Viet Tranh Nguyen visited campus a while back.

I've been reading his book, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, and a great deal of his thought strikes me as relevant to the "Trojan War" whose literature we are studying.

A thesis I have been entertaining is that the very fact that the "Trojan War" was far in the past, so far that it was a completely different age and the players were both more than human and divine, makes it not less of a battleground for identities (of Greeks, of Trojans, of Romans, of so many others), but more so, because the power of the imagination reigns supreme here, and imagination is what builds identity.

Some quotations from the first chapter, "Just Memory."

• To think of war solely as combat, and its main protagonist as the soldier, who is primarily imagined as male, stunts the understanding of the war's identity and works to the advantage of the war machine.

• In the desert of organized forgetting, memory is as important as water, for memory is a strategic resource in the struggle for power. Wars cannot be fought without control over memory and its inherent opposite, forgetting (which, despite seeming to be an absence, is an actual resource). Nations cultivate and would monopolize, if they could, both memory and forgetting.

• Those who resist war foreground a different ethics of remembering others. They call for remembering enemies and victims, the weak and the forgotten, the marginalized and the minor, the women and the children, the environment and the animals, the distant and the demonized, all of whom suffer during war and most of whom are usually forgotten in nationalist memories of war.

• In the struggles that take place within and between nations for the meanings of war and the justifications for them, those who resist war and remember others fight for the imagination, not for a nation. In the imagination new identities can arise, alternatives to national identities and the identities that nations attribute to their wars.

• Art is the artifact of the imagination and imagination is the best manifestation of immortality possessed by the human species, a collective table recording both human and inhuman deeds and desires. The powerful fear art's potentially enduring quality and its influence on memory, and thus they seek to dismiss, co-opt, or suppress it. They often succeed, for while art is only sometimes explicitly nationalistic and propagandistic, it is often implicitly so.

• ... memories are not simply images we experience as individuals, but are mass-produced fantasies we share with one another. Memories are not only collected or collective, they are also corporate and capitalist. Memories are signs and products of power, and in turn, they service power.

• Our ambivalence about war's identity simply expresses ambivalence about our own identities, which are collectively inseparable from the wars our nations have fought. These are the wars for which we have paid, from which we have benefitted, by which we are traumatized.
  

• The basic dialectic of memory and amnesia is ... fundamentally about remembering our humanity and forgetting our inhumanity, while conversely remembering the inhumanity of others and forgetting their humanity. A just memory demands instead ... a shift toward ... remembering how the inhuman inhabits the human.