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

by Marita Sturken

This fascinating investigation into the production of American cultural memory focuses on two of the most traumatic and contested events in recent U.S. history: the Vietnam War and the AIDS epidemic. Each, Marita Sturken argues, disrupts our conventional understanding of nationhood, identity, and American culture. She brilliantly compares the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the AIDS Quilt as key sites where cultural memory is produced and debated. While debunking the characterization of the United States as a culture of amnesia, Sturken shows that remembering is itself a form of forgetting, and memory an inventive social practice.

Sturken's immensely readable and multilayered work considers films, memorials, and bodies as commemorative media. She shows how television images of events like the Challenger explosion and the Gulf War and Hollywood films about the Vietnam War feed into "official histories" and operate in concert with cultural objects like yellow and red ribbons, AIDS activist posters, photographs of the immune system, and alternative art works to mediate concepts of identity and nationalism. Tangled Memories illuminates not only how cultural memories are produced and embodied but also what desires, needs, and fantasies they satisfy.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, LGBT, Research, Theory, Historical, School

358 pages, Paperback

First published January 29, 1997

About the author

Marita Sturken is a professor and chair in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her work spans the fields of cultural studies, visual culture, American studies, and memory studies with an emphasis on cultural memory, national identity, consumer culture, art, and the cultural effects of technology.

Reviews

[Myles Grant · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly accessible language. Would recommend to anyone looking to educate themselves on political and cultural life of the late 1960s-1980s. Sturken writes brilliantly about the Vietnam War and the Persian Gulf War -- if you don't know much about the subject, this is a great place to start, and you'll learn WHY you never knew much about it to begin with...

[George Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well written and worth engaging. I would like to see a chapter on the Iraq/Afghanistan war. Too soon I suppose, but will we look at this someday as another example of the human march of folly (thinking of Barbara Tuchman).

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5: I think Sturken offers some really great ideas in the introduction, but I wasn’t that interested in her examples of the Vietnam war or the AIDS epidemic. Also wasn’t expecting so much media criticism.

[Lizzie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Informative with a bit of a feminist bias, this book explains what remembering really means during the Vietnam War and the AIDS epidemic. This was an enjoyable read and the bias was very clear.

[Casey Browne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredibly accessible language. Would recommend to anyone looking to educate themselves on the political and cultural life of the late 1960s-1980s. Sturken writes brilliantly about the Vietnam War and the Persian Gulf War -- if you don't know much about the subject, this is a great place to start, and you'll learn WHY you never knew much about it, to begin with... the book was also informative with a bit of a feminist bias, this book explains what remembering really means during the Vietnam War and the AIDS epidemic. This was an enjoyable read and the bias was very clear.

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book isn't for everyone-- it is awfully heavy on the cultural studies "lets-just-put-stuff-together-and-see-what-sticks" kind of thing. However, if you can get past your initial response to "AIDS and Vietnam" I promise you will be happy.

For me, the most valuable chapter was the introduction/literature review and the pieces on Vietnam. Her book provides a fantastic model for thinking about the past as a force actively shaping the present as it is shaped by the present. That said, it does feel at times like she's just picking information that fits her model and/or that she's ignoring a lot of stuff that would problemitize it. Her evidence base is wide if a bit unmethodical, this emphasizes how omnipresent the phenomenon of cultural memory is while also making it seem like ANYTHING could be cultural memory.

Also, she does a great job at pulling apart the concept of History from the concept of Memory.

If you're looking to get into the field of cultural memory this book is a must read.

[Starbubbles · Rating 3 out of 5]

other than the historic inaccuracies that should have been checked and elminated before releasing the first edition, yet alone the second, it was a decent book. memory is inaccurate, which is kind of the point. but what makes collective memory is the weaving together of multiple groups accurate and inaccurate perspectives on historic events. sturken (a non-historian -journalist- writing about a history field of study) does descent job relaying public moods and interpretations of vietnam, the gulf war, aids...
just wish she would have let out the post-modern jargon about the immune system being an extension of your identity, and aids, like communists were attacking your very essence. yeah, would have been better without that mess.

[Tori · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book about how we remember the past. Relevant 10 years ago when I was starting college, not sure how applicable today, but I remember it being a quick read.

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marita!

[Mike Rancourt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I particularly appreciated Sturken's work on Vietnam docudramas and the tangling of memory and history.