The killing of the American political activist and provocateur is analyzed through a cultural sociology lens, specifically the paradigm of cultural trauma and the model of social drama. According to cultural trauma theory, political violence of this type catalyzes a “meaning struggle” in its aftermath, where questions concerning what happened, who is responsible, and what is now to be done, are publicly debated. The discursive combat surrounding the meaning of Kirk’s death has produced two competing narrative frames, one calling Kirk’s killing an “assassination” that was aimed at the core of the American nation, and the other a political murder, carried out by a lone gunman without coherent political motivation. The difference is not trivial. Assassination implies an ideological motive, with the distinct possibility of coconspirators, while a murder may well have political consequences, but need not have a clear ideological basis or coconspirators. Framing the killing as an assassination multiplies the emotional impact and the significance of an incident, while calling it a murder can diffuse it. An assassination is more likely than a murder to trigger the “trauma drama” that is at the core of cultural trauma. In the case of the killing of Charlie Kirk, there was a clear attempt made to direct and promote the discourse around its meaning toward that end, to turn an incident of political violence into a matter of polarizing collective identification. At the same time, there was the attempt from the opposite side, to diffuse it, as yet another incident of the senseless violence that has a long history in American society.

The chapter traces the "meaning struggle" as carried out in the various arenas of memory in the United States. Central concepts and themes in the official narration of the war are identified and discussed, such as the " Vietnam Syndrome" and the "lessons" drawn from the lost war. Could the war have been won, was it a "failure" from the beginning and thus a "tragic mistake"? The counter-narratives developed in the powerful antiwar movement are also given a central place in the chapter. Mass media and popular culture representations of the war are discussed in detail. Artworks, novels, and other forms of aesthetic representations are included, most especially those produced by veterans. The chapter concludes by arguing that the American war was the cause of cultural trauma in the United States.

Unlike both the Vietnamese communists and the broader American society, the South Vietnamese experienced at the end of the American-Vietnamese War the annihilation of their governmental and political institutions, military forces, economic system, and mode of social organization: their state, the Republic of Vietnam, was simply snuffed out. What's more-and also in contrast to the communists and the rest of the United States-the individuals who would become Vietnamese Americans were displaced from their homeland to a foreign country. The dissolution of the Republic of Vietnam and the dislocation of the Vietnamese to North America led this group to construct a new collective identity over the course of subsequent years, and the present chapter provides an overview of what the Vietnamese Americans consistently narrate as the key moments of their shared experience.

This chapter provides a fine-grained analysis of the competing narratives of the American-Vietnamese War that have circulated within the Vietnamese-American community. The three major arenas of collective memory where these narrative contests occur are delineated (i.e., the community, the academic, and the artistic), then the specific narratives within each of those arenas are identified. Based on the ongoing narrative struggle over the nature of the war and the Vietnamese-American collective identity, the claim is made that the Vietnamese-American collectivity has suffered a cultural trauma.

After a brief historical background, this chapter explores the meaning and collective memory of the American-Vietnamese War as it is represented and displayed in Vietnamese war museums. The official narrative of these museums is the focal point of the analysis. The founding narrative celebrates the collective struggle against colonial domination, one that includes the war against the Americans. We discuss how the Vietnamese of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam have created memorial sites and ceremonies to represent this narrative of national liberation through violent struggle against more powerful enemies. Their narrative focuses on the forcefulness of long-term resilience and collective will. As other narratives exist, the dominant heroic narrative expressed in official museums and memorials is contrasted by examples from the arena of the arts and ancestor worshiping.

Reviewed by: Ugly White People Writing Whiteness in Contemporary America by Stephanie Li Ron Eyerman Ugly White People Writing Whiteness in Contemporary America. By Stephanie Li. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023 What is "whiteness"? Does it refer to skin tone, a racial category, a state of being in the world? Are "White" Americans a race or an ethnic group, another hyphenated collective identification? Answering such questions has become ever more critical in the contemporary American political and cultural climate, where declining national stature has polarized reactions and highlighted group differences. The field of whiteness studies was founded to address such issues. Unlike other ethnic studies programs, however, whiteness studies is not celebratory, looking to recover the lost or hidden histories of a marginalized group. With its focus on a dominant majority, its aims have always been critical and subversive, to examine the structures that produce a sense of privileged entitlement and the ways and means through which this is justified and reproduced. Stephanie Li's book is a contribution to this field of study. Ugly White People is about polite as opposed to aggressive whiteness, as reflected and represented in contemporary American literature. Analytically, one can distinguish white privilege – a sense of entitlement associated with skin tone – white consciousness, the articulation and justification of that entitlement, and white supremacy, its righteous defense. Li is clear to distinguish what she terms "ugly" whiteness from a conscious belief in and support for white supremacy or an outspoken racist ideology. Ugliness is here expressed in subtle and seemingly banal behavior; it is neither loud nor outspoken. It is voiced, or rather written, by "liberals" (for the most part) and reflects a form of behavior resting within "minor ways of being—not the kind of aggressive racism that makes headlines or inspires swift condemnation" (xii). More precisely, "ugly" refers to those "whose minor acts of racism— whether through repression of past atrocities, romanticized desire for an exotic other, acceptance of structural inequalities, or refusal to recognize the full humanity of people of color—contribute to a national legacy of white supremacy" (200). Li illustrates this through a close reading of a selection of twenty-first century American authors: Dave Eggers, J.D. Vance, Sarah Smarsh, Claire Messud, Gary Shteynart, Otessa Moshfegh and Ben Lerner. In her analyses of these authors, each the subject of a chapter, Li shows her skills as a theoretically informed literary critic. She guides us through these texts armed with post-colonial intersectional analysis, exposing how the racializing frameworks that structure American society influence literary expression in subtle ways, sometime counter to the intentions of the author. One of her central criticisms of the selected authors is their lack of awareness of the historical nature of that racial framework, willful in some cases and seemingly unconsciously unintentional in others. She reminds us that the point of literary criticism is not merely to place a text in its historical context, but also to show how that context shapes and permeates textual representations. As opposed many sociologists influenced by Bourdieu's field analysis, that brackets out judgement of the work itself, Li's humanities-influenced intersectionality dares enter the text to expose the forces that structure it. She reveals how these popular authors express the societal forces that surround them and produce "ugly" texts that fail to sufficiently acknowledge those forces, taking the examples of the politically polar opposite J. D Vance and Dave Eggers. With regard to Eggers who she identifies as a well-meaning liberal, Li reveals how his books are "ugly" in that they fail "to reckon with the inequalities produced by various aspects of white privilege" (xxxi). The politically conservative Vance, on the other hand, uses a class analysis to place himself, as a "hillbilly", at the lower end of the social scale, thus denying the privilege his white skin affords. The "ugliness" of Vance's writing comes from an "unencumbered embrace of whiteness that fosters isolation and civic neglect" (xxxi). What do we learn from such literary criticism and who is it aimed at? Students and scholars can marvel at what theoretically informed textual analysis reveals with regard to popular culture. The authors of these texts...

This article seeks to explain the growth of identification and support for the Palestinian cause over the last decades from a regional concern to a global movement. What are the mechanisms that made this possible? This problematic is addressed within a cultural sociological framework, focusing on the cultural work of intellectuals and the collective actions of social movements in articulating and dispersing the idea of a distinctive Palestinian identity and cause. This is a form of cultural nationalism, where claims to nationhood are rooted in the idea of a distinctive, ancient culture. Focus is on the role of intellectuals in the articulation of collective identification and the cultural representations through which it is dispersed. The prime data supported this argument consists of aesthetic representations like novels, films, and photography.

In this article, Eric Taylor Woods asks Ron Eyerman about the motivations, methods, and ideas that informed the writing of his recent book, The Making of White American Identity (2022). The conversation focuses particularly on the significance of racism, the Civil War, and popular culture in the founding and sustaining of white American identity as a mobilizing force in American politics. Along the way, Woods and Eyerman discuss the comparability of white American identity with other collective identities, including Northern Irish Unionism; Serbian Identity; and Afrikaner Identity. The aim of printing this conversation is to provoke further research and debate on the cultural sociology of white American identity.

Vietnam: A War, Not a Country explores the conflicting ways in which the American-Vietnamese War has been collectively remembered and represented from the perspective of the war’s three primary belligerents: the Vietnamese communists, the South Vietnamese, and the Americans. The book examines how the three different collectives memorialize this traumatizing historical event. Within each of these three groups there exists a number of competing narratives, generating not only a sense of shared meaning and community, but also impassioned social conflict. In order to trace these narratives within each collectivity, the authors develop the concept of arenas of memory, distinct discourses that are tied to specific individuals, organizations, and institutions that advocate specific narratives through specific forms of media. Their analysis leads them to make the case as to whether each of these societies experienced a cultural trauma as a result of the way in which the war is remembered.

Journal Article Seeds of the Sixties. By Andrew Jamison and Ron Eyerman. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. xiv, 235 pp. $25.00, ISBN 0-520-08516-7.) Get access David Steigerwald David Steigerwald Ohio State University, Marion, Ohio Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 82, Issue 1, June 1995, Pages 354–355, https://doi.org/10.2307/2082145 Published: 01 June 1995

from Kulu reside) that generates economic, social, and political outcomes for both Kulu as a town and Sweden as a country to the extent that the Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt visited Kulu town and met its mayor after his visit to the capital city Ankara in 2009, showing the importance of this migration corridor from a specific Anatolian town to Sweden. Such corridors between particular towns/cities in sending countries and destination countries present intriguing cases for migration and development research, as the implications of migration and development can be felt more deeply in small towns. Overall, the publication of this voluminous handbook is in itself an indication of the growing significance of the topic of migration and development. Routledge Handbook of Migration and Development provides an up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of migration and development, and offers a useful resource for students and scholars with an interest in understanding how human mobilities influence development and vice-versa.

This book traces the development of whiteness in the United States as a distinctive collective identification, from the early colonial period through the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. The theory of cultural trauma provides the framework for mapping and analyzing this process. The central argument is that whiteness is a mobilizing ideology, articulated and communicated over generations by individuals and carrier groups who make use of various means of mass media, from traditional print and visual media to the internet. In analyzing this transmission, hot and cold forms and thick and thin identification are distinguished. Hot forms carry clear ideological messages; cool forms are more subtle, such as genres of country music and novels and films. Memorials, such as those to the Confederacy, lie somewhere in between. The conflict over their removal, such as what occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, is a key factor in this analysis. The book’s final chapter sums up the argument and discusses the future of whiteness in the United States, when those who identify as white will no longer constitute the majority of the population.

AbstractThis chapter traces the development of new means of mass communication in transmitting the ideology of white supremacy. This occurs in a context of political turmoil, where the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam have mobilized the populace and the public sphere. White identity-based subcultures form and grow, as carriers of thick white identification, aided by new digital forms of mass media. This new means of communication adds another dimension to the articulation and distribution of the ideology of white supremacy, creating a scene where participation and recruitment can operate in a more anonymous fashion.

AbstractThe chapter traces the making of white identity from the colonial period to the Civil War. While it is present, trauma narrative plays only a marginal role in early American history, as settlers struggle to survive in a hostile environment. As a basis for collective identification and collective action, whiteness is more of a thin form, more a potential than an actual collective consciousness, while thick individual and group identification centers on religion, region, and country of origin. It was the Civil War that fully activated white consciousness and in its aftermath, the myth of a Lost Cause articulated a mythical form that could be materialized and transmitted in various forms over generations.