|
Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
|
Where do we go from here: The pasts, presents and futures of Ground Zero
Yifat Gutman
New School for Social Research, Gutmy472{at}newschool.edu
Spring 2006, when the rebuilding of Ground Zero began, was a unique moment in time — a turning point for the New York site and its publics. It signified transformation from debris to a memorial museum; a move from past catastrophe to future memories, as the nationalized narration of the events in the formal exhibit on site emphasized. Surprisingly, while the end result was already known, this moment of transformation allowed different audiences to put at halt the nationalized interpretation of the events of 9/11 and engage in personal, collected and collective, local and global, perspectives on the past, while enacting the presents and futures which seem to unfold from them. This article examines these distinct yet connected moments in order to reveal the different connections that people and governments make between pasts, presents and futures. It uses a non-linear approach to time, which explores and reworks the tension between linearity and relativity, as a sensitive lens to a political change that has proceeded well beyond the interaction on site.
Key Words: 9/11 • material-symbolic practice • memory • narrative • political change
References
- Anderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso.
- Blumer, Herbert (1986) Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
- Boyer, Christine (2002) `Meditations on a Wounded Skyline and its Stratigraphies of Pain', in Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin (eds) After The World Trade Center: Rethinking New York, pp. 109-20. New York: Routledge.
- Brenner, Neil (1999) `Beyond State-Centrism? Space, Territoriality, and Geographical Scale in Globalization Studies', Theory and Society 28(1): 39-78.[CrossRef][Web of Science]
- Carr, Edward (1961) What is History? New York: Vintage Books.
- Chidester, David and Edward Linenthal (1995) `Introduction', in David, Chidester and Edward Linenthal (eds) American Sacred Space, pp. 1-42. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
- Dayan, Daniel (2005) `On Mothers, Midwives and Abortionists: The Genealogy and Obstetrics of Audiences and Publics', in S. Livingstone (ed.) Audiences and Publics, pp. 43-76. San Francisco, CA: Intellect Press.
- Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
- Denzin, Norman (1992) Symbolic Interactionism and Cultural Studies. Cambridge: Blackwell.
- Durkheim, Emile (1912) The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: Allen and Unwin.
- Eade, John and Michael J. Sallnow (1991) `Introduction', in J. Eade and M.J. Sallnow (eds) Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage, pp. 1-29. London, New York: Routledge.
- Eco, Umberto (1979) A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
- Giddens, Anthony (1979) Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
- Goffman, Erving (1971) Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Basic Books.
- Goffman, Erving (1967) Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-face Behavior. Garden City: Anchor Books, Doubleday & Co.
- Goldfarb, Jeffrey C. (2006b) `The Politics of Small Things: The Left Finds its Voice, the Right Responds, Democratic Prospects', Contexts 5(2): 26-8.
- Halbwachs, Maurice (1992) On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Hall, Stuart (1980) `Encoding/Decoding', in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (ed.) Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79, p. 128. London: Hutchinson.
- Heller, Agnes (2002) `Cultural Memory, Identity and Civil Society', International Politics and Society 2 [http://www.fes.de/ipg/ipg2_2001/artheller.htm].
- Irwin-Zarecka, Iwona (1994) Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory. Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
- Irwin-Zarecka, Iwona (1995) `"Topographies of Terror" in Berlin: is remembrance of forgetting possible?' Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society 25(1): 17-26.
- Ivakhiv, A. (2006) `Towards a Geography of "Religion": Mapping the Distribution of an Unstable Signifier', Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96(1): 169-75.
- Jackson, Derrick Z. (2002) `A lesson from Condoleezza Rice', The Boston Globe, OP-ED section, 20 November, p. A19.
- Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara (2003) ` Kodak Moments, Flashbulb Memories: Reflections on 9/11', TDR/The Drama Review 47(1): 11-48.
- Luz, Nimrod (2005) The Arab Community of Jaffa and the Hassan Bey Mosque: Collective Identity and Empowerment of the Arabs in Israel via Holy Places. Jerusalem: The Floersheimer Institute for Policy Studies.
- Matynia, Elzbieta (2001) `Furnishing Democracy at the End of the Century: Negotiating Transition at the Polish Round Table & Others', Eastern European Politics and Society 15(2): 454-71.
- Middleton, David, Brown, Steven and Lightfoot, Geoffrey (2001) ` Performing the Past in Electronic Archives: Interdependencies in the Discursive and Non-Discursive Ordering of Institutional Rememberings', Culture & Psychology, 7(2): 123-144.[Abstract/Free Full Text]
- Olick, Jeffrey K. and Joyce Robbins (1998) `Social Memory Studies: From Collective memory to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices' Annual Review of Sociology 24: 105-40.[CrossRef][Web of Science]
- Schudson, Michael (1992) Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past. New York: Basic Books.
- Schwandt, Thomas, A. (1994) `Three Epistemological Stances for Qualitative Inquiry: Interpretivism, Hermeneutics and constructionism', in N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln (eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research, pp. 189-214. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
- Schwartz, Barry (1982) `The Social Context of Commemoration: A Study in Collective Memory', Social Forces 61(2): 374-402.[CrossRef][Web of Science]
- Schwartz, Barry (2000) Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Smith, Neil (2002) `Scales of Terror: The Manufacturing of Nationalism,' in Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin (eds) After The World Trade Center: Rethinking New York, pp. 97-108. New York: Routledge.
- Sturken, Marita (2004) `The Aesthetics of Absence: Rebuilding Ground Zero', American Ethnologist, 31(3): 311-25.
- Sturken, Marita (2007) Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- Turner,Victor (1974a) `Pilgrimage as a social process', in Drama, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Actions in Human Society, pp. 166-230. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
- Turner, Victor (1974b) `Pilgrimage and communitas', Studia Missionalia 23: 305-27.
- Wagner-Pacifici, Robin (2005) The Art of Surrender: Decomposing Sovereignty at Conflict's End. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Warner, Michael (2005) Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books.
- Zelizer, Barbie (1995) `Reading the Past against the Grain: the Shape of Memory Studies,' Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12: 204-39.
- Zolberg, Vera (1998) `Contested Remembrance: The Hiroshima Exhibit Controversy', Theory and Society 2(4): 565-90.
Memory Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1,
55-70 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1750698008097395
 CiteULike  Complore  Connotea  Del.icio.us  Digg  Reddit  Technorati  Twitter What's this?
|
|
