Transmediated Memory of the Crusades in U.S/Middle East Relations
Brian Johnsrud, Stanford University

James Wertsch argues that cultural memory is distributed between active agents and the cultural tools they employ, making cultural memory fundamentally mediated. The more we employ multiple culturally mediated platforms (e.g. Wikipedia, online history forums) to recall and engage with the past, I argue, the more our memory becomes cultural and transmediated. While Henry Jenkins' limits his focus on transmedia storytelling to franchises, the notion is helpful for characterizing the diverse, multi-mediated terrain of representations of the past.Through my ethnographic fieldwork on the popular reception of National Geographic's Genographic Project genetic ancestry studies, I question how transnational relations interact with new media as transcultural tools to accept, negotiate, or contest local and global identity politics. The Phoenician and Crusader pasts were employed to justify sectarian violence during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90), and afterward many of these histories were officially censored in a work of national amnesia. That is, they remained silenced until The Genographic Project created a scientific narrative that resurrected the contemporary significance of these controversial pasts through multiple, transmediated platforms.After three years of intermittent participant observation in Genographic labs in Lebanon, I conducted 30 in-depth interviews with Lebanese individuals who received genetic ancestry results that marked them as patrilineal descendants of Phoenicians, Arabs, or medieval European Crusaders. The interviews focused on participants' reception and interpretation of their genetic results and the kinship networks and print, digital, or online media they employed to interpret, negotiate, or creatively remediate their newfound relationship with the past.This paper emphasizes the effectiveness of comparative, multi-sited ethnography and semi-structured, case study interviewing. These methods are particularly useful for exploring the transnational co-construction of the past in new realms like ancestry genetics and their transmediated representations in scientific reports, online communities, and international news coverage. My findings reorient cultural memory studies and our notion of the public or private "Carchive" by attending to to audience reception and socially mediated engagements with the past.Brian Johnsrud is finishing his PhD in Stanford's interdisciplinary Program in Modern Thought and Literature under the supervision of Fred Turner and Amir Eshel. Brian's research considers how the Crusades and other violent histories have served as popular metaphors for relations between the U.S. and Middle East since the First Gulf War. In particular, he explores how those analogies are employed and mediated to affect realms like U.S. national intelligence reports, conspiracy theory novels like Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, genetic ancestry studies conducted by National Geographic in Lebanon, and Iraqi primary school textbook revision by the U.S. after 2003.Read more about Brian Johnsrud at: http://www.stanford.edu/~johnsrud/index.html