I WOULD LIKE to express my gratitude to the various institutions and individuals whose intellectual, moral, and financial support enabled me to complete this book.
The ideas for this book originated from a series of papers I wrote for several groundbreaking international conferences and symposia on memory, media, and history. I thank the following colleagues for providing me the opportunity to present my work and for the insightful feedback I received: Ann Gray and Erin Bell, organizers of the “Televising History” conference at the University of Lincoln in 2009; Leonardo Gandini, organizer of the “Memory and Media” conference in Trento, Italy, in 2009; Michael Rothberg and Stef Craps, who put together the seminar “Creolizing Memory” for the American Comparative Literature Association’s annual meeting in 2010; Anne Rigney, organizer of “Memory on the Move” at the University of Utrecht in 2010; Eleanor Ty and Russ Kilbourn, organizers of “Memory, Mediation, Remediation: An International Conference on Memory in Literature and Film” at Wilfrid Laurier University in 2011; and Stephan Jaeger, organizer of “Languages and Cultures of Conflicts and Atrocities” in Winnipeg, Canada, in 2012. I am grateful also to Malgorzata Rymsza-Pawlowska, who as a graduate student at Brown University invited me to a give a talk there in 2011 and to participate in an exciting Mellon Workshop, “Affect Unbounded,” that she and other graduate students organized.
I am eternally grateful to Robert Rosenstone and Alun Munlsow, founding editors of the journal Rethinking History. They were early champions of my work, and as this book attests, their own extensive scholarship has been incredibly important to my thinking.
Portions of chapter 1 were first published as “Politics and the Historical Film: Hotel Rwanda and the Form of Engagement,” in A Companion to the Historical Film, edited by Robert Rosenstone and Constantin Parvulescu, 11–29 (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), and a portion of chapter 2 first appeared as “Waking the Deadwood of History: Listening, Language, and the ‘Aural Visceral,’” Rethinking History 14, no. 4 (2010): 531–49. I am grateful for the permission to include them in this book.
I owe a significant debt to my colleagues in both the Department of History and Art History and the Cultural Studies Ph.D. program at George Mason University; I have benefited enormously from being around a group of talented and supportive colleagues. Although neither Roy Rosenzweig nor Larry Levine were alive during the writing of this book, their commitments to democratizing history and to examining how history is disseminated, produced, and acquired outside the academy were a true inspiration. Deborah Kaplan, colleague and dear friend, has been a crucial interlocutor for me. I am profoundly grateful for her pointed questions and truly insightful suggestions and for her meticulous reading of the full manuscript.
I could not ask for a better editorial team than the one I worked with at Columbia University Press. My editor, Philip Leventhal, was a supporter of this somewhat unconventional project from the beginning, and Anne McCoy, Whitney Johnson, Annie Barva, and others were consistently patient and helpful. Not all authors are lucky enough to receive thorough, insightful, and, above all, useful readers’ reports; I am grateful to the anonymous readers of this manuscript, whose invaluable suggestions certainly made it better. Of course, only I am responsible for the book’s shortcomings.
Although my children, Eli and Leah, were until recently only dimly aware that I was writing another book, they nevertheless contributed in important ways to the project. From the time that Eli was little, he has always wanted to understand the big picture. His questions are profound and energizing, and they provide precisely the kinds of provocations to new thoughts that I take up in this book. Leah, perhaps the most empathetic person I know, always tries to see every situation from the other side. Her lack of cynicism and her ardent desire to see the good in everything are an inspiration to me and are reflected in the way I approach the mass-cultural texts that I analyze.
My colleague, friend, and husband, Matthew B. Karush, was fully aware that I was writing another book! He has been my sounding board and my most tireless reader for nearly two decades. His incisive questions and insights have been instrumental in helping me to develop and refine my ideas. It is to him that I owe my deepest gratitude.