Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering

In Tangled Memories, Marita Sturken attempts to explain how events take on cultural meaning through what she calls "technologies of memory," primarily monuments, texts, icons and images. She argues memory has as much to do with fantasy and invention as with truth and that it attains a narrative form separate from history and possessed of its own political significance. Although it focuses primarily on the Vietnam War and the AIDS epidemic, her book also takes in the Kennedy assassination, the Challenger explosion, the beating of Rodney King, and the Gulf War. Sturken's conclusions are often belabored: that the American Vietnam memorial fails to capture the horrors brought upon the Vietnamese people is a rather unoriginal and obvious insight she blames on the "underlying nationalism of the Washington Mall." Does the AIDS quilt she documents likewise obscure the worldwide ravages of the disease when spread upon the Mall? The theoretical discussion of memory and representation often bogs down in the political positions the author assumes rather than defends. One of the pities of such difficult exposition is that a relatively superb chapter on the Gulf War is "forgotten,"a mere 22 pages of her 358-page book.