Groups become consumable images that erase their own violent histories

Evidence

Classes are few; they come into being by slow transformations in the mode of production; even emergent they seem perpetually at distance from themselves and have to work hard to be sure they really exist as such. Groups, on the other hand, seem to offer the gratifications of psychic identity (from nationalism to neoethnicity). Since they have become images, groups allow the amnesia of their own bloody pasts, of persecution and untouchability, and can now be consumed: this marks their relationship to the media, which are, as it were, their parliament and the space of their “representation,” in the political fully as much as the semiotic sense. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 746

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports the reader’s stated intent — this is the mechanism by which style/identity becomes a media commodity, periodizable. — connects to: Threatened group members either reinterpret history or revise their group’s image — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt: International…, 1054; High glorifiers minimize and deflect their own group’s atrocities. — Bernhard Leidner et al., Ingroup Glorification, Moral…, 26
• ADDENDUM: Fits ‘Grafting & Growth’ / identity-as-consumable theme via the media as groups’ representational parliament.
• SEED: Angle: how neoethnicity and nationalist identity are consumed as images, with their histories of persecution amnestied — modern examples from wellness-culture ethnicity to marketing ‘authenticity.’