Space and Culture

Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero. Marita Sturken, Duke University Press, Durham: 2007.

Serendipitously, I read Sturken’s Tourists of History while visiting one of the kitschiest cities in the Canadian prairies: Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. Moose Jaw has made a tourist industry out of Chinese immigrant exploitation of the early 20th century, and the violence of 1920s bootlegging gangsters. In Moose Jaw, in between dramatized tours of tunnels that were staged to represent the lifestyle of early Chinese immigrants, I settled down with this, Sturken’s latest book. In it, Sturken untangles the complicated relationship Americans have with consumption, kitsch and the contemporary American traumas of the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11. Her analysis brilliantly textured my reading-week prairie getaway.

The book also develops the thesis Sturken presented in her 1997, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the Aids Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering where she explored cultural memory as a constant negotiation between individual and collective desires and narratives positing “cultural memory and history as entangled rather than oppositional”(1997: 5). Unlike others such as Pierre Nora (1989) who suggests that individual memory is always culturally mediated, accessible only in trace-form, Sturken understands cultural memory and responses to cultural trauma as necessarily entangled.

The thesis of Tourists of History is that American culture has become a ‘comfort culture’ where kitsch consumption has become the predominant cultural response to collective traumas. While this could easily have become a Marxist critique of the commodification of collective grief, Sturken takes another path. She suggests that the compulsive consumption of kitsch is a form of traumatic repetition, where the traumatic event – Oklahoma City bombing or 9/11 never ends. This traumatic repetition is tied to the idea of kitsch objects as “failed commodities” (Olalquiaga in Sturken 2007: 20). It is precisely because kitsch objects cannot contain or represent the emotional response of the event they are tied to that they become compulsively produced and circulated. Continually consuming kitsch is a form of traumatic repetition— an earnest attempt to contain, in a way understandable in the dominant market economy (as a commodity)— collective grief.

Underlying this form of consumption and engagement with trauma are two married concepts: tourism of history and American innocence. By employing the subjectivity of the tourist, Sturken suggests that kitsch consumption offers a passer-by experience of ‘othering’ history; a shallow, one-dimensional understanding of cultural traumas. Furthermore, the forms the kitsch takes (teddy bears, breast cancer Barbies, snow globes) produce a culture of innocence, where every trauma compulsively represents America’s “loss of innocence”.

She states,

It is precisely when kitsch, consumerism, and reenactment aim to smooth over the moment in which grief and loss are powerfully present that opportunities for broader cultural empathy and new ways of response are lost (30).

In this way, the predilection of a kitsch response to cultural traumas has political consequences. Sturken’s reading of kitsch, memory and trauma is further nuanced as she teases out the consumption of kitsch as both participating in repetitive presentations of American innocence and ironic kitsch consumption as a form of political aesthetic.

Substantively, Sturken focuses on two key traumatic events in American history: the Oklahoma City bombings and 9/11. Within these two events she discusses the execution of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bombing memorial, the architectural plans for ground zero, and various other forms of trauma tourism.

People with interests in material culture, cultural memory, the pedagogy of memory, architecture, monuments, tourism and kitsch will find this an engaging and delightful read.

Review by Tonya Davidson, University of Alberta, Canada.

-Ondine