Screen Memory - Department of English

waned; the nation, Peter Fritzsche writes,
can be usefully thought of as a memory system that
enabled individuals to recognize their lives in
nonrepeatable, historical time. Because of their
boundedness in time and space, national narratives have
an unusual ability to organize remembrance and to make
the past sensible . . . . At the same time, the very
forcefulness of the representative powers of the nation
10
have worked to disable other narratives (108).
National memory is frequently charged with bias, with being
the champion of and apologist for dominant elites. Nations
remember largely what suits them, so Japan remembers the bombings
of Hiroshima and not its own prior history of militarism. America
remembers Japan’s history of imperialism but not the dark side of
the Enola Gay episode. Control of the national memory is a
crucial weapon of the ruling class, since, as Foucault has
stated, “If one controls people’s memory, one controls their
dynamism . . . . It is vital to have possession of this memory,
to control it, administer it, tell it what it must contain” (25-
26).
Societies, therefore, expend great energy to control the
circulation of recollection, generally by supervising the
mechanisms of memory exchange. For the U. S., Gary Taylor
instances a variety of regulatory mechanisms, including the
17