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Maintaining (US) collective memory: from Hiroshima to a critical study of security history
Abstract
Almost 70 years after the dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs, debates continue in the United States over the morality and strategic necessity of their use. Surveys indicate that slight to significant majorities of Americans continue to approve, in retrospect, the use of the bombs. Far from a definitive explanation for such a consistent understanding of the atomic bombs, this article instead seeks to more precisely delineate what could be considered three ‘provocations’ (via the works of Arendt, Ricoeur, Halbwachs, among others) for such consistent memory. These provocations, considered complementary to one another in a ‘constellation’, provide a way forward for other scholars investigating similar topics and cases of consistent collective memory. In the conclusion, the article suggests how the case of US collective memory surrounding Hiroshima illustrates the need for a potential subfield of critical security studies, what might be titled a ‘critical study on (the making of) security history’.
This paper contributes a novel way to theorise the power of narratives of nuclear weapons politics through Kenneth Burke's concept of entelechy: the means of stating a things essence through narrating its beginning or end. The paper argues that the Manhattan Project functions narratively in nuclear discourse as an origin myth, so that the repeated telling of atomic creation over time frames the possibilities of nuclear politics today. By linking Burke's work on entelechy with literature on narrative and eschatology, the paper develops a theoretical grounding for understanding the interconnection of the nuclear past, present, and future. The paper supports its argument by conducting a wide-ranging survey of academic and popular accounts of the development of the atomic weapon in the US Manhattan Project. It reveals a dominant narrative across these accounts that contains three core tropes: the nuclear weapon as the inevitable and perfected culmination of humankind's tendency towards violence; the Manhattan Project as a race against time; and the nuclear weapon as a product of a fetishized masculine brilliance.
The Handbook of Communication and Security provides a comprehensive collection and synthesis of communication scholarship that engages security at multiple levels, including theoretical vs. practical, international vs. domestic, and public vs. private. The handbook includes chapters that leverage communication-based concepts and theories to illuminate and influence contemporary security conditions. Collectively, these chapters foreground and analyze the role of communication in shaping the economic, technological, and cultural contexts of security in the 21st century. This book is ideal for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students and scholars in the numerous subfields of communication and security studies.
This article makes a case for incorporating the concept of ‘Critical Security History’ (CSH) into security studies. While history plays a powerful role in a cornucopia of security stories, we contend that it often goes unnoticed in scholarly research and teaching. Against this backdrop, we present a detailed guide to study how history is told and enacted in non-linear ways. To do this, the article outlines how CSH can contribute to securitisation and ontological security studies. As shown, this lens casts a new light on the legacies of (de)securitisation processes and how they are commemorated. It also illustrates that ontological security studies have only begun to call into question the concept of historicity. Working through these observations, the article marshals insights from Halvard Leira's notion of ‘engaged historical amateurism’ to entice scholars interested in ‘doing’ CSH. While acknowledging that this research agenda is hard to achieve, our study of the 2012 Sarajevo Red Line project helps to illustrate the added value of trying to ‘do’ CSH in theory and in practice. We end with some reflections for future research and continued conversations.
This article examines how the protection of migrants, refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) is spoken about and framed. Today it is evident that the dominant responses of sovereign States to each of these groups is heavily reliant on the language of security and (de)securitization, and this article openly conceptualizes ongoing attempts to protect migrants, refugees and IDPs as a series of overlapping (de)securitized “games”. At least three arguments follow from this claim. First, adopting this approach serves as a reminder that the ways in which different groups of people are spoken about often constitutes a dividing line between life and death. Second, the language games of (de)securitization are not identical when it comes to protecting different groups. Third, using securitization as the theoretical point of departure provides a timely reminder that none of the three categorizations listed above is guaranteed to apply. On the contrary, the adoption of each linguistic label – migrant, refugee, IDP – is subject to and dependent upon audience acceptance. Remembering the latter dimension is imperative to fully comprehend the ongoing contestations and countermoves in response to people moving in search of security. By way of conclusion, the article contends that far more attention must be paid to broader understandings of acceptance and love to ensure the protection of migrants, refugees and IDPs.
This paper uses the referent of the hallucination as a way to move with and then past the role of images in intervention. It is used for two purposes. First, it calls our attention to how often those advocating intervention refer not to images and what we can see (but disagree over), but rather to what is not seen. A second purpose is analytical. I engage research on hallucinations at the individual level, link this to research on interventions and provide three conceptual bridges relating to hallucinations in international relations – images and their visual political contestations, trauma and generational experiences. I also present three examples of hallucination common to International Relations studies – counterfactuals, simulations and scenarios. This paper thus deploys the concept of ‘hallucination’ to contextualize, recast and interrogate interventions.
Recent breakthroughs in neuroscience have led to increasing concern about its uses in warfare. This article challenges the primacy of dual-use frameworks for posing ethical questions concerning the role of neuroscience in national security. It brings together three fields – critical war studies, bio-ethics, and the history of medicine – to argue that such frameworks too starkly divide ‘good’ and ‘bad’ military uses of neurotechnology, thus focusing on the degradation of human capacities without sufficiently accounting for human enhancement and soldier rehabilitation. It illustrates this through the emergence of diagnoses of Traumatic Brain Injury and Polytrauma in the context of post-9/11 counterinsurgency wars. The article proposes an alternative approach, highlighting the historical co-production and homology of modern war and medicine so as to grapple with how war shapes neuroscience, but also how neuroscience shapes war. The article suggests new routes for thinking through the connections between war, society, science, and technology, proposing that we cease analysis that assumes any fundamental separation between military and civilian life.
In recent years, paradigmatic debates in International Relations (IR) have focused on questions of epistemology and methodology. While important in their own right, these differences have obscured the basic divide in the discipline between substantialism, which takes entities as primitives, and relationalism, which takes processes of social transaction as the basic building blocks of theory. We argue that while both approaches can be fruitful, theories of processes and relations are better suited to address certain questions, most notably those involving change in global politics. Drawing on work in International Relations, sociology and philosophy, we examine what such theories entail and discuss areas of research for which they are especially suited.
This article joins the growing scholarship on the ontological security needs of states. By focusing on state denial of historical crimes, the article will address the main point of contention among scholars who study ontological security, i.e. the question of whether identity pressures on states are mostly endogenously or exogenously generated. Through a study of the Turkish state’s reluctance to apologize for the Armenian genocide, and the Japanese discomfort over the WWII atrocities, I argue that we can avoid tautology in our generalizations by introducing temporal and spatial dimensions to the argument. Inter-subjective pressures matter more at times when traditional routines defining the self are broken and are more likely to create ontological insecurity outside the West. The review of the Turkish and Japanese cases demonstrate that both social and individualistic approaches to ontological security are partly right, but also incomplete because neither takes into account the uneven expansion of international society or the effect this expansion has had on the identity of outsider states who were incorporated into the system at a later date.
Within the community of academic students of international politics today there is a deep epistemological rift over the extent to and ways in which we can know our subject. Speaking very broadly, on one side stand what have become known as 'positivists', who think we can get closer to the truth about international politics, but only if we follow the methods which have proven so successful in the natural sciences. And on the other side stand , who think we do not have privileged access to the truth about international politics, and least of all through the methods of natural science. Although it can seem far removed, this epistemological disagreement actually matters quite a lot to our collective efforts to make sense of the real world, since we cannot avoid taking some position on it, and those positions affect the questions we ask, the methods we use to answer those questions, and ultimately the kinds of knowledge that we produce. Perhaps for this reason what may seem more a dispute for philosophers than political scientists has become one of the (the Third) in the discipline of International Relations (IR), and, indeed, it arguably underlay the Debate between behaviouralists and traditionalists in the 1960s as well.
This article deals with a topic-poetry-that is often considered to be of marginal interest to politics. To prove otherwise is the article's principle task-a task that is pursed through apt engagement with Pablo Neruda's work. Nobel laureate, international diplomat and political activist in one, Neruda reveals how poetry can enter the political process and, perhaps more importantly, turn into a critical historical memory.;Ib engage political struggles a poet must be as accessible as possible. Neruda was well aware of this necessity, which is why he wrote in the language of everyday life. But he was also aware of the need to break through existing linguistic habits, for it is through these very conventions, inaudible and seemingly harmless as they are, that practices of domination become objectified The article discusses both the theoretical issues that are at stake in this paradoxical tension and the more specific attempts Neruda undertook to engage political issues related to fascism, imperialism and class domination.
Stories of missing persons offer profound insights into the tension between how political systems see us and how we see each other. The search for people who go missing as a result of war, political violence, genocide, or natural disaster reveals how forms of governance that objectify the person are challenged. Contemporary political systems treat persons instrumentally, as objects to be administered rather than as singular beings: the apparatus of government recognizes categories, not people. In contrast, relatives of the missing demand that authorities focus on a particular person: families and friends are looking for someone who to them is unique and irreplaceable. This book highlights stories from a range of circumstances that shed light on this critical tension: the aftermath of World War II, when millions in Europe were displaced; the period following the fall of the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan in 2001 and the London bombings of July 2005; searches for military personnel missing in action; the thousands of political “disappearances” in Latin America; and in more quotidian circumstances where people walk out on their families and disappear of their own volition. When someone goes missing we often find that we didn't know them as well as we thought: there is a sense in which we are “missing” even to our nearest and dearest and even when we are present, not absent. This book investigates what this more profound “missingness” might mean in political terms.
In this interesting study, Jenny Edkins explores how we remember traumatic events such as wars, famines, genocides and terrorism, and questions the assumed role of commemorations as simply reinforcing state and nationhood. Taking examples from the World Wars, Vietnam, the Holocaust, Kosovo and September 11th, Edkins offers a thorough discussion of practices of memory such as memorials, museums, remembrance ceremonies, the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress and the act of bearing witness. She examines the implications of these commemorations in terms of language, political power, sovereignty and nationalism. She argues that some forms of remembering do not ignore the horror of what happened but rather use memory to promote change and to challenge the political systems that produced the violence of wars and genocides in the first place. This wide-ranging study embraces literature, history, politics and international relations, and makes a significant contribution to the study of memory.
The Cuban missile crisis is a seminal event. For thirteen days of October 1962, there was a higher probability that more human lives would end suddenly than ever before in history. Had the worst occurred, the death of 100 million Americans, over 100 million Russians, and millions of Europeans as well would make previous natural calamities and inhumanities appear insignificant. Given the probability of disaster—which President Kennedy estimated as “between 1 out of 3 and even”—our escape seems awesome. This event symbolizes a central, if only partially thinkable, fact about our existence. That such consequences could follow from the choices and actions of national governments obliges students of government as well as participants in governance to think hard about these problems.
Improved understanding of this crisis depends in part on more information and more probing analyses of available evidence. To contribute to these efforts is part of the purpose of this study. But here the missile crisis serves primarily as grist for a more general investigation.
This study proceeds from the premise that marked improvement in our understanding of such events depends critically on more self-consciousness about what observers bring to the analysis. What each analyst sees and judges to be important is a function not only of the evidence about what happened but also of the “conceptual lenses” through which he looks at the evidence. The principal purpose of this essay is to explore some of the fundamental assumptions and categories employed by analysts in thinking about problems of governmental behavior, especially in foreign and military affairs.
Stories of the missing offer profound insights into the tension between how political systems see us and how we see each other. The search for people who go missing as a result of war, political violence, genocide, or natural disaster reveals how forms of governance that objectify the person are challenged. Contemporary political systems treat persons instrumentally, as objects to be administered rather than as singular beings: the apparatus of government recognizes categories, not people. In contrast, relatives of the missing demand that authorities focus on a particular person: families and friends are looking for someone who to them is unique and irreplaceable. In Missing, Jenny Edkins highlights stories from a range of circumstances that shed light on this critical tension: the aftermath of World War II, when millions in Europe were displaced; the period following the fall of the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan in 2001 and the bombings in London in 2005; searches for military personnel missing in action; the thousands of political "disappearances" in Latin America; and in more quotidian circumstances where people walk out on their families and disappear of their own volition. When someone goes missing we often find that we didn't know them as well as we thought: there is a sense in which we are "missing" even to our nearest and dearest and even when we are present, not absent. In this thought-provoking book, Edkins investigates what this more profound "missingness" might mean in political terms.
German memories of the Second World War are controversial, and they are used to justify different positions on the use of military force. In this book, Maja Zehfuss studies the articulation of memories in novels in order to discuss and challenge arguments deployed in political and public debate. She explores memories that have generated considerable controversy, such as the flight and expulsion of Germans from the East, the bombing of German cities and the 'liberation' of Germany in 1945. She shows how memory retrospectively produces a past while claiming merely to invoke it, drawing attention to the complexities and contradictions within how truth, ethics, emotion, subjectivity and time are conceptualised. Zehfuss argues that the tensions and uncertainties revealed raise political questions that must be confronted, beyond the safety net of knowledge. This is a compelling book which pursues an original approach in exploring the politics of invocations of memory.
In the past decade, Jeffrey Olick has established himself as one of the world’s pre-eminent sociologists of memory (and, related to this, both cultural sociology and social theory). His recent book on memory in postwar Germany, in the House of the Hangman (University of Chicago Press, 2005) has garnered a great deal of acclaim. This book collects his best essays on a range of memory related issues and adds a couple of new ones. it is more conceptually expansive than his other work and will serve as a great introduction to this important theorist. in the past quarter century, the issue of memory has not only become an increasingly important analytical category for historians, sociologists and cultural theorists, it has become pervasive in popular culture as well. Part of this is a function of the enhanced role of both narrative and representation – the building blocks of memory, so to speak – across the social sciences and humanities. Just as importantly, though, there has also been an increasing acceptance of the notion that the past is no longer the province of professional historians alone. Additionally, acknowledging the importance of social memory has not only provided agency to ordinary people when it comes to understanding the past, it has made conflicting interpretations of the meaning of the past more fraught, particularly in light of the terrible events of the twentieth century.
This book bridges two key divides in International Relations. The first is between 'value-free' and normative theory. The second is between reflective, philosophically inflected explorations of ethics in IR and empirical studies of practical problems in world politics. Featuring a novel, provocative and detailed survey of IR's development over the second half of the twentieth century, the work draws on early Frankfurt School social theory to suggest a new ethical and methodological foundation for international theory-sustainable critique-which draws these disparate approaches together in light of their common aims, and redacts them in the face of their particular limitations. Understanding the discipline as a vocation as well as a series of academic and methodological practices, sustainable critique views normative and empirical theory both in terms of the knowledge they disclose, and in terms of their respective tendencies to reify. Each, it is argued, must be therefore be sustained in the same intellectual moment: if IR is to meaningfully and responsibly address an increasingly dense, heavily armed, and persistently diverse world.
Critical Security Studies introduces students of Politics and International Relations to the sub-field through a detailed yet accessible survey of emerging theories and practices. Written in an accessible and clear manner, this textbook: offers a comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to critical security studies, locates critical security studies within the broader context of social and political theory, evaluates fundamental theoretical positions in critical security studies against a backdrop of new security challenges. The book is divided into two main parts. The first part, 'Approaches', surveys the newly extended and contested theoretical terrain of critical security studies, and the different schools within the subdiscipline, including Feminist, Postcolonial, and Poststructuralist viewpoints. The second part, 'Issues', then offers examples of how these various theoretical approaches have been put to work against the backdrop of a diverse range of issues in contemporary security practices, from environmental, human, and homeland security to border security and the War on Terror. The historical and geographical scope of the book is deliberately broad and readers will be introduced to a number of key illustrative case studies. Each of the chapters in Part II will act to illustrate concretely one or more of the approaches discussed in Part I, with clear internal referencing allowing the text to act as a holistic learning tool for students. This book will be essential reading for upper-level students of Critical Security Studies, and an important resource for students of International/Global Security, Political Theory, and IR in general. © 2010 Columba Peoples and Nick Vaughan-Williams. All rights reserved.
This article examines the evolution of security studies, focusing on recent developments in the field. It provides a survey of the field, a guide to the current research agenda, and some practical lessons for managing the field in the years ahead. Security studies remains an interdisciplinary enterprise, but its earlier preoccupation with nuclear issues has broadened to include topics such as grand strategy, conventional warfare, and the domestic sources of international conflict, among others. Work in the field is increasingly rigorous and theoretically inclined, which reflects the marriage between security studies and social science and its improved standing within the academic world. Because national security will remain a problem for states and because an independent scholarly community contributes to effective public policy in this area, the renaissance of security studies is an important positive development for the field of international relations.
The end of World War II in the Pacific is the most successful case of military coercion among modern nation-states. On August 15, 1945, Japan unconditionally surrendered to the United States, although it still possessed a two-million-man army in the home islands which was prepared and willing to meet any American invasion, as well as other forces overseas. Indeed, Japan's surrender represents a rare instance of a great power surrendering its entire national territory to an opponent that had not captured any significant portion of it. This coercive success saved the lives of tens of thousands of Allied soldiers and many more Japanese.
From the standpoint of understanding coercion, what matters is not the exact date of Japan's surrender, but the fact that it surrendered without offering last-ditch resistance. The key question is: why did Japan capitulate before invasion and decisive defeat of her home army?
Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War 1911-13, Secretary of State 1929-33, Secretary of War 1940-45, was the man who had to make the recommendation to the President.
* A brief reference to the estimated capabilities of other nations is here omitted; it in no way affects the course of the argument.
* Report of United States Strategic Bombing Survey, "Japan's Struggle to End the War"; "If the Atomic Bomb Had Not Been Used," by K. T. Compton, Atlantic Monthly, December 1946; unpublished material of historical division, War Department Special Staff, June 1946.
This article considers the place of the Hiroshima bombing and the September 11 attacks as singular acts of violence constituting major points of rupture in the historical consciousness and chronological narratives of the Western world: Ground Zero is Time Zero. Geographically and temporally delineated instances of intense death and destruction, both acts have been construed as moments when the world `changed for ever'. Our schemata of interpretation — the mental frameworks through which we impose meaning and continuity on the world around us and determine the range of our expectations — were violently overthrown by those events, shattered by images that exceed our minds' capabilities of re presentation and symbols that challenge our liberal metanarratives of ineluctable progress. By bringing to the fo re their aesthetic dimension and reading them through the lens of the Kantian notion of the sublime, we can grasp those events in their original intensity as overwhelming revelatory experiences. Apocalyptic both in their imagery and the meaning attributed to them, those unprecedented acts of terror re p resent turning-points in our reconstituted historical narratives, marking a culmination of history leading to it as well as the start of a new era in which it is proclaimed that many previous assumptions no longer hold. ————————————————————————
The Cuban missile crisis is a seminal event. For thirteen days of October 1962, there was a higher probability that more human lives would end suddenly than ever before in history. Had the worst occurred, the death of 100 million Americans, over 100 million Russians, and millions of Europeans as well would make previous natural calamities and inhumanities appear insignificant. Given the probability of disaster—which President Kennedy estimated as “between 1 out of 3 and even”—our escape seems awesome. This event symbolizes a central, if only partially thinkable, fact about our existence. That such consequences could follow from the choices and actions of national governments obliges students of government as well as participants in governance to think hard about these problems.
Improved understanding of this crisis depends in part on more information and more probing analyses of available evidence. To contribute to these efforts is part of the purpose of this study. But here the missile crisis serves primarily as grist for a more general investigation. This study proceeds from the premise that marked improvement in our understanding of such events depends critically on more self-consciousness about what observers bring to the analysis. What each analyst sees and judges to be important is a function not only of the evidence about what happened but also of the “conceptual lenses” through which he looks at the evidence. The principal purpose of this essay is to explore some of the fundamental assumptions and categories employed by analysts in thinking about problems of governmental behavior, especially in foreign and military affairs.
Rufus E. Miles, Jr., is a former senior fellow of the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University, and a former thirty-year career official of the U.S. government.
1. Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, Vol. 1, Year of Decisions (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), p. 417. This figure and others of similar magnitude appear in history texts used by American secondary schools, for example, Madgic, Seaberg, Stopsky, and Winks, The American Experience (Menlo Park, Calif.: Addison-Wesley, 1979), p. 515; and Bragdon and McCutcheon, A Free People (Riverside, N.J.: McMillan, 1970), p. 377.
2. Appendix E, "Letter from James Byrnes," in Robert J.C. Butow, Japan's Decision to Surrender (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1954), p. 245.
3. "The Fortune Survey," Fortune, December 1945, p. 305.
4. Henry L. Stimson, "The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb," Harper's Magazine, February 1947.
5. See, for example, Herbert Feis, The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 12; and The Harvard Nuclear Study Group, Living with Nuclear Weapons (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), pp. 72, 73.
6. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. 6, Triumph and Tragedy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953), pp. 638-639.
7. Joseph C. Grew, "The Emperor of Japan and Japan's Surrender," in Walter Johnson, ed., Turbulent Era: A Diplomatic Record of Forty Years, 1904-1945 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), pp. 1423-1924; and Truman, Memoirs, Vol. 1, pp. 416-417.
8. The War Reports of General of the Army George C. Marshall, General of the Army H.H. Arnold, and Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1947), pp. 440-444.
9. Robert P. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins (New York: Harper & Bros., 1948), p. 903.
10. Joint Chiefs of Staff, 924/15, Report by Joint Staff Planners, Subj: Pacific Strategy, 25 April 1945. Modern Military Branch, National Archives, 381 PA-6/10/43-Section 12.
11. Although Assistant Secretary of State William L. Clayton was a member of the super-secret "Interim Committee" to discuss the possible uses of the atomic bomb, there seems to be no evidence that any other State Department official, not even his superior, Acting Secretary Grew, was allowed to share knowledge of the "S-1" project.
12. Len Giovannitti and Fred Freed, The Decision To Drop The Bomb (New York: Coward-McCann, 1965), pp. 180-184.
13. Truman, Memoirs, Vol. 1, p. 417.
14. "Minutes of meeting held at the White House on 18 June 1945 at 1530 hours" (Truman Library); also contained in Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers: The Conference of Berlin, 1945 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1960), p. 909.
15. Butow, Japan's Decision to Surrender, p. 129.
16. Ibid., p. 130.
17. Lewis L. Strauss, "A Thousand Years of Regret," in Men and Decisions (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962), p. 188.
18. Ibid.
19. Strauss, "A Thousand Years of Regret," p. 189.
20. Butow, Japan's Decision to Surrender, p. 145.
21. Strauss, "A Thousand Years of Regret," p. 189.
22. Hanson W. Baldwin, Great Mistakes of the War (New York: Harper & Bros., 1950), p. 92; and Butow, Japan's Decision to Surrender, pp. 132-135.
23. Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York: Harper & Bros., 1947), p. 628.
24. Ibid., p. 629.
25. The War Reports, p. 243.
26. Ibid., p. 678. Emphasis added.
27. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, from "The Political Target Under Assault," in Walter Wilds, ed., Japan's Struggle to Surrender (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946), p. 13.
28. The War Reports, p. 439.
29. Giovannitti and Freed, Decision To Drop The Bomb, p. 333.
30. Louis Morton, "The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb," in Kent Roberts Greenfield, ed., Command Decisions (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1960), p. 509. In a footnote, Morton identifies some of the "responsible officials," citing Byrnes (Speaking Frankly [New York: Harper & Bros., 1947], p. 508), Stimson (On Active Service, p. 637), and Leahy (I Was There [New York: Whittlesey House...
This is a critique of an article in the popular military magazine U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings (August 1995) by journalist/historians Norman Polmar and Thomas Allen. Those two coauthors argued for high casualty numbers in the November 1945 invasion of Japan in order to justify the atomic bombings. Because their article is severely flawed, because it appeared in a popular military journal, because it won a prize and is likely to be regarded as authoritative, and because it was conceived to justify the atomic bombings, it warrants serious critical examination. This critique examines, among other problems, the two coauthors' misreading of sources, their reliance upon some dubious materials, their neglect of some important documentary evidence, and their questionable reasoning and conclusions. Ultimately, this critque also discusses the social/political functions of Polmar and Allen's article, and briefly raises some questions about standards in scholarship and in publishing. This critique is based upon very substantial archival research, as well as the use of the Freedom of Information Act, and considerable knowledge of the A-bomb literature, the casualty-estimates literature, and the scholarship on the Smithsonian's ill-fated Enola Gay exhibit.
Trauma and the Memory of Politics. By Jenny Edkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 265p. $65.00 cloth, $23.00 paper.
This is an important and innovative book. In it, Jenny Edkins explores the relationship between violence, the traumatic effects of violence, and the foundation and perpetuation of sovereign power. Using historical and field research, Edkins examines sites and practices that commemorate famines, wars, genocides, and terrorist attacks. She describes the evolution of the Cenotaph in Great Britain and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC; Dachau and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; and the place of the “camp” (concentration camps at midcentury; refugee camps at the millennium) in political discourse. While many of these sites seek to contain and appropriate traumatic experience for the purposes of reproducing sovereign power, she contends, the testimony made possible in part through them has radical potential for helping us to contest nationalism and to rethink our relationship to the state.
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