In the introduction of her book, Tangled Memories, cultural studies scholar Marita Sturken introduces the culture of memory, that is, “a field of negotiation through which different stories vie for a place in history”, in America (Sturken 1). In other words, cultural memory is akin to collective memory, a shared pool of knowledge that is constantly reshaped and reworked in order to form a narrative or identity for that culture. She writes that American political culture is often portrayed as amnesiac and arguing that in her own view this representation is highly superficial. America, she argues, is overflowing with memories and that it’s these collective or cultural memories that the American national identity is formed.

As an American citizen, to some extent I agree with Sturken, because, she defines memories, not in opposition to forgetting but a natural process that happens entwined with forgetting. From my emic, or insider perspective, I see America as a culture of what Sturken calls, based in Milan Kundera’s work, “strategic forgetting” (Sturken 7). In fact, American participate in this type of forgetting every day. We ignore certain police initiated violence stories because the incidents were propagated by whites against minorities; by ignoring the story we ignore the problem of racialized violence and its implications for our identity, because as American’s we don’t nationally identify as racists and therefore don’t want the implications of racialized violence to reflect back on us. Another example of “strategic forgetting” is how the media covers gun violence throughout the country, especially at schools. The media would be considered to be a “technology of memory” as termed by Sturken: objects, images, and representations through which cultural memory is articulated (Sturken 9). The media’s portrayal of these very consistent trends as infrequent episodes protects the traditional American’s identity with the second amendment to the United States constitution.

America has a long history of choosing what to forget in order to choose a more positive national or culture memory to remember instead. Because to be a nation in the globalized word we live in, it must be attractive, physically, culturally, ideologically, economically, and socially to the world. This presentation of the nation as presenting and projecting a positive identity is Joseph Nye’s term soft power. He defines soft power as “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than through coercion… It arises from the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals, and foreign and domestic policies” (Nye 166).

Cultural memory intertwined with forgetting, as Struken explicates can be an interesting way of looking at a country’s national identity and “technologies of memory” as a way that the identity is formed. There are also more enthralling and insidious implications for determining other nations views of your nation based of “strategic forgetting” and presenting an image strictly based on positive national memories.

Nye, Joseph S. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. New York: Public Affairs, 2004. Print.

Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: U of California, 1997. Print.