On Commemoration - Barnard College - September 2011 (original) (raw)
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Performing trauma: Commemorating 9/11 in downtown Manhattan
Memory Studies, 2018
There are two memorials at the site of the World Trade Center: the above ground Memorial Park and the below ground Memorial Museum. They embody very different conceptions of how an event such as 9/11 should be remembered. The Memorial Park was an attempt to integrate the recognition of loss into the ongoing life of the city. It fails to do this, largely because it succumbs to the temptation to let the site itself—“Ground Zero”—do the work of memory. The two pools (“voids”) are located on the footprints of the two towers. They dominate the site, inheriting the clumsy monumentality of the destroyed buildings. The underground Memorial Museum combines relics, remnants, images, and newsreels, to involve its visitors in the emotional immediacy of the events of 9/11. It presents 9/11 as a traumatic memory, one to be re-experienced but not understood, placing it outside history in a kind of perpetual present. It reinforces what Marita Sturken identified as a national sense of innocence, and...
Compelling Memory: 9/11 and the Work of Mourning in Mike Binder's Reign over Me
Cultural Critique, 2016
In New York, a block from the National 9/11 Memorial Museum, stands the 9/11 Tribute Center (opened in 2006 and previously known as the Tribute WTC Visitor Center), which aims to commemorate the victims and convey accounts of 9/11 and the earlier 1993 World Trade Center bombing through "person to person history." When I visited, in 2010, the promise "We will never forget" was prominently featured on a wall in the exhibition, which also included video and audio recordings of personal testimonies, a time line of the attacks, and a model of the buildings and memorial planned for the WTC site. A large section of the Tribute Center was devoted to a gift shop selling, as the brochure put it, "Tribute items" that "allow visitors to take home and remember the Tribute experience." The displacement from commemorating the attacks to remembering one's experience at the Tribute Center is remarkable, all the more so because of the necessary relation established to material consumption; the implication being that only those who return home with Tribute items will remember. According to Marita Sturken, 9/11 souvenirs envelop their purchasers in a depoliticizing "comfort culture" (2007, 5), while Karen J. Engle sees them as allowing Americans to narcissistically identify with the dominant patriotic narrative of the event (72). What I want to add to these perspectives is a focus on the expressive dimension of these souvenirs-the way in which, as material objects designed to be put on display, they not only provide their owners with a sense of decontextualized comfort or patriotic identiWcation but also serve to certify to others that memory is taking place and that it is doing so in the "proper" socially sanctioned form. 1 This expressive dimension also manifests in a card distributed at the Tribute Center advertising the opportunity to sponsor a cobblestone on the National 9/11 Memorial Plaza by imploring: "Help pave the way Cultural Critique 92-Winter 2016-Copyright 2016 Regents of the University of Minnesota
Enacting Remembrance: Turning Toward Memorializing September 11th
The memorial at the site of the former World Trade Center will open on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 to help us commemorate, honor, educate, and mourn. Memori-alizing is an act that involves shared memory and collective grieving—aiming also to restore severed communal bonds and dismantled cultural ideals. As such, it is a form of cultural renewal that can transform traumatized mourners into an ethical community of memory. The active rituals of memorial activity utilize both inscribed and non-inscribed practices to help survivors of mass trauma manage fear, disorganization, and helplessness as well as sorrow. To bear witness to horrific events and the suffering they induced is a moral act. To do so together with people who may have seen the events of 9/11 from other perspectives, while also remembering one's own vision of what mattered, may mean learning to tolerate multiple conflicting narratives about the events' meanings. It is time to turn our attention from the memorial to memorializing.
This essay extends the interdisciplinary work that exists on the dialectic between mourning and melancholia as a way of analyzing the rhetorical effect of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. We argue that while previous research on this site has often underscored the reverential and mourning functions of this space, few have studied the darker, more melancholic features of these hallowed grounds. By investigating the melancholic dimensions of public memory, and by illustrating how national communities can strategically take advantage of these dimensions, we affirm the importance of resilience, mourning, and recovery for commemorative efforts.
The Aesthetics of Remembering 9/11: Towards a Transnational Typology of Memorials
A decade after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, all three sites of violent impact have seen the dedication of national memorials to the victims. Hundreds of memorials have appeared in less likely places in the United States and around the world. This article offers an analysis of international 9/11 memorials along the lines of Michael Rothberg, as “a complementary centrifugal mapping that charts the outward movement of American power.” It traces well-established memorial aesthetics, such as walls and statues, in a selection of 9/11 memorials located in the United States, Ireland, Spain, Germany, Italy, and Israel. Richard Gray’s hypothesis, that no fundamental change occurred in American prose writing, the works rather “assimilate the unfamiliar into familiar structures,” lends itself to examine 9/11 memorial aesthetics. In fact, despite the proclaimed sense of historical rupture, we do not witness great innovations of memorial design but a continuation of known patterns: modernist minimalism augmented by figural representations.
Recalling the Ghosts of 9/11: Convergent Memorializing at the Opening of the National 9/11 Memorial
International Journal of Communication, 2013
This study examines the physical and digital existence of the National 9/11 Memorial located at Ground Zero inNew York Cityas it stood on September 12, 2011. Through a rhetorical analysis of the interplay between the physical memorial and its digital smartphone applications (apps), we argue that the digital apps create a contradictory, paradoxical experience of the physical memorial. Whereas the memorial invites public reflection moving toward a sense of renewal, the digital apps privatize the experience through archives of information and images that suspend the events of 9/11 as a perpetual trauma. Such convergent technologies challenge the memorializing process, providing information in place of imagination.
Frames of Memory after 9/11: Culture, Criticism, Politics, and Law
Frames of Memory makes an important intervention into the emerging body of scholarship surrounding the culture and politics of the post-9/11 world. Bond provides a sweeping analysis of American memorial culture after 11 September, examining the ways in which diverse modes of commemoration, from Acts of Congress to museum exhibits, the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay to the corpus of 9/11 trauma fiction, have adhered to delimiting templates of remembrance that present an artificial impression of a unified American response to the attacks. In so doing, the book poses a series of urgent questions about the ethical and political factors at stake in the work of memory, asking why, and with what consequences, commemoration becomes an ideological endeavour; in what ways the academic discipline of memory studies influences contemporary memorial practice, and vice versa; what it means to seek justice for the dead; and how we might open the exceptionalist and exclusionary culture of memory surrounding 9/11 to a more diverse, globally oriented engagement with the recent past. "Lucy Bond has produced a compelling analysis of the post-9/11 literary and legal cultures that draw upon and stretch the limits of the conventions of memory studies (and above all trauma studies) in place at the time of the event. Her book will appeal to those seeking a clear and comprehensive overview of the topic, as well as to readers already invested in the detailed study of the effects of 9/11, to whom she offers many new insights." - David Simpson, UC Davis, USA
Performing trauma: Commemorating 9/11 in downtown Manhattan (2018)
Memory Studies, 2018
There are two memorials at the site of the World Trade Center: the above ground Memorial Park and the below ground Memorial Museum. They embody very different conceptions of how an event such as 9/11 should be remembered. The Memorial Park was an attempt to integrate the recognition of loss into the ongoing life of the city. It fails to do this, largely because it succumbs to the temptation to let the site itself— " Ground Zero " —do the work of memory. The two pools (" voids ") are located on the footprints of the two towers. They dominate the site, inheriting the clumsy monumentality of the destroyed buildings. The underground Memorial Museum combines relics, remnants, images, and newsreels, to involve its visitors in the emotional immediacy of the events of 9/11. It presents 9/11 as a traumatic memory, one to be re-experienced but not understood, placing it outside history in a kind of perpetual present. It reinforces what Marita Sturken identified as a national sense of innocence, and it militates against the development of an historical understanding of the causes and consequences of 9/11. In the final section of this article, I reflect on ways in Ground Zero might have been designed to create a site where residents, citizens, and visitors might have come together to mourn, reflect on, and seek to understand the events of 9/11. The voids There are two memorials for 9/11 at the site of the World Trade Center (" Ground Zero "). The first, the Memorial proper, is a park of around 8 acres, consisting of paved space, rows of trees (swamp oaks) and grass, and concrete benches. Within this space are two large square pits (" pools " and " voids "), each of which has water cascading down its walls, disappearing into a smaller square hole in the center. Surrounding each pool is a low wall, with the names of those who were killed on 9/11 and of those who died in the car bombing of 1993 displayed along a slanted top surface. A strangely off-kilter two-story building close to the two pools provides the entrance to the underground Memorial Museum, the second memorial (of which more shortly).