TY - CHAP
T1 - The Diffusion of an Atomic Icon
T2 - Nuclear Hegemony and Cultural Memory Loss
AU - O’Gorman, Ned
AU - Hamilton, Kevin
PY - 2012/1/1
Y1 - 2012/1/1
N2 - In America, visual imagery related to the “Atomic Age” stands ready for recall as a style, easily appropriated into retro-fashion and nostalgia. But Americans with access to the Atomic Age as style don’t necessarily stand ready to recall the era’s inaugural event-that of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thus, within Atomic Age aesthetics, understood as the performance of collective memory, there exists a gap. This chapter considers how that gap might not be so much the product of a collective mental block, but the extension of the structure of the Atomic Age archive as it was built in the Cold War. For the horrible imagery of nuclear destruction was not so much forgotten as it was lost, and it was lost as it was managed, even displaced, by competing iconography.
AB - In America, visual imagery related to the “Atomic Age” stands ready for recall as a style, easily appropriated into retro-fashion and nostalgia. But Americans with access to the Atomic Age as style don’t necessarily stand ready to recall the era’s inaugural event-that of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thus, within Atomic Age aesthetics, understood as the performance of collective memory, there exists a gap. This chapter considers how that gap might not be so much the product of a collective mental block, but the extension of the structure of the Atomic Age archive as it was built in the Cold War. For the horrible imagery of nuclear destruction was not so much forgotten as it was lost, and it was lost as it was managed, even displaced, by competing iconography.
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U2 - 10.4324/9780203803400
DO - 10.4324/9780203803400
M3 - Chapter
AN - SCOPUS:84920449187
SN - 9780415895538
SN - 9780415744164
T3 - Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication
SP - 189
EP - 208
BT - Rhetoric, Remembrance, and Visual Form
A2 - Demo, Anne Teresa
A2 - Vivian, Bradford
PB - Routledge
CY - New York
ER -