Journal of Transnational American Studies

This essay proposes ecological forms of memory that unsettle dominant processes of remembering war that privilege nationalist narratives of heroism and conquest in mourning the loss of human life. Instead, we theorize an aesthetic relationship between refugee memory and more-than-human witnessing that offers an avenue to remember militarized landscapes differently. While nationalist practices of memory often demand cohesion around a collective identity or a universal humanism, ecologies of memory prior­itize diffuse stories of horizontal kinship that open up new possibilities of making com­munity amongst more-than-human denizens caught in the web of imperial war. In this essay, we examine three incomplete aesthetic inquiries into the memorialization of mili­ta­rized environments: the community curation of The Missing Piece Project Collective, Tiffany Chung’s installation For the Living, and Binh Danh’s chlorophyll prints One Week’s Dead. These interventions respond to the enduring presence of the Vietnam Veterans Mem­orial in Washington, DC, as a representation of how memories of scarred psyches and environments are consolidated into a national consciousness. In doing so, these artists com­plicate forms of memorialization by attending to the diasporic, ephemeral, and incon­clusive, creating new forms of collective memory that account for communal relationships with each other and with nonhuman environments.