Frames of Memory After 9/11 : Culture, Criticism, Politics, and Law

This book examines the commemoration of 9/11 in American memorial culture. It argues that the emergence of counter-memories of September 11 has been compromised by the dominance of certain narrative paradigms - or, frames of memory - that have mediated the representation of the attacks across cultural, critical, political, and juridical discourses. 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 Guantanamo 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 Front Matter....Pages i-xvii Introduction....Pages 1-15 American Trauma Culture after 9/11....Pages 16-51 The New American Jeremiad after 9/11....Pages 52-86 Analogical Holocaust Memory after 9/11....Pages 87-127 Memory, Law, and Justice after 9/11....Pages 128-159 Conclusion....Pages 160-171 Back Matter....Pages 172-218