Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Greg Dickinson is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Colorado State University.

Carole Blair is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina.

Brian L. Ott is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Colorado Denver and author of The Small Screen: How Television Equips Us to Live in the Information Age.

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Places of Public Memory

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Contents

List of Illustrations................................................................................................................................................................viiAcknowledgments......................................................................................................................................................................ixIntroduction: Rhetoric/Memory/Place Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson, and Brian L. Ott..................................................................................................11. Radioactive History: Rhetoric, Memory, and Place in the Post-Cold War Nuclear Museum Bryan C. Taylor.............................................................................572. Sparring with Public Memory: The Rhetorical Embodiment of Race, Power, and Conflict in the Monument to Joe Louis Victoria J. Gallagher and Margaret R. LaWare.....................873. Rhetorical Experience and the National Jazz Museum in Harlem Gregory Clark........................................................................................................1134. Bad Dreams about the Good War: Bataan John Bodnar................................................................................................................................1395. You Were on Indian Land: Alcatraz Island as Recalcitrant Memory Space Cynthia Duquette Smith and Teresa Bergman...................................................................1606. Tracing Mary Queen of Scots Michael S. Bowman....................................................................................................................................1917. Memory's Execution: (Dis)placing the Dissident Bod Bernard J. Armada............................................................................................................2168. The Master Naturalist Imagined: Directed Movement and Simulations at the Draper Museum of Natural History Eric Aoki, Greg Dickinson, and Brian L. Ott............................238Selected Bibliography................................................................................................................................................................267Contributors.........................................................................................................................................................................279

Chapter One

This chapter is concerned with nuclear museums as a rhetorical site of public memory in post-Cold War American culture. Its argument is developed across three sections. I will begin by discussing the unique relationships that exist between nuclear weapons, space, and rhetoric. Next, I will consider museums as reflexive spaces for the "entangled" discourses of nuclear history, memory, and heritage. I then conceptualize and critique the relationship between nuclear museum rhetoric and the evolving context of post-Cold War U.S. culture.

To preview my argument, this relationship may be characterized as follows: In American nuclear museums, currently, we find an ongoing contest between the proponents and opponents of continued nuclear weapons development by the United States and by other nations. That contest is conducted through rhetoric that interprets and evaluates the legacies of Cold War-era nuclear weapons production, and that circulates among audiences girding for the unfolding "Long War" between Western liberal democracies and radical Islamic jihadists. In this process, nuclear museums in the United States continue to serve as sites of struggle for the control of rhetoric that mediates public understanding of nuclear weapons development. At these sites, visitors encounter a throbbing history marked by paradox and risk. These phenomena threaten to breach the narrative "containment" typically sought by nuclear museum officials and their patrons. In this process, the places of nuclear rhetoric and of its apparent referents converge.

How this containment and convergence will evolve is a question that this chapter can raise but not resolve. That resolution requires the development of new nuclear places-of new rhetorical contexts that facilitate the ideal of genuine nuclear-democratic deliberation. To that end, I conclude this chapter with a surrealistic fragment that suggests how museums and rhetorical criticism can facilitate this development.

Nuclear Weapons, Rhetoric, and Place

As a historical and cultural phenomenon, nuclear weapons have created unique and highly charged relationships between space and rhetoric. To unpack this claim, we must consider some of the conditions created by their development.

Most obvious is the threat that nuclear weapons pose to the integrity of space as a potential place of human safety. The principal military innovation created by nuclear weapons arises from their efficiency: a single nuclear weapon instantly yields a scale of destruction that previously required the use of many conventional weapons over time. As a result, the space of a successful nuclear detonation is one of total, mercilessly enunciated force. That force speaks in three hellish registers: heat (producing both immediate incineration and raging firestorms), blast pressure, and ionizing radiation that is pathogenic, invisible, and persistent. The potency of this force was vividly demonstrated in the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which quickly signaled to U.S. military officials that nuclear weapons phenomena could not be easily contained. Once they were coupled with international delivery systems capable of evading detection and defense (officials reluctantly conceded that "the bomber will always get through"), nuclear weapons created a novel existential condition. Under this condition, the human inhabitation of all space became precarious and fatalistic, shadowed by fleeting images of devouring flashes and billowing clouds.

The development of nuclear weapons thus destroyed and reconfigured traditional boundaries that had organized the cultural experience of political, military, and social spaces. These boundaries included those between enemy, ally, and Self; between battlefield and home front; and-more abstractly-between the military, industrial, and civilian spheres of society. One example of this process involves the residents of postwar American communities surrounding military bases and defense plants. Reluctantly, those residents realized that proximity ensured that their fates were inextricably tied to the targeting of those facilities by enemy nuclear forces. Another example involves a lesson of the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis: As that conflict escalated, the U.S. Strategic Air Command deemed it necessary to deploy its nuclear-capable aircraft at domestic civilian airports. As a result, this crisis undermined the viability of "counterforce" strategy as a tentative agreement between the superpowers that encouraged them to regulate nuclear conflicts by spatially discriminating between "military" and "civilian" targets. In the cultural history of nuclear weapons, then, American citizens have been required to assimilate the consequences of the military colonization of space for their own mortality.

So far, this account has emphasized a particular scene: a nuclear blast that signals the onset of enemy attack...