Popular Memories: Commemoration, Participatory Culture, and Democratic Citizenship (Studies in Rhetoric/Communication)

186 Pages·2015·11.069 MB·English

by  Ekaterina V. Haskins

Popular Memories
Popular Memories
Studies in Rhetoric/Communication Th omas W. Benson, Series Editor
Commemoration,
Participatory Culture, and
Democratic Citizenship
Popular Memories
Ekaterina V. Haskins
Th e University of South Carolina Press
© 2015 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can
be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-494-6 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-495-3 (ebook)
Cover illustration: Eyes Wide Open boots display in Washington, D.C.
Photograph by American Friends Service Committee
For my family
Contents
List of Illustrations viii
Series Editor’s Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Chapter 1—“Put Your Stamp on History”: Celebrating Consumer
Democracy 21
Chapter 2—The September 11 Digital Archive: Archival Memory
and Popular Participation 44
Chapter 3—Carnival after Katrina: Popular Festivity in a Time of Crisis 67
Chapter 4—Eyes Wide Open: Reflecting on Patriotism and the Cost
of War 95
Chapter 5—Toward a Participatory Memory Culture 117
Notes 131
Bibliography 153
Index 165
Illustrations
1900s souvenir stamp sheet, Celebrate the Century stamp collection,
United States Postal Service 34
1990s souvenir stamp sheet, Celebrate the Century stamp collection,
United States Postal Service 36
“Notice Concerning Sandbox” 57
“Redeemers” 58
“Union Square Park” 59
Effigy of Osama bin Laden 60
The September 11 Digital Archive original home page 61
The “Levee” Mardi Gras float 80
“Ship of State” Mardi Gras float 80
“Department of Homeland Insecurity” Mardi Gras float 81
“Red Rover” Mardi Gras float 82
Krewe of Zulu parade 85
Young spectators greet the Zulu parade 86
Eyes Wide Open boots display 101
Eyes Wide Open civilian shoes and “Dreams and Nightmares” exhibit 103
Visitor contributions to Eyes Wide Open 104
Series Editor’s Preface
In Popular Memories: Commemoration, Participatory Culture, and Democratic
Citizenship, Professor Ekaterina V. Haskins offers a fresh look at the study of what
she calls popular memories, examining how “participatory forms of communi-
cation” have “redefined the rhetoric of democratic citizenship.” She explores in
detail how four very different campaigns for participatory public memory—the
Postal Service’s “Celebrate the Century” commemorative stamp program, the
September 11 Digital Archive, the first post-Katrina New Orleans carnival, and
the Eyes Wide Open project of the American Friends Service Committee-suggest,
guide, and sometimes limit genuine democratic participation.
Haskins explores the now familiar distinction made by memory scholars
between popularization—the engagement of mass audiences through invocation
of the idioms and practices of the popular arts—and democratization, which at a
minimum would involve the participation of ordinary people in the production
of memory practices, and suggests that the distinction may not fully explain what
happens in actual cases. “Popular participation in memory work does not render
it instantly more democratic, nor does the stamp of approval from government or
mainstream media necessarily diminish the political charge of grassroots efforts.”
Haskins asks how each of the cases she examines represents civic identity and
how if at all it prompts democratic encounters among people of differing opin-
ions about issues and about citizenship itself. The “Celebrate the Century” com-
memorative stamp program did invite citizens to participate in choosing the final
designs from a menu of choices, and did depict an America of inclusiveness. On
the other hand, the program equated consumerism with civic responsibility, pro-
moting a neoliberal and self satisfied mythology in which each person has a place
and an identity, but in which there is no space for strangers to mingle and debate.
In a similar way, the online September 11 Digital Archive created an open web site
for the uncensored contribution of diverse responses to the attacks of September
11, 2001, but while the structure of the archive encouraged a diversity of contribu-
tions, it did not enable the interactive potentials of the technology to encourage
potentially transformative conversation, debate, or deliberation.
x Series Editor’s Preface
The first Mardi Gras festival after Katrina was highly complex and widely par-
ticipatory for the citizens of New Orleans, though from the perspective of public
memory it was ephemeral, especially for those who witnessed the carnival at a
distance through the mass media. Haskins admires the complex treatment of the
events by National Public Radio, and even more the fictional depiction of New
Orleans in the television series Treme.
Eyes Wide Open was a traveling memory exhibit sponsored by the Ameri-
can Friends Service Committee, in which the war in Iraq was commemorated
by the display in a large field of empty combat boots, each pair with the name
of an American soldier killed in the war, and a display of civilian shoes repre-
senting dead Iraqi civilians. The exhibit was supplemented with a “memory wall.”
Haskins finds that Eyes Wide Open drew ongoing and productive contributions to
the memorial itself in the sites to which it traveled, and that it was also recorded as
having created a space for genuine citizen encounter with those of differing views
and commitments.
Popular Memories is a fresh, vivid, theoretically sophisticated, and critically
astute work of scholarship.
Thomas W. Benson