Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies

The research collected in this special issue demonstrates that memory is mobilized symbolically and materially, spatially and temporally. It is fully embodied and often works affectively.

This essay explores the commemorative site of Fleury-devant-Douaumont (Fleury), a village destroyed during the battle of Verdun in 1916. We argue that Fleury offers a creative rhetoric of imagining otherwise by rendering a doubled demand on the imagination. It provokes visitors to attend to the fact of war’s overwhelming destructiveness. And simultaneously, it urges them to imagine the counterfactual, the “not having happened”—Fleury as a tiny and vibrant community as it would have been in the absence of war. In doing so, Fleury’s rhetoric opposes itself to a stance that sanitizes, justifies, or glorifies war.

In 2009, the Whitney Gallery of Western Art (WGWA), located within the Buffalo Bill Historical Center (BBHC) in Cody, Wyoming, was redesigned—its art rehung and its vision of the West reimagined. The newly designed gallery replaced the structuring principles of history, artist, and genre that had governed the previous layout and design of the gallery with a thematic structure that elicits a series of affective dissonances. In this essay, we argue that the redesigned Whitney Gallery of Western Art performs a sacred hymn that—in repositioning Buffalo Bill Cody as its orchestrating figure—resolves discordant images and narratives of the West, harmonizes diverse themes into a single vision, and reconstitutes national identity in terms of the Western sublime.

Of those things people tend to think of as “internal” mental processes, memory is one of the hardest to separate from their material experience in the physical world. The materiality of memory is recognized in many fields. Using as heuristics some seminal concepts from Henri Bergson and Walter Benjamin, this article offers a case study of the complex materiality of a particular “memory object.” The so-called Chadwick Ram is reputed to be the most perfect big game trophy in the history of North American hunting. It provides an occasion for exploring how memory as a life process ebbs and flows in the variable materiality of one object. In the perspective taken here, one may consider degrees or intensities of materiality, which are related to various mechanisms of memory. An analysis contrasting this modern hunting trophy with a premodern, trophy-like artifact from the realm of a heroic epic illustrates the complexities of material memory.

This article examines the everyday memory practices Westerners employed to shape the meaning of Wyoming in the early twentieth century. Resisting the “Wild West” image of the cowboy that was popularized by Western mythmakers from the East, like Owen Wister and Frederic Remington, Grace Raymond Hebard led an effort to mark Wyoming as settled, “civilized,” and equal to the East. Hebard worked with the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) and the Wyoming Oregon Trail Commission (WOTC) to mark the path of the Oregon Trail across the state of Wyoming. Hebard’s commemorative discourse domesticated Wyoming’s image as she celebrated signifiers of Wyoming’s domesticity and drew on the agrarian myth to elevate the settler—who tamed the Wyoming land and built a permanent home—as the Western hero. By commemorating and marking local sites throughout Wyoming, Hebard constructed each marker as a material manifestation of Wyoming’s progress, civilization, and mythic significance.

A critical reading of George Catlin’s 19th century portraits of Native Americans is offered. Catlin’s Traveling Indian Gallery distorted the culture voices and customs of his subjects. My reading is a form of memory-making, but in a sense it is no more authentic than Catlin’s. I attempt a form of self-critique which acknowledges and disturbs this fact.