Penny Von Eschen (University of Michigan)

Memory and Nostalgia in the Post-Cold War Era

In this course we will examine multiple forms of nostalgia and contests over memory that emerged in the post-Cold War era, in diverse genres and spaces such as film, museums, and public monuments and memorials. As Cold War assumptions and constant reinvocations of Cold War triumphalism continue to frame the common sense of bipartisan U.S. foreign policy as well as a good deal of scholarship, scholars face the ongoing challenge of bringing these self-contained, self-referential logics of U.S. exceptionalism to a crisis in their work. We will employ a range of interdisciplinary perspectives to analyze post-Cold War narratives produced in the United States as well as the former eastern bloc, enabling us to ask questions about who owns stories of the Cold War; how does the narrating of war happen; and how do these stories of war become larger stories about global power? Throughout, we will be concerned with the question of how to pursue a critical American Studies that is not framed by American exceptionalism.

Monday: Marita Sturken, Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Duke University Press, 2007)
and Penny Von Eschen, “Cold War Nostalgia: From the International Spy Museum (Washington D.C.) to “Stalin World Theme Park,” (Lithuania),” available from Catherine Carey, Catherine.Carey@ucd.ie on June 1.

Tuesday: Sheila Miyoshi Jager and Rana Mitter editors,, Ruptured Histories: War, Memory, and the Post-Cold War in Asia (Harvard 2007)

Wednesday: Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests
and the Politics of Memory, (Stanford
University Press, 2003.)

Thursday: Daniel J. Walkowitz and Lisa Maya Knauer, editors, Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space, (Duke University Press, 2004);

Friday: Charity Scribner, Requiem for Communism, (MIT Press, 2005)