In the past few decades, thousands of new memorials to executed witches,
victims of terrorism, and dead astronauts, along with those that pay
tribute to civil rights, organ donors, and the end of Communism have
dotted the American landscape. Equally ubiquitous, though until now less
the subject of serious inquiry, are temporary memorials: spontaneous
offerings of flowers and candles that materialize at sites of tragic and
traumatic death. In Memorial Mania, Erika Doss argues that these
memorials underscore our obsession with issues of memory and history,
and the urgent desire to express--and claim--those issues in visibly
public contexts.
Doss shows how this desire to memorialize the past disposes itself to
individual anniversaries and personal grievances, to stories of tragedy
and trauma, and to the social and political agendas of diverse numbers
of Americans. By offering a framework for understanding these sites,
Doss engages the larger issues behind our culture of commemoration.
Driven by heated struggles over identity and the politics of
representation, Memorial Mania is a testament to the fevered pitch of
public feelings in America today.