Compelling Memory: 9/11 and the Work of Mourning in Mike Binder's Reign over Me (original) (raw)

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