I'll Be There: Stories, Collected Memories, Half-Truths, Counter Memories & Somewhat Just Memories of James Foley

James Savage

Advisor: Douglas Eyman, PhD, Department of English

Committee Members: Michelle LaFrance, Alison Landsberg

Horizon Hall, #3012, https://gmu.zoom.us/j/91555360917?pwd=q7NHW0bbwyJtHsHL75fx2bFIb0eDuD.1
April 29, 2026, 02:00 PM to 04:00 PM

Abstract:

Conflict journalist James Foley was beheaded by Mohammed Emwazi in the late summer of 2014, and a video of the alleged moments before and after his beheading circulated around the world. From a historical perspective, Foley’s death was a tragic ending to two years of brutal captivity and the beginning of an escalation of US and British bombing in the region, bombing that weakened ISIS and eventually played a role in toppling the Assad regime. From the perspective of individual and collective memory, Foley’s death set off a whirlwind of remembrance that continues today: remembrance in the form of political speeches, media reports, critique and revision of US hostage policy, educational curricula, witness testimony, journalism awards, films, books, and more, some by those who never met Jim and many by family and friends. In most of these cases, there is a mention of Jim’s memory in the broad, colloquial sense, often coupled with a wish, implicit or explicit, to (re)claim him, to distill his identity and to use him for political and personal ends in the present. Yet, specific memory concepts from memory scholarship are rarely, if ever, mentioned or applied, and stories about him often compete with one another for space in what Rothberg (2009) has called a zero-sum game.

This dissertation seeks to see Jim as object of memory rather than a figure of history and to apply specific memory concepts, such as counter-memory, just memory, multidirectional memory, prosthetic memory, and collected memory to his story and the memory of those people and events his story evokes. In doing so, it creates a collected memory, a piece of art that does not foreclose other memories but includes as much as it can and invites more and more—a memory that at one and the same time attempts to (re)claim Jim and to argue that his memory is indeterminate, dynamic, and ephemeral, and that he is unclaimable and unknowable.