10 Fifty years later, the Tower shooting was used in arguments both for and against SB 11, the Texas Campus Carry law. Johnson stated that one reason for the tragic incident was easy access to firearms, and he used the shooting as a rationale to push for gun control legislation. A day after Whitman’s killing spree, President Lyndon B. 9 The mass shooting was quickly entangled with debates and imaginaries of guns in U.S. The connection to the past is mediated by “imaginative investment, projection, and creation.” 8 The need for memories of the Tower shooting qualifies it as a cultural trauma, as it involves a contested process relating to its interpretation as an outcome of a particular kind of gun culture and, ultimately, of U.S. Thus, postmemory expands beyond descendants or family members, involving affiliated contemporaries and generations who recall the past trauma by means of stories, images, and observations. 7 The notion of postmemory refers to constituted memories by those who did not experience the actual traumatic event. The chronic recollections and stories display a return of traumatic knowledge, which Marianne Hirsch characterizes as postmemory. For some, just seeing the visible landmark, the 307-foot UT Tower, may trigger memories, not to mention hearing the news that Campus Carry law would come into effect on the very day of the 50th year anniversary of the shooting. Whenever something happens that reminds of the event, stories about the past resurface. I met various people who told stories about how the shooting affected the community-people who had friends or neighbors living in town when the shooting happened, or who knew people whose relatives had witnessed the actual massacre. 6 I was struck by the abiding aftershocks of the Tower shooting in the everyday lives of Austinites. I learned about the novel’s role as an ameliorative narrative for the community in coming to terms with this cultural trauma during my visits to Austin in 20. 4 The reference to this particular song is connected to an actual memory by a witness who recalls the song playing on the radio at the time Whitman began shooting from the Tower, and gives an example of how the novel is shaped in relation to memories and imagery of the mass shooting. The song playing in her head is “Monday, Monday” by The Mamas & the Papas, which hit the top of the charts in 1966. Just as she stops hoping for rescue, two young men heroically come to her aid. She has been lying on the concrete in a puddle of her own blood, terrified by the prospect that the sniper might be looking at her through his scope. 3 The character in the epigraph is the novel’s protagonist, Shelly Maddox, who has been hit by a bullet. 2 The perpetrator Charles Whitman, a former Marine and a student at UT, killed 14 people and wounded 32 others in a 96-minute shooting spree. history because of its wide media coverage. The recounted shooting is based on one of the first and most notorious mass shootings by a single individual in U.S. gun culture.Įlizabeth Crook’s novel Monday, Monday (2014) opens with a massacre on the first Monday of August in 1966, with a gunman shooting pedestrians from the observation deck of the Main Building Tower at The University of Texas at Austin. How are these figures highlighted in the narratives? What cultural values and concerns relating to mass shootings as traumatizing experiences does the gendered imagery reveal? An analysis of gendered heroes, victims, and survivors brings perspectives on the pervasive cultural mode in which the collective trauma of mass shooting is processed within U.S. The chapter focuses on the gendered figures of heroes, victims, and survivors in constituting the collective trauma that emerges as a result of a cultural crisis. The narratives reify a particular imagery that shapes the collective trauma and its affective resonance. The chapter takes a closer look at the KTBC special news report aired immediately after the shooting, and two narratives: Elizabeth’s Crook’s novel Monday, Monday (2014) and Keith Maitland’s animated documentary film Tower (2016), created in response to a collective need for commemoration several decades later. In this framing, trauma is a product of history and politics, and subject to reinterpretation. Drawing from theorization of cultural trauma and trauma cultures after World War II, this chapter explores the mediation and narrativization of the Tower shooting as a cultural trauma. The Tower shooting at The University of Texas at Austin on Augis among the first and most memorable mass shootings in U.S.
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