Tourists
of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism
from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero
by Maria
Sturken
Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2007
360 pp., illus. 119 b/w. Trade, $24.95
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4122-2.
Reviewed by John F. Barber
Digital Technology and Culture
Washington State University Vancouver
jfbarber@eaze.net
Beyond death and destruction, the bombing
of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building
in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on 19 April
1995, and the attacks of 11 September
2001, which included plane crashes at
the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and Shanksville,
Pennsylvania, and the destruction of the
Twin Towers of the World Trade Center
in New York City, share a consumer commodity:
teddy bears.
Starting in the early 1980s, when they
were given to AIDS victims, teddy bears
have increasingly symbolized the promise
of empathy, companionship, and comfort.
Relief organizations gave them to returning
evacuated New York City residents. Oklahoma
City sent 60 thousand stuffed bears to
New York where they were distributed to
schools, support organizations, and fire
stations. Thousands more continue to sell
in both Oklahoma City and New York to
tourists eager to document their presence
at these sites of destruction and lost
innocence. Not a single one of these teddy
bears promised to make things better for
those affected by tragic events, only
to, hopefully, make their owners feel
better about the way things were.
This notion of comfort culture and consumerism
is the heart of a new book by cultural
critic Marita Sturken. In Tourists
of History, Sturken, examines the
complex intersection of cultural memory,
tourism, consumerism, paranoia, security,
and kitsch that has defined America for
the past two decades, and how they are
related to the broad tendency to see United
States culture as innocent, distanced
from and unimplicated in global strife.
In using the term "tourists of history"
Sturken speaks to a mode of experiencing
cultural memory where the public is encouraged
to consider itself the subject of history
through consumerism, media images, souvenirs,
popular culture, and memorial or architectural
reenactments that have as their goal catharsis.
Despite, or perhaps because of, their
uncritical participation and minimal effect
on what they see, tourists of history
help promulgate a far-reaching cultural,
economic, and political structure whose
authenticity is subjective, mediated,
removed, and reenacted.
Of course, the practices of tourism of
history and pilgrimage at sites of collective
traumalike the Oklahoma City Memorial
or New York's Ground Zeroare often
concurrent and intermingled. One can cry
for the loss of life at memorial sites,
and take pictures. One can leave a personalized
object, and purchase a souvenir, perhaps
a teddy bear, snow globe, pin, T-shirt
or small American flagall examples
of kitsch, and most all made in Korea
or China.
Sturken argues that memorial sites proliferate
kitschmass produced objects that
offer easy formulae for the relief of
grief, without addressing any of the complex
and interrelated economic, social, or
political causes that lead to the traumatic
event they symbolize. In this way souvenirs
protect a sense of innocence that has
been key to national identity throughout
much of American history. This notion
of innocence sees America as a good, virtuous
nation, distant and disconnected from
world history, culture, and politics.
Occasionally, bad things can happen, but
these acts of violence are perpetrated
by outsiders, popular culture, or, as
noted in defense of the American military's
role in the torture of prisoners at Abu
Ghraib, "a few bad apples." As a result,
the innocence narrative is reaffirmed,
after the fact, and reasserted, or rhetorically
twisted, as it was following the attacks
of 11 September 2001, to form the basis
for a military invasion of Afghanistan
and Iraq, even though the latter had no
role in the attacks.
In Tourists of History, Sturken
focuses on this relationship between the
practices of consumerism and the maintenance
of the idea of innocence. A kitsch culture,
she argues, promotes a tourist relationship
to global perspectives that distances
and insulates the individual or national
culture from any engagement with underlying
causes and effects. Instead, Americans
are encouraged to consume a rhetoric of
fear, along with its attendant commodities:
SUVs (because they are "safe"), duct tape,
plastic, and bottled water (because they
provide protection), loss of civil liberties
and invasion of privacy (because they
are necessary for "homeland security")
and teddy bears, arms seemingly outstretched,
offering a hug (because they provide comfort
and continued innocence).
While she argues for the importance of
remembering the tragic loss of lives in
Oklahoma City, Washington, Shanksville,
and New York City, Sturken urges attention
be paid to a dangerous confluence of memory,
tourism, consumerism, paranoia, security,
and kitsch that promulgates fear in order
to sell safety, offers prepackaged emotion
at the expense of critical thought, contains
alternative politics not always seen until
after the fact, and facilitates public
acquiescence in the federal government's
repressive measures at home and its aggressive
political and military policies abroad.