Nguyen, an associate professor of English and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California, is no stranger to the war's memory. It is part of his identity, as a refugee who left Vietnam as a small child with his family in the chaotic spring of 1975, and it serves as the narrative vehicle for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer, a fictional account of a Viet Cong spy living among the exiled South Vietnamese community in Southern California told as a confession to a mysterious Vietnamese commandant. Both his personal attachment and professional interest guide this study. [End Page 681] Nguyen turns to the "artistic work on war and memory" as his subject matter in appraising how the war in Vietnam has been remembered, mining "the writing, photography, film, memorials and monuments" of the Americans, former North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese exiles, Laotians, Cambodians, and South Koreans (12-13). Naturally, this involves critical appraisal of such well-known memorials as the Truong Song Martyrs Cemetery in Quang Tri province, Vietnam, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. But its greatest strength is its consideration of the edifices of memory that have been overlooked by a Western-read American-audience. To identify but a few examples, Nguyen discusses the forgotten national cemetery for the Southern Army of the Republic of Vietnam, on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City; the exhibit commemorating South Korea's contribution to the War in Vietnam in the Korean War Memoria in Seoul; and the work of the Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh, which tries to come to terms both with the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge and with the monstrous inhumanity of the perpetrators themselves. The central theme that ties the various strands of Nguyen's argument together is what he refers to as the "industrialization of memory." This is a powerful phenomenon that reinforces the "ideas, ideologies, fantasies and words that justify the war" for all sides (106). In what is the book's most novel feature, Nguyen compares both the industries of memory and their products of the war's participant nations. He demonstrates a caustic asymmetry that exists in the way the war's losers have been able to monopolize the memory of the war over its victors, which serves to grossly distort how the war has been remembered globally. For the United States, the industry of memory is a product of the connection between capitalism, memory, and the military, an unspoken partnership between Hollywood and the military industrial complex that "exploits memory...

What is Missing: Cataloguing the End

What is Missing:Cataloguing the End Sarah Chihaya (bio) 1. BEGINNING If you're not there already, go to a computer. If it's sleeping, perhaps you might catch your own eye in the screen's black mirror for an uncanny flicker in that moment before it flashes awake. Open a web browser and go to www.whatismissing.net. A darkened map of the planet greets you: midnight-black cutouts of landmasses drop out of a dusk-black backdrop of water. Is this monochrome world alive or dead? Is it the fantastical image of an enchanted night that has fallen across the whole world—or is it the endless night of the world's end? We cannot say. It is beautiful, if not a little frightening. A swarm of tiny colorful pinpoints scatters slowly across the map, also beautiful, twinkling gently as the points slowly fade in and out. A legend at the bottom of the page tells us somewhat cryptically what the different kinds of colored dots and swirls indicate: "TIMELINE," "VIDEO," "STORIES," "CONSERVATION," "DISASTER." Click on these dots and you will see that each contains the miniaturized record of a disappearance, slow or sudden, partial or complete, of an animal, plant, place, or natural phenomenon. For example, aiming somewhat haphazardly for my location in Brooklyn, I click first on a whorl that brings up an illustrated pocket history of the Heath hen, from its role as a staple of the Plymouth Colony diet to its extinction in 1932. Another nearby click calls up a timeline of the Hudson [End Page 571] River, in headlines that are alternately depressing ("General Electric still leaves PCBs in the River," 2015) and hopeful ("Sturgeon Recovery Looks Optimistic," 2016). A random click across the world summons up a video encounter with the forest elephant of Central Africa, accompanied by the vivid soundtrack of the elephant and its lively surroundings (birds, insects, the rush and rustle of leaves). Lingering for a second over an orange dot somewhere in Australia makes my computer erupt with the ill-tempered grunt of koalas; a green dot north-northeast of the koalas emits the misleadingly serene burbles of the dying coral reef. These videos and timelines are interspersed with other dots that conjure viewer-contributed personal memories and images of things either disappeared or disappearing. Leafy green target symbols represent timelines of conservation projects; they are, unsurprisingly, vastly outnumbered by multicolored constellations of disaster, endangerment, and disappearance. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Maya Lin, What Is Missing? Map of Memory (2010–) www.whatismissing.org. Image courtesy of the artist. This nocturnal map, with its pinprick sinkholes of time, is the work of artist Maya Lin. Titled What is Missing? and unveiled in 2012, Lin has declared [End Page 572] it to be her final memorial project. The map I just described (designated the "map of memory") is a grim work that unravels as it progresses, for perversely, the more the black map is filled in with color, the more depleted is the actual planet. It is perhaps fitting that this call for conservation begins with a darkened world; the black background of Lin's last memorial is reminiscent of her first: the black, reflective surface of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. This self-reflective reference asks viewers of both pieces what kind of work a "memorial" might do. The image of the viewer, reflected and reflecting, is visible in the benighted backdrop of What is Missing just as it is in the glossy gabbro surface of the Vietnam memorial wall. However, while the latter is an unanswered roll call of the silent and inaccessible dead, in which the viewer sees the image of her own mourning, the former is a strangely indeterminate interpellation. It is at once a thrilling call to act now (a series of icons at the top are loaded with an overwhelming abundance of facts, statistics, and suggestions for individualand policy-level action), and a grim, shaming enumeration of volumes of irrecoverable losses—the bad things we have already done and cannot undo. The website is, in a sense, both a desired beginning (of new conservation movements) and an inevitable end...

Curating and re-curating the American war in Vietnam

The American war in Vietnam killed 58,000 US military personnel and millions of people on the ground, creating a troubling war legacy that has been ‘resolved’ in the USA through state strategies to efface military mortalities. Drawing on Charlotte Heath-Kelly’s work addressing mortality denied or ignored in the field of international relations and that of Andrew Bacevich and Christian Appy on American militarism, I explore the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, as a site of war re-curations that refuse the effacement of mortality and disrupt the militarist myths that sustain it – namely, that America is renewed and revitalized through war, and that soldiers live on as American heroes when they sacrifice for the country. With the Vietnam Syndrome long since replaced by insistence on loving all soldiers, even if not all the country’s wars, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is dedicated to remembering those who were not publicly acknowledged for fighting and dying in America’s failed war. Assemblages of pictures, letters, and other items that a community of loss leaves at the Memorial re-curate the war by showing the lingering pain that war mortality inflicts on those who experience it decade upon decade. Taken together, the objects of war shown at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and collected each evening put mortality at the heart of war experience. The Memorial is therefore a key location of knowledge that challenges militarist appeals and state effacements in favor of what Viet Thanh Nguyen calls ‘just memory’ of war.

Coping with Trauma through Social Remembrance


 
 
 In this article, I examine “spiritual remembrance” as it is enacted by three members of the Canadian Vietnam Veterans Memorial Association (CVVMA) in Windsor, Ontario as a means of coming to terms with traumatic experiences from the Vietnam War. Spiritual remembrance is a term I use to describe a fusion of one’s religious heritage and one’s private understanding and expression of spirituality as it occurs in the context of memorialisation. It can occur when a group with a shared memory of trauma or horror memorialises their experiences according to what they hold as the deepest meanings of life. In this article, I present the methodology I used to collect the data, provide definitions for the terminology being used, offer a context for the theory, give some examples of spiritual remembrance as it is enacted by the veterans and finally, offer some conclusions regarding the utility of the theory.
 
 

The Memorial Form of John Lydgate’s Troy Book

This essay argues that both sides of the continuing debate about whether Lydgate’s Troy Book is more interested in political legitimation or admonition have not understood the form of the poem. It claims that this form is, surprisingly, akin to that of postmodern memorial monuments, such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which provide a framework for a trans-temporal communal negotiation of values that is ambivalent and underdetermined by design. Scrutinizing Lydgate’s use of the term memorial and depiction of memorial monuments (especially those for Hecuba and Hector) across the breadth of the poem and in light of its source, the essay demonstrates how the poem’s apparent contradictions or confusions are in fact expressions of its informing idea. In conclusion, the essay reflects on the implications of its argument and anachronistic methodology for the conceptual and methodological confines of synchronic historicism and, more generally, for the relation between historical contingency and aesthetic objects.

Memory, art and the social condition

ABSTRACTTheodor Adorno once famously declared: ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’. An opposing proposition: without poetry, and more generally speaking, without the arts, we cannot successfully confront modern barbarism. This paper explores this opposing proposition by closely analysing three works of art and how they have made it possible to confront difficult pasts – Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Paweł Pawlikowski’s film, Ida, and Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The central argument of the paper is that it is particularly in the creation and appreciation of art that the challenges of memory (and forgetting), as important dilemmas knitted into the fabric of social life, ‘the social condition’, are successfully confronted.

Emplacing Narrative: Affect and Performativity in Architectural Narratives

The article focuses on the relations between narrative and landscape architecture and identifi es the characteristics of architecture and landscape architecture which make them distinct narrative media. The article offers analyses of the narrative aspects of two monuments (one built and one at the stage of the design): the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC and a project entitled „A Forest”, which won the competition for a monument design to commemorate Poles who rescued Jews during the German occupation. Both monuments present challenges to narrative theory through such characteristics as performativity, processuality, interactivity and affective potential. However, such challenges should be seen as a possibility for extending the realm of narratology in new directions.

In the footsteps of Anne Frank, The Beatles and Vincent Van Gogh: a review and discussion of personal legacy trails

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on a review and discussion of personal legacy trails. A detailed analysis and reconstruction of tourism in the footsteps of Anne Frank and the management of the involved sites form the main case study here. The short life of Anne Frank in perilous times has attracted the attention of millions of readers as well as visitors to the places closely associated with her life path: Frankfurt, her birth place in 1929, Aachen, Amsterdam (including her place in hiding 1942–1944), Transit Camp Westerbork, Concentration Camp Auschwitz and at last Concentration Camp Bergen-Belsen, where she and her sister Margot died in March 1945. A general discussion of the importance of personal legacy trails follows in the last third of the paper. This section examines cases of the popularized legacy of well-known artists and musicians in local/regional settings, such as The Beatles in Liverpool, and tourism in the search of Van Gogh’s Provence. Finally, the commonalities in the personal legacy trails of ordinary US citizens is discussed and shown for the visitation of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Washington Mall and for the Wall of Honor on Ellis Island.

Moving Bodies Moving Architecture

This essay uses the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to trouble the critique that permanent, enduring architecture no longer effectively stands in for shared, collective memory. Dance studies and memory studies concern themselves with formations of epistemologies emerging outside traditional, text-based sources. For both fields, the performing body is a source of knowledge through which to respectively address the production of culture and the storage/transmission of memory. As such, I insert a dance studies optic, which approaches the body as a meaning-making force, into discourses of architecture as contextualized within practices of commemoration. By pairing investigations of the body as constructed in the archive-tracing processes of memorial production and with an analysis of visitors engaged in an embodied interaction with the actual memorial site, I argue that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial architecture and site harbors the capacity to mobilize into action, acting as a choreographic collaborator in the formation of bodily texts, which participate in memory discourse.

Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall of Faces

Media review of the Virtual Wall of Faces, an extension of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, DC.

“We Don't Want Another Vietnam”: The Wall, the Mall, History, and Memory in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Education Center

When the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) was dedicated on the National Mall in 1982, it was notable both for its controversial anti-heroic and anti-monumental form, and for its attempt to close the...

Accidental tourists: Visiting ephemeral war memorials

How a memorial impacts public memory depends not just on its symbolic appeals but also on how it gains the attention of visitors and how those appeals convert visitors into engaged participants. Although numerous studies have explored visitors’ performances at sites of memory, this scholarship has largely overlooked what we call “the accidental tourist,” the would-be visitor who had not planned to visit a site of memory but ended up doing so because of the site’s proximity to another existing attraction or daily route. Building on research into the performances of memory at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, we expand inquiry into the way memorials attract and engage visitors by studying two temporary memorials to the cost of the Iraq War. We demonstrate how these memorials gain attention and prompt the engagement of “accidental tourists” through temporal and spatial tactics as well as both overt and subtle cues for visitors to interact with the site, organizers, and other visitors.

Emplacing Narrative. Affect and Performativity in Architectural Narratives

The article focuses on the relations between narrative and landscape architecture and identifi es the characteristics of architecture and landscape architecture which make them distinct narrative media. The article offers analyses of the narrative aspects of two monuments (one built and one at the stage of the design): the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC and a project entitled „A Forest”, which won the competition for a monument design to commemorate Poles who rescued Jews during the German occupation. Both monuments present challenges to narrative theory through such characteristics as performativity, processuality, interactivity and affective potential. However, such challenges should be seen as a possibility for extending the realm of narratology in new directions.

The Comfort of Melancholy: Understanding the Experience of Absence at American Memorials

There's comfort in melancholyWhen there's no need to explainIt's just as natural as the weatherIn this moody sky today....Well I looked at the granite markersThose tributes to finality to eternityAnd then I looked at myself hereChicken scratching for my immortalityJoni Mitchell, Hejira, 1976The battle of Gettysburg and the 9/11 terror attacks, 150 years apart, produced memorials that share a common theme: each expresses absence as its memorial theme. The dead cannot be seen, even in sculptural form: they have vanished into abstraction. At Gettysburg, the dead and numbered in the thousands. Survivors saw their colleagues vaporized (Faust 128). The damage and poisonous stench after the three days of battle in 1863 created a discourse about death of the magnitude that circulated in the aftermath of 9/ 11. The title of the winning design for the 9/11 memorial-''Reflecting Absence-made explicit a theme that has implicitly made its way into public spaces of mourning in America since Gettysburg's response to its tragedy provided the visual vocabulary of absence: relying on combinations of earth, stone, water, and names, rejecting the figurai, they establish a memorial vernacular of the missing. Gettysburg, the 9/11 Memorial, and two others that express this visual trope-the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial-are all among America's most prominent memorial sites, and all evoke the comfort of melancholy.From Gettysburg to 9/11 : The Visual Language of Absence at American MemorialsGettysburg's Civil War burials were the result of America's first experience with mass mourning. The 9/11 Memorial shares with Gettysburg features that in 1863 were unprecedented: a shared community of mourners, still reeling from the enormity of the event, produced a message of equality and absence combined (Faust 69, 100-01; Haas 49; Wills 29-30). At Gettysburg's National Soldiers' Cemetery, the flat markers are identical in shape and typeface, and all are embedded in the soil. Unknown appears interspersed with names and ranks. The dead are indistinguishable from one another, the absent equally absent. Conveying the message of missing in turn relies on abstraction: its lines are rectilinear and nonfigural, inviting looking inward or imagining beyond. Precluding hero worship, Gettysburg relies on evenly spaced semicircles of headstones to convey its message. The first American memorial commemorating violent mass deaths evokes absence through abstraction.This same visual message is found at America's memorials to imponderable mass tragedies that occurred after Gettysburg: the attack on Pearl Harbor, represented by the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial; the Vietnam Veterans Memorial; and the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum. The U.S.S. Arizona visitors' center is a simple rectangular box built on the waters above the sunken ship Rising bubbles from the ship's leaking oil tanks, visible in an open well inside, and the round armament that once housed one of the ship's turrets are the only surface signs of the graveyard of the ship's rusting hulk below. The memorial structure does not touch the ship (Delgado 77). The bodies of the dead remain out of sight and out of reach. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial lists the names of the dead in order of their deaths on a planished wall embedded in soil. From the northwest approach, the nestled wall is invisible. The first memorial to mark a long war, rather than a single event, with the message of absence, the wall of names represents a variation on Gettysburg's heritage: the community marked the tragedy both of the deaths and of their political ambiguity (Haas 16).Other memorials to the lengthy process of war and their dead do not speak the language of absence. Memorials to the dead of World War II and the Korean War are exemplars of figurai presence, that to the Korean War Memorial literally, and that to World War II implicitly. …

A Place to Mourn

All memorials offer solace to those who visit, but the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is particularly suited to this cause because of certain aspects of its design. As this article demonstrates, qualities such as its black reflective surface, its gradual increase in height, and the ordering of the names work to create an emotional connection to the names on the wall, bringing them to life and creating a place for grief, and ultimately healing, to occur.

Exile on the Commercial Strip: Vietnam War Memorials in Little Saigon and the Politics of Commemoration

Exile on the Commercial StripVietnam War Memorials in Little Saigon and the Politics of Commemoration Erica S. Allen-Kim (bio) In 1999 Consul General Phong Xuan Nguyen denounced the creation of a Vietnam War memorial in Orange County, California. Although dozens of memorials have been constructed since the dedication of the national Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1982, the memorial in Westminster caused particular offense to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam because of its depiction of a South Vietnamese soldier. In a letter to Mayor Frank Fry, Nguyen argued that the project would “dredge up a bitter past … that both sides have decided to leave behind.”1 In a bid to take control from the Vietnamese refugees funding the project, he suggested replacing the proposed South Vietnamese soldier with a North Vietnamese, thereby transforming the project into a monument to reconciliation between the two nations. In an interview published in the Orange County Register, Nguyen argued, “We should have a statue that represents our relationship today.”2 At stake was not only the communist country’s recently acquired standing with the United States but also its tenuous relationship with Vietnamese refugees. The completion of a memorial by the largest Vietnamese community in the United States challenged the existing discourse on Vietnam War commemoration.3 As the first officially designated Little Saigon, a term that broadly refers to an overseas Vietnamese community but in this case specifies a tourist and redevelopment zone, Westminster’s Little Saigon is considered the capital of the South Vietnamese diaspora. Prominent members of the Little Saigon business and political community initially envisioned a memorial that contrasted sharply with American and Vietnamese narratives of the war that marginalized the contributions of South Vietnamese veterans (Figure 1).4 Dedicated in 2003, it is the product of nearly thirty years of predominantly suburban community formation by Vietnamese in the United States. Two years later, a second memorial funded by Vietnamese Americans was installed in a shopping center’s parking lot in southwestern Houston (Figure 2).5 Both of these projects appropriate suburban space to make claims about the war’s legacy for Vietnamese refugees within a transnational context. They do so by countering the absence of South Vietnamese veterans in American Vietnam veterans’ memorials and the bulldozing of South Vietnamese military monuments and cemeteries following the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. In response to the official histories produced by the United States and Vietnam, Vietnamese refugees imagine their collective identity as political exiles through explicit references to other Vietnam War monuments in the United States.6 The two memorials critique the invisibility of South Vietnamese veterans and their implied inferiority to the American military. They also participate in the resurgence of overtly didactic monument designs since architect Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., was selected in 1981.7 Architectural historian Dell Upton notes that Lin’s black granite wall inscribed with the names of American casualties has spurred the recent period of “energetic commemoration,” in which monument builders negotiate between [End Page 31] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Westminster Vietnam War Memorial, Sid Goldstein Freedom Park, Westminster, California, dedicated 2003. Photograph by Erica S. Allen-Kim. Courtesy of Tuan Nguyen. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Houston Vietnam War Memorial, Universal Shopping Center, 11360 Bellaire Boulevard, Houston, Texas, dedicated 2005. Photograph by Erica S. Allen-Kim. Reproduced with permission from Thong Pham. [End Page 32] symbolic and literal truths by presenting what they claim are authoritative interpretations.8 In the case of the national Vietnam Veterans Memorial, additions of an American flag and two figurative sculptural groups, Frederick Hart’s Three Soldiers (1982-84) and Glenna Goodacre’s Vietnam Women’s Memorial (1984-93), illustrate this impulse toward didacticism. The memorials in Westminster, California, and Houston, Texas, also participate in this didactic commemorative impulse. More specifically, they express the anticommunist ideology that has dominated the Vietnamese refugee community and shaped its cultural landscapes.9 Their respective siting—in a civic center and in a shopping center parking lot—indicates the extent to which refugees have established a presence in suburbs, where the majority...

Bradley S. Keefer. Conflicting Memories on the “River of Death”: The Chickamauga Battlefield and the Spanish-American War, 1863–1933; Ari Kelman. A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek.

The stubborn idea that heritage and history are irreconcilable lingers, but most historians who work in the public sector operate in the space between them. The best scholarship on history and memory has focused attention on this space, analyzing memorials and historic sites as stages for reconciling popular and professional interpretations of the past. This body of literature has grown dramatically in the last thirty years. Spurred by the public response to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, scholars began to examine the cultural significance of commemorative activities. Histories examining the effort to remember—or to forget—war and tragedy have been particularly influential. Two recent works in this genre raise important questions about power and agency in the space between history and memory. Both A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek and Conflicting Memories on the “River of Death”: The Chickamauga Battlefield and the Spanish-American War, 1863–1933 explore the relative place of experience, recollection, and research in the creation of cultural meaning and historical significance. In Conflicting Memories, Bradley S. Keefer reconstructs the experiences of two generations of soldiers who fought or trained on the Chickamauga Creek in northern Georgia. He explores the impact that both commemorative and practical activities have had on the site's preservation as a battlefield park. In A Misplaced Massacre, Ari Kelman analyzes the effort to establish the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site in Colorado. These works demonstrate that both history and heritage have the potential to challenge or to legitimize the myths that underscore American national identity.

Book Review: Just My Type: A Book about Fonts by Simon Garfield

Just My Type: A Book about Fonts. Simon Garfield. New York, NY: Gotham Books, 2011. 356 pp. $27.50 hbk. $16 pbk.Fonts greet us everywhere. Names on Vietnam Veterans Memorial appear in Optima. President Obama's 2008 presidential campaign materials used Gotham. The U.S. editions of Harry Potter series were published in Garamond. And there's ubiquitous Helvetica-the world's most familiar font-in logos for American Airlines and CrateB illustrating samples of more than two-hundred fonts and explaining their backgrounds; and examining Nazi party's embrace of traditional gothic text, which led typeface Fraktur to be nicknamed the jackboot gothic.When Johannes Gutenberg launched mass production of books with invention of mechanical movable type in mid-1400s, he also created world's first font, Textura-a Gothic type resembling hand-written script, since that's what people back then were used to seeing. More than 560 years later, font creation has exploded to point that encyclopedic go-to FontBook lists more than 100,000 typefaces, ranging from classic Times New Roman to BANANA.strip Regular, with letters made from drawings of banana skins.A modern milestone in font history was 1984 unveiling of Apple's Macintosh computer, which, unlike primitive computers before then, offered variety of fonts. These font options, writes Garfield, marked the beginning of something-a seismic shiftin our everyday relationship and with type. IBM and Microsoftsoon had their own font offerings, and computer users' ability to change at will marked a creative move towards expressiveness, liberating playfulness with words.Garfield says overriding principle in type design is that typefaces should mostly pass unrecognized in daily life; that they should inform but not alarm. Among world's most legible fonts are serif Bembo, Bodoni, and Garamond, all of which have existed for hundreds of years. Yet aesthetics of typeface creation are as important as practicality. Today, Garfield says, the most important questions when selecting or appreciating type have become: Does it fit role it was intended for? Does it get its message across? And does it add something of beauty to world?Thus, are form and function intertwined in ways that can evoke strong emotions? …