Tangled Memories : Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic and the Politic

Analyzing the ways in which US culture has been formed and transformed in the ´80s and ´90s by its response to the Vietnam War and the AIDS epidemic, this work argues that each has disrupted conventional notions of community, nation, consensus and "American culture". It examines the relationship of camera images to the production of cultural memory, the mixing of fantasy and re-enactment in memory, the role of trauma and survivors in creating cultural comfort, and how discourses of healing can smooth over the tensions of political events. The discussion encompasses a comparison of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the AIDS Quilt. It offers a reading of the memorial as a national wailing wall, one whose emphasis on the veterans and war dead has allowed the discourse of heroes, sacrifice and honour to resurface at the same time that it is an implicit condemnation of war. The book also includes discussions of the Kennedy assassination, The Persian Gulf War, the Challenger explosion and the Rodney King beating.