The
Enola Gay Controversy:
The Politics of Experience or Truth Telling
at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century
Barbara Biesecker, Department of Communication Studies
The University of Iowa
Barbara
Biesecker teaches and writes at the intersections of
contemporary rhetorical theory and criticism, feminist theory
and criticism, and cultural studies. A few of her regular course
offerings at the graduate level are: Visual Rhetoric; The
Question of Agency; Rhetoric, Feminism and Social Change;
Rhetoric and Poststructuralism; and Twentieth Century Rhetorical
Criticism and Theory. She also teaches the following courses on
the undergraduate level: Visual Rhetoric, Feminist Critical
Practice, Communication and Contemporary Culture, and Twentieth
Century Rhetorical Criticism. In addition to a book (Addressing
Postmodernity: Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric, and a Theory of Social
Change), Dr. Biesecker has published her work in various
scholarly journals and essay collections. She now serves as an
associate editor for several national journals, is co-editing a
volume of essays on rhetoric and materiality, and is in the
process of writing a book-length manuscript on recuperations of
World War II at the end of the twentieth century.
Abstract: Between
the release of Patton and Tora!Tora!Tora! in the early 70s and
the premier of Saving Private Ryan in the late 90s, World War II
virtually disappeared from the national popular scene. Indeed,
in striking contrast to its popularity during the postwar era,
"by the early 1970s," as Tom Engelhardt notes in his historical
analysis of the "Vietnamization" or "castration" of American
culture, "the 'Good War' . . . had lost its recyclable
quality." This presentation is, then, part of a larger effort
to take rhetorical stock of its dramatic uptake almost thirty
years later. Exactly how, I ask, is WWII being given back to us
today, and to what effect?
Overall, the book
will argue that recent popular cultural representations of the
"Good War," from blockbuster movies to cable television series
and best selling books, from museum displays to monuments and
memorials, together constitute one of the primary means through
which a renewed sense of national belonging is being
persuasively packaged and delivered to U.S. audiences for whom
the question, What does it mean to be an American? has, at least
since the Civil War, never been more difficult to answer. I
will argue that if, as scholars from both the left and the right
have argued, "for the second time in the nation's history, there
is a real question of how to maintain a stable and effective
relationship between America's unum and pluribus," present day
recuperations of WWII may be understood as a decisive answer to
it. By examining these "memory texts" and the discourses that
circulated about them in the popular press and mass media, I
show how these extraordinarily well received reconstructions of
the past function rhetorically as civics lessons for a
generation beset by fractious disagreements about the viability
of American culture and identity itself (evidenced by, for
example, the canon wars and the English Only and affirmative
action debates) as it moved toward what Ronald Takaki has called
"the multicultural millennium." By manufacturing and embracing
a particular kind of American, a certain idea of what it means
to be a "good citizen," these popular cultural texts, best
understood as technologies of national transformation, promote
national cohesion by rhetorically inducing differently
positioned audiences to disregard rather than actively seek to
dismantle the assymetrical power relations that continue to
structure collective life in the U.S.
The chapter I am
sharing with the POROI seminarians (chapter two in the book),
revisits the Enola Gay controversy. By putting the controversy
into explicit contact with the larger cultural formation to
which it contributes and of which it is a part, I will suggest
that its legacy is to have inaugurated a process by which World
War II has been discursively transformed from an event in the
past about which we try to make sense into a mode of sense
making or matrix of popular reasoning in the present. More
specifically, I will argue that what is of lasting political
significance about the Enola Gay controversy is that it laid the
epistemological groundwork for the emergence of a powerful new
"truth teller" for the twenty-first century who, bursting onto
the national popular scene in 1998 with the release of Steven
Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, would speak with unassailable
authority not only about "The Good War" but also, and more
important, about what it means to be an American and to do
things the American Way.
My primary aim in
this chapter, then, is to supplement the liberal historians'
reading of the Enola Gay controversy as the story of the demise
of the freedom of speech at the end of twentieth century with
yet another: the story of the discursive installation of a new
and singularly commanding speaking subject on the eve of the
next. Not coincidentally, this truth-teller for the
twenty-first century on whose ethos is predicated his
unassailable authority to tell the truth has a determined
relation to those visual remainders and reminders of ground zero
whose own truth effects are, along the way, also and
simultaneously being remade.
[Thursday, October 21;
7:30-9:30
PM; 302 Schaeffer Hall]
