Transnational Bataan memories : text, film, monument, and commemoration

Abstract

This dissertation is a study of the politics of historical commemoration relating to the Bataan Death March. I began by looking for abandonment but instead I found struggles for visibility. To explain this diverse set of moves, this dissertation deploys a theoretical framework and a range of research methods that enables analysis of disparate subjects such as war memoirs, films, memorials, and commemorative events. Therefore, each chapter in this dissertation looks at a different yet interrelated struggle for visibility. This dissertation is unique because it gives voice to competing publics, it looks at the stakes they have in creating monuments of historical remembrance, and it acknowledges their competing reasons for producing their version of history. My research is historical, archival, and ethnographic and thus consistent with the interdisciplinary nature of American Studies. Prisoners of War or POWs write memoirs in order to be recognized. Movies internally contradict themselves as a challenge to a preferred reading. Survivors construct monuments as a means of transforming space and to save a dying legacy. Finally, old and new generations both ritualize events and reenact battles to remind themselves and others of their past. The official narrative of Bataan is set through the development of key works written for the various branches of the armed forces that function as diaries of military operation. In these works, the experience of the POWs is absent. By writing personal recollections POWs become part of a discourse where once they were not included. Moreover, American veterans and expatriates not just write and build their new visibilities, they also perform them. Thus, this study shines a light on discourses that change the learning landscape and impacts what is visible.