Examines the emotional, formal, and environmental dimensions of war commemoration
Experiencing War Memorials is a compelling edited collection of essays that examines how war is commemorated through public memorials and the powerful emotions and ideologies these sites generate. Drawing on fields such as war studies, affect studies, public memory studies, and the environmental humanities, the volume demonstrates that commemoration is not only an intellectual act but an embodied, affective experience.
Through diverse case studies, contributors analyze how memorials shape public feelings about fast and slow violence, including battles, massacres, incarceration, colonialism, slavery and its afterlives, and the uneven harms of climate change. The essays reveal how materials, landscapes, narrative conventions, and innovative memorial forms guide emotional responses such as grief, pride, ambivalence, and outrage while making injustice perceptible. Against the backdrop of ongoing debates over heritage and violence, the collection insists on the importance of attending to the messy and disordered emotional dimensions of public memory. Essays explore memorials that center marginalized experiences, from Native American and female veterans to military working dogs; scrutinize unsettling sites such as Confederate monuments and overlooked Holocaust locations; and consider digital, ecological, and pandemic-era memorials that expand the boundaries of commemoration.
Edited by Jennifer K. Ladino, Experiencing War Memorials offers nuanced insights into how memorial practices shape national identities, ethical understanding, and the possibilities for social change, illuminating the profound ways public remembrance influences how societies feel, remember, and reckon with violence in all its forms. This volume will appeal to scholars and students of memory studies, war and cultural studies, environmental humanities, and American studies, as well as museum professionals, artists, and readers interested in the politics and emotions of public commemoration.
About the Author :
Jennifer K. Ladino is a professor of English at the University of Idaho. She is the author of Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature and Memorials Matter: Emotion, Environment, and Public Memory at American Historical Sites. She is the coeditor of Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment.
Review :
"The essays in this timely and carefully conceived project are well researched and focus on the intersection of war memory and affect studies." —Susan McCready, author of Commemorative Acts: French Theatre and the Memory of the Great War
"This exciting collection is a clear benefit to the study of war memory, memorialization, and commemoration." —William T. Allison, coauthor of American Military History: A Survey from Colonial Times to the Present
"This is a vibrant collection of essays whose writers seek to reframe memorialization and public memory in light of the tensions many memorials provoke. Case studies are diverse, including chapters on memorials to war dogs, white supremacy and lynching, the Mexican-American border, and the conflict between native Americans and white Mormon settlers in Utah. Each chapter activates one's thinking about the emotional experience of contradictory and interconnected interactions with memorial spaces across the United States and around the world." —David A. Messenger, author of War and Public Memory: Case Studies in Twentieth-Century Europe
"This luminous collection compellingly shows how war memorials generate and circulate public feelings—grief, pride, shame, outrage—across scales from the local to the planetary. Through rich, interdisciplinary case studies, it rethinks commemoration as a site of affective encounter and ethical reckoning in an age of ecological and political crisis." —Stef Craps, coeditor of Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies
