|
Perspectives on War: Media and Memory
VOLUME 5 NUMBER
2 June 2008
Introduction:
The Fear of Forgetting
A striking feature of the articles in the “Perspectives
on War: Media and Memory” edition of InterCulture is how
they facilitate a compulsion to remember, for various reasons,
the violence and victories of past and present wars. Danicar Mariano’s
review on Bruce Cumming’s Ruptured Histories: War, Memory,
and the Post-Cold War in Asia (2007) begins with an excerpt quoted
from the text, “Happiness, cheerfulness, hope—they
all have as their talisman, a salutory forgetting. The opposite
faculty is, of course, memory. The preservation of memory is a
struggle precisely with inertia: ‘an active desire not to
rid oneself” of memories, however unpleasant; a will to
memory; a conviction never to forget” (150). Do the memorials,
memoirs, letters, and photographs like those discussed here answer
this fear of forgetting the past? Is memory how people reconcile
with the passage of time, carrying the hope of redemption for
a wasted life? These kinds of questions raise some thorny problems
about the complex connections between media, memory, and war.
Together the essays and reviews below outline a way to proceed.
|
