Reinventing World War II

Popular Memory in the Rise of the Ethnonationalist State

Author: Barbara A. Biesecker Series: RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric

A deeply researched examination of the power of public memory in shaping American civil society from the end of the Cold War to the rise of ethnonationalism.

"Explores how World War II was retooled in popular culture starting in the mid-1980s to redress a crisis in American identity and restore social equilibrium"-- Provided by publisher.

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Summary

A deeply researched examination of the power of public memory in shaping American civil society from the end of the Cold War to the rise of ethnonationalism.

"Explores how World War II was retooled in popular culture starting in the mid-1980s to redress a crisis in American identity and restore social equilibrium"-- Provided by publisher.

Description

By the 1970s, World War II had all but disappeared from US popular culture. But beginning in the mid-eighties it reemerged with a vengeance, and for nearly fifteen years World War II was ubiquitous across US popular and political culture. In this book, Barbara A. Biesecker explores the prestige and rhetorical power of the “Good War,” revealing how it was retooled to restore a new kind of social equilibrium to the United States.

Biesecker analyzes prominent cases of World War II remembrance, including the canceled exhibit of the Enola Gay at the National Air and Space Museum in 1995 and its replacement, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Situating these popular memory texts within the culture and history wars of the day and the broader framework of US political and economic life, Biesecker argues that, with the notable exception of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, these reinventions of the Good War worked rhetorically to restore a strong sense of national identity and belonging fitted to the neoliberal nationalist agenda.

By tracing the links between the popular retooling of World War II and the national state fantasy, and by putting the lessons of Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, and their successors to work for a rhetorical-political analysis of the present, Biesecker not only explains the emergence and strength of the MAGA movement but also calls attention to the power of public memory to shape and contest ethnonational identity today. This book will interest rhetoricians and historians as well as students and scholars in the fields of US politics and communication studies.

Critic Reviews

“Reinventing World War II is an incisive, theoretically sophisticated, and well-argued critique ranging from the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s through popular culture’s invocation of WWII memory as a palliative. This historical critique is brought to bear in a summative—and sobering—commentary on the extreme political polarization of the present moment. A must-read for cultural/rhetorical critics and memory scholars and those concerned about the current state of political discourse in the United States.”

—Carole Blair, coeditor of Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials

“Biesecker, one of rhetoric’s leading scholars, masterfully weaves together rhetorical theory and contemporary philosophy to provide an insightful reading of the ways the memories of World War II helped shape the neoliberal fantasy of the modern ethnonational state. A compelling analysis for anyone interested in memory, neoliberalism, or contemporary rhetorical theory.”

—Kendall R. Phillips, author of A Place of Darkness: The Rhetoric of Horror in Early American Cinema

About the Author

Barbara A. Biesecker is Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia. She is the author of Addressing Postmodernity: Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric, and a Theory of Social Change and coeditor of Rhetoric, Materiality, and Politics.