Occupy wall street meets occupy Iraq: On remembering and forgetting in a digital age

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-8-2013

Abstract

The transformation of iconic images of traumatic historical events into everyday humorous practice illuminates the mechanisms of remembering and forgetting that operate in digital popular culture. The image-icon has the power to evoke history, to function in Walter Benjamin's terms as a monad. This power, however, is fleeting as history is yet again rendered latent and forgotten once it is transformed into a gesture or everyday common sense. In this article, Stefka Hristova offers a comparative analysis of two Internet-driven participatory memes - "Pepper Spray Cop" and "Doing a Lynndie" - to illuminate the role digital media plays in the remembering and forgetting of what W. J. T. Mitchell calls the "histor[ies] of perception" of the November 18, 2011, pepper spaying of peaceful protesters at the University of California, Davis, and of the 2004 abuse and torture of Iraqi detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison. © 2013 by MARHO: The Radical Historians' Organization, Inc.

Publication Title

Radical History Review

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