Marita Sturken - Terrorism in American Memory: Memorials, Museums, and Architecture in the Post-9/11 Era

Marita Sturken

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

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NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sturken, Marita, 1957 author.

Title: Terrorism in American memory : memorials, museums, and architecture in the post-9/11 era / Marita Sturken.

Description: New York : New York University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021011564 | ISBN 9781479811670 (hardback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479811687 (paperback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479811717 (ebook) | ISBN 9781479811700 (ebook other)

Subjects: LCSH: September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001Social aspects. | TerrorismUnited StatesHistory21st century. | Collective memoryUnited States. | MemorialsUnited States. | MuseumsUnited States. | United StatesSocial conditions1980

Classification: LCC HV6432.7 .S785 2021 | DDC 363.32509747/109051dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011564

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In memory of my mother

Marie Ryan Sturken

19212018

In late May and June of 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the cities and towns of the United States erupted into protests over the killing by Minneapolis police of George Floyd on May 25, a killing that was documented on video and shared widely on social media. Protests in opposition to police violence against Black citizens, many of them led by Black Lives Matter, had been taking place for years, but what happened in the summer of 2020 was different. Not only did very large numbers of people turn out, conveying the sense that anger over these ongoing deaths had accumulated, but these protests also began to turn to the Confederate monuments, the statues of Christopher Columbus, the numerous symbols of white power and history that had been set in stone over long periods of time. People had been agitating for the removal of many of these statues for decades, arguing that they were symbols of racism in the present. In the summer of 2020, these monuments suddenly began to fall, either through the collective action of the crowds or as institutions and political officials made rapid decisions for their removal. The removal and destruction of so many monuments revealed a shift in public discussion about race, nation, and memory and a surging of memories of racial violence that had long been suppressed. Was this a new era in the politics of memory in the United States?

In the months that followed, a time of enormous political drama and upheaval, the grim and frightening toll of the COVID-19 pandemic continued to rise, the tallies of the dead climbing daily. Media commentators attempted to make sense of the numbers by comparing them to previous crises in American history. Throughout December 2020 and into January 2021, they noted that more people were dying each day than had died on 9/11. When the death toll reached over four hundred thousand in January 2021, many observed that the number of dead now exceeded the number of US soldiers who had died in World War II. As the historical comparisons continued, they began to seem futile, if not absurd. As cartoonist Rob Rogers notes, the 3,124 deaths on December 9, 2020, compared to the 9/11 dead, was just another Wednesday. Such a comparison revealed, of course, that the deaths from the pandemic had been dramatically undervalued and unmourned in the national context, compared to the 2,977 victims of 9/11 whose deaths have been the subject of an enormous number of memorials and tributes.

The entire first two decades of the twenty-first century were a time of remarkable upheavalculturally, economically, and politicallyresulting in dramatic changes to national self-identity and to the image of the United States in the world. During these two decades, the country endured terrorist attacks, engaged in ongoing wars of aggression, divided into increasingly polarized factions, and was extraordinarily preoccupied with memorialization. The countrys obsession with memorialization and debates about memory reveal the ways that national identity is often negotiated, fought over, projected, and asserted through conflicts over who is remembered and how. This era began with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, soon encapsulated in the term 9/11, which immediately produced a demand for memorialization, and culminated in 2020 with the protests over police brutality that demanded the removal of historical monuments to racist historical figures. It also led to a reassertion of traditional American history myths as a form of backlash to these demands and a right-wing attack on the US Capitol, the symbol of the government, on January 6, 2021. In these events, cultural memory became a battleground for negotiations of national identity because it is a field through which the past is experienced in the present. This leads us to a set of questions: How do the processes of memorialization of traumatic events shape our current understandings of nation, race, and the United States as a nation and global force? How does the process of collective memorialization transform the victims of violence, war, and trauma into figures of a national narrative? What roles do design and architecture play in the shaping of these memories? And why does memory continue to matter so much in the post-9/11 era of the United States, an era of upheaval and social change?

In her sweeping history of the United States, These Truths, Jill Lepore defines the last two decades of US history as an era of disruption. The shocking event of 9/11 is merely one of many events that define disruption for Lepore in this era, which followed several decades of relatively stable political and economic shifts since the upheaval of the 1960s. This included not only the potential crisis of Y2K at the end of 1999; the 2008 election of Barack Obama, the first Black president; the emergence of social movements such as the Tea Party, Occupy, and Black Lives Matter; the Patriot Act and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; and the election of Donald Trump in 2016. This era also included disruptions of entire industries, from journalism and publishing to advertising and retail to travel and transportation; saw the rise to dominance of the tech industry and social media; and felt the pain of widespread job loss in the manufacturing sector as a result of automation and global outsourcing. It has also seen the disruptions of the financial crises of 2008, the rise of financialization as a global force, the class divisions and increased inequality arising from economic hardship in whole areas of the country, and the global climate emergencies of wildfires, melting Artic ice, increasing numbers of hurricanes and typhoons, and crippling drought. In the last few years, these disruptions have only been magnified, with the impeachments of Donald Trump, the devastating impact of the pandemic and global economic crisis of 202021, the uprisings and protests over police brutality of Black citizens, the chaos of the 2020 election, and the attack on the US Capitol in January 2021. Disruption can act as a force that demands more of national narratives, which bend toward themes of heroism and sacrifice to restore pride and provide comfort. Disruption can also bring out divides and divisions, scapegoating and othering, because of the fear, insecurity, and desperation it can sow. And it can open new feelings, new ways of thinking, and demands for change.