The Ephemera of Dissident Memory: Remembering Military Violence in 21st-Century American War Culture

Abstract

The militarization of 21st-century American society is an entrenched and volatile system of institutional and cultural power, one that is not likely to go away despite the national fantasy that withdrawing US troops from foreign territories will inaugurate a new era of peace and return us to “the way things were.” This dissertation explores the domestic and transnational legacies of the “War on Terror,” arguing that America’s contemporary war campaigns are waged in part against the memories of state-sanctioned military violence and those oftoverlooked populations who struggle against it. I argue that increasingly expansive atmospheres of US military violence prompts state institutions to govern the norms through which war-torn populations can make sense of personal loss and attribute significance to the complex histories of America’s prolonged military campaigns. More importantly, the dissertation will also bring attention to those ephemeral but nonetheless vital acts of dissident memory that populations engender in order to negotiate, contest, and occasionally dismantle the conditions of state-sanctioned military violence that routinely compromise the safety and integrity of their lives. The case studies that comprise this project include: the bereaved who mourn the deaths of U.S. soldiers at official military cemeteries and vernacular memorials (chapter 2); civilian communities who live adjacent to US military facilities that dump vast amounts of toxins into their ecological environments (chapter 3); and (un)documented Latinos/as who persistently confront increasingly militarized US-Mexico borderlands (chapter 4). By attending to each these war-torn populations and the spaces of their attrition, I argue that America’s war on terrorism is increasingly becoming a war on memory, as it is precisely this site of cultural struggle where US military institutions strive to sustain power and communities vie for a less dismal future.