A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (review)

"This book," author Emily S. Rosenberg concludes at the close of her study of Pearl Harbor, "has attempted to work against the revelatory and event-centered tradition that generally seeks to uncover the 'reality' of the past and to stabilize historical meaning" (189). Instead, Rosenberg tries to understand Pearl Harbor less as an event, or a chain of causal effects (the facts surrounding December 7, 1941 have long since been exhaustively "uncovered") than as an unstable and contingent series of memory acts reflecting debates about, primarily, militarism or military culture and racial politics in the United States in the last six decades. She goes beyond simply asserting that Pearl Harbor is "a date which will live" (as recent invocations of the event in the wake of 9-11 seem to have affirmed) in order to focus instead on how it "lives" in a thousand guises and symbolizes dozens of often conflicting historical "lessons" (5). This study pays homage to the important recent scholarship on history and memory, a field of theory that dispenses with the illusion of a public/private divide between history and memory by exposing the unstable aesthetic and affective terms of official forms of remembrance. Rosenberg's adoption of this view of "history/memory" allows her to appreciate especially how the representation of Pearl Harbor has been shaped by "diverse print, celluloid, electronic and commemorative media" (7), amid a half century of cataclysmic cultural and political upheaval.

The book is divided into two sections. The first lays out the foundational meanings that initially became associated with Pearl Harbor, and the second section examines the significant post-1991 revisions and re-transcriptions of Pearl Harbor's meaning. Topics include the immediate post-WWII debates about what Pearl Harbor did or did not reveal about "backdoor" government deceit and American-Japanese relations, as well as the impact of the many controversies surrounding the fiftieth anniversary celebrations and the increasing visibility of Japanese American internment in academic and popular accounts of the early years of World War II. The ten chapters are short, usually no more than twenty pages (one chapter, "Commemoration of Sacrifice" is barely ten pages, in fact). As a result, this study is best approached as an attempt to sketch, rather than to question or re-vision, the broader significance of these episodes in shaping the cultural stakes and practices of remembering Pearl Harbor.

Although Rosenberg is a historian, her analysis would probably disappoint those historians seeking comprehensive, detailed engagements with these complex debates and the archives that continue to amass about them. Asian American historians, in particular, will find nothing new or provocative in the chapter on Japanese American internment, for example. Rosenberg characterizes Japanese American narratives of the internment as either "compliance" (or "model minority") and "resistance" (142) stories, a familiar if somewhat reductive viewpoint. Curiously, this assertion appears in the context of a passage where Rosenberg quotes Lisa Lowe's observation that "stereotypes that construct Asians as the threatening 'yellow peril,' or alternatively, that pose Asians as the domesticated 'model minority'" (143) serve to maintain the coherence of the United States in the face of histories of racism that often exceed its logic. A number of other points of historical "fact" would likewise benefit from more questioning or troubling. In Chapter 5, "Bilateral Relations", which treats the controversies that arose in the months leading to the fiftieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor in 1991, Rosenberg observes that "the emergence of strong identity politics during the 1980s and 1990s," acting in concert with "the end of the cold war," established the tense terms of the global debates about the commemoration of Pearl Harbor (102). Yet nothing more is said about the convergence of these ideological shifts in the rhetoric or tenor of the debates. Neither does the chapter confront the question of how these cultural formations affected the rising demands within the United States for a presidential apology for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nor the meaning of the...