Reinventing World War II

Popular Memory in the Rise of the Ethnonationalist State

Barbara A. Biesecker

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780271097824
• eBook ISBN: 9780271099002
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• COVER Front
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Notes to Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Enola Gay Controversy | The Politics of Experience and Truth Telling at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century
• Notes to Chapter 1
• Chapter 2: Popular Memory and Civic Belonging at the End of the American Century
• Notes to Chapter 2
• Chapter3: Remembering the “Good War” / Refiguring Democracy |Ethico-Political Resubjectivation at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Notes to Chapter 3
• Chapter 4: The Culture and History Wars of the Twenty-First Century, or, Can You Be white and Look at This
• Notes to Chapter 4
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index