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Review
| Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, by Alison Landsberg. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 215 pp. $59.50, cloth; $22.50, paper.
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| When looking at popular and public history, historians typically drop to their knees and throw their hands in the air. In a low mumble or loud groan, they lament the errors, omissions, and uncritical reverence that passes for history in the public sphere. That these histories all too often serve jingoistic ends only adds to the frustration. Alison Landsberg's Prosthetic Memory provides an insightful way to rethink the history presented in novels, museums, movies, and television dramas. She posits that visiting a museum, reading a novel, or viewing a film provides more than historical information; mass media sources allow audiences to create "prosthetic memories" for things that they—or their direct ancestors—never experienced. |
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In an original and provocative thesis, Landsberg urges her readers to consider how mass culture generates and shapes individual and collective memory. In her words, "the technologies of mass culture and the capitalist economy of which they are a part open up a world of images outside a person's lived experience, creating a portable, fluid, and nonessentialist form of memory" (18). Like a prosthetic limb on an amputee, these technological memories are not "organic" products of lived experience. Yet, also like prostheses, they are carried around with us and become part of our lived experience. Most importantly, prosthetic memories are useful: "Because they feel real, they help condition how a person thinks about the world and might be instrumental in articulating an ethical relation to the other" (21). These memories are not always conduits of repression; rather, these prostheses can provide consumers access to the experiences and memories of oppressed and marginalized minorities in progressive ways. |
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Prosthetic Memory applies this theory to the ways Americans remember three traumatic historical experiences: the late nineteenth and early twentieth century "new immigration" of Eastern Europeans to the urban northeast United States, African American slavery, and the Holocaust of European Jewry during World War II. In our "age of mass culture" consumers gain access to "sites of sensuous, as well as cognitive, knowledge production" (129). Landsberg's argument is most convincing when it draws on depictions of historical events constructed by fiction writers, movie directors, and museum curators. In arguing that "the kinds of memories to which we have 'intimate,' even experiential, access now, are no longer limited to events through which we actually lived" (143), Landsberg provocatively urges her readers to see that mass culture can provide the technologies for empathy and, perhaps, social responsibility. |
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For example, after viewing Schindler's List, visiting the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, or reading Art Spiegelman's Maus, consumers can remember the Holocaust because of the ways the mass media constructs consumption as experience. In the case of the Holocaust Museum, visitors are handed an identity card of a victim of the genocide, confront difficult images and events as that person, and have few opportunities to rest. It is a physical, emotional, and intellectual ordeal. But it is not an experience of the Holocaust itself. "Rather," Landsberg writes, "they have an experience that positions their bodies to be better able to understand an otherwise unthinkable event" (131). As they do so, visitors from a wide variety of backgrounds will do more than think about the experience of European Jews; they will feel it in their bodies and remember the experience. |
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Prosthetic Memory provides an important new way to understand how consumers incorporate the perspectives and lessons of the mass media. Its use of secondary sources by professional historians, however, adds little substance to this otherwise excellent book. For example, in the chapter on immigration, Landsberg chooses novels like Henry Roth's Call it Sleep and Mary Antin's The Promised Land that depict Jewish immigrants leaving behind European identities as they embrace more assimilated versions of "American" identity. The topic of these novels is only one among many possible "prosthetic memories" through which readers can gain access to the past. Similarly, while Landsberg uses rich and evocative fictional and cinematic sources for her chapter on "remembering slavery," she privileges Stanley Elkin's contention that the past, for enslaved Africans, "had been annihilated" (86). Elkin's work is an important piece of the historiography of slavery, but the counterargument presented by scholars from Melville Herskovits to Michael Gomez is nowhere to be found. Nevertheless, Prosthetic Memory will be particularly useful for teachers looking for a way to inspire students to rethink the ways they view historical memory in the age of mass culture. It will be especially useful in courses on public history or in classes that make frequent use of novels, films, or museums. |
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| State University of New York at New Paltz |
Lee Bernstein |
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