ABSTRACT
Based on scholarly literature from a variety of disciplines, in its overview of the domestic politics of national memory in the United States, this chapter argues that American remembrance is a dynamic, multi-player and yet also hierarchically structured field. The country’s history of colonization, slavery and immigration has made for a multiplicity of ethnic and subcultural memories that subscribe to elements of, but at times also challenge, the nation’s dominant, Anglo-American memory régime. Several of the major ethnic groups’ commemorative events have also been codified in the nation’s memory calendar, thus enriching the country’s dominant perspective of the past. Yet both the government and the most powerful social and political groups enforce their dominant national memory régime, especially at a time of real or imagined crisis. All the while, the increasingly sophisticated popular culture industry has been developing formulae for depicting the nation’s history in ways that maximize audience interest and experience, and thereby also profits, while minimizing the complex and painful political and moral questions of the past. Finally, the occasional controversies over progressive critiques of the nation’s past serve as reminders to the United States government to privilege its domestic constituencies in its international memory diplomacy.
