Campbell, Peter
(2020)
Naval Nostalgia and Racial Memory in the United States, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.
In: Pitt Momentum Fund 2020, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pa.
(Unpublished)
Abstract
“Naval Nostalgia and Racial Memory in the United States, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands” seeks, for the first time, to build a comprehensive account of the situated and physical arrangement of naval nostalgia rhetoric—in museums, parks, battlefield monuments, and sites of active operation—across the histories and geographies of the maritime empires of England, the Netherlands, and the United States. These three empires are intimately and related (for example, through U.S., English, and Dutch conflicts with the Empire of Japan in the Pacific before and during World War II). To date, most studies of this relationship have focused on the Atlantic—and work on the Pacific has tended to treat this as a wholly separated space. My work considers how naval memory practices in the Pacific might work together with maritime museums on the U.S. and European Atlantic seaboards. To my knowledge, “Naval Nostalgia and Racial Memory” will be the first attempt to connect naval memory sites across English and Dutch locations in the Atlantic, and present U.S. naval colonies in Pacific archipelagoes. I am a rhetorician—a student of discursive modes for human interaction and collective memory building—with training in U.S. composition and communication studies. Work in rhetoric and communication studies on U.S. war memorials in France has argued for the trans-Atlantic character of U.S. memorial rhetoric. My work will build on this scholarship by illustrating the importance of transnational, European and U.S. approaches to understanding how museum and monument rhetoric works in the construction of specifically maritime imperial and post-imperial national memory. Generic differences in U.S., UK, and Netherlands naval nostalgia rhetoric provide insight into how discourses of racial apology are composed across these interconnected maritime empires: and in the role the U.S. Navy plays in composing justifications for ongoing U.S. settler colonialism in the Pacific.
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