Lucy Bond

The transcultural turn : interrogating memory between and beyond borders

Acknowledgements / Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson -- Introduction -- Theorising transcultural memory / A. Dirk Moses and Michael Rothberg -- Problematizing transcultural memory / Lars Breuer -- The possibilities of transcultural memory / Wendy Koenig -- Contributors -- Index.

Compromised critique: a meta-critical analysis of American studies after 9/11

This paper contends that 9/11 remains subject to a crisis in criticism, resulting from the failure of certain strains within American studies to sufficiently separate their modes of critique from the ideological means of 9/11s manipulation. An overreliance upon themes of trauma, and a failure to observe the means by which these discourses have been compromised by their mobilization in political rhetoric, has led to the development of an interpretative void unable to produce a much-needed counternarrative. Whilst the explicit politicization of 11 September has been widely criticized, far less remarked upon is the extent to which the tropes in which 9/11 is represented have been standardized across popular, political, critical and artistic narratives. Failure to challenge the basic terms of this movement has engendered a compromised interpretative field, in which frames of reference slip too easily between the public and the personal, simultaneously militarizing mourning and sentimentalizing politics. This compromises counterhegemonic narratives, neutering the force of their thrust by presenting them as echoing, and even reinforcing, the discourses of the public–political realm. I will contend that this crisis of representation has arisen, at least in part, from the ubiquity of traumatic narratives, which have been transferred across discursive realms, disguising crucial authorial and critical differences, and seeming to validate the perspective of the state by testifying to an apparent unity of interpretation and response.

Introduction: Planetary memory in contemporary American fiction

This special issue considers the ways in which contemporary American fiction seeks to imagine a mode of ‘planetary memory’ able to address the scalar and systemic complexities of the Anthropocene – the epoch in which the combined activity of the human species has become a geological force in its own right. As Naomi Klein has recently argued, confronting the problem of anthropogenic climate change alters everything we know about the world: demanding wholesale recalibration of economic and political priorities; destabilising the epistemic frameworks through which quotidian life is interpreted and enacted; and decentring the dominant cultural imaginaries that seek to give form to historical experience

Intersections or Misdirections? Problematising Crossroads of Memory in the Commemoration of 9/11

The turn towards transculturalism engenders a focus on modes of remembrance that conceptualise memory as dialogic and diverse rather than hierarchical and linear. However, this paper expresses concern that this apparent openness will lead to the presumption that all manifestations of ‘multidirectional’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ memory are ethically-oriented, according commemorative practice a transparency that is not always merited. Particularly disquieting are overly analogical memorial endeavours that suggest unproblematic equivalence between historical events, as exemplified by the reliance upon tropes inherited from Holocaust discourse in the public memorial culture of 9/11. This paper analyses the convergence of two pre-existing cultural discourses in the American public sphere after 9/11. The first relates to the ‘Americanization’ of the Holocaust in memorial culture from the early 1990s, which critics have suggested involves a transition from viewing the Holocaust as a historical event to reading it as an affirmative national parable. The second concerns the mobilisation of the Holocaust in support of U.S. military intervention in foreign policy rhetoric in the post-Cold War period. Analysing the intersection of these discourses with the narrative of American exceptionalism, I question whether the prevalence of Holocaust tropes in 9/11s memorial culture suggests a deliberate appropriation of its master narrative of loss. I argue that, in the decade since 9/11, other memorial constellations have been ignored in favour of less problematic acts of historical analogy. Ultimately, I call for greater attention to the potential consequences of applying analogical templates of remembrance without adequate self-reflexivity. I suggest that it is not always the most visible points of connection that offer the potential for ethical modes of remembrance, but the hidden histories, the forgotten memories, whose relationship to 9/11 opens the most important claims to attention.

‘In the eyeblink of a planet you were born, died, and your bones disintegrated’: scales of mourning and velocities of memory in Philipp Meyer’s American Rust

ABSTRACT Tom Cohen (2012) contends that critical accounts of climate change have a tendency to collapse the ecological into the economic, reinscribing the privileged epistemological and ideological homelands of liquid modernity (Bauman). Such slippages underscore the conceptual insecurities inherent in imagining the era of the Anthropocene. As Robert Markley (2012) asserts, the Anthropocene ‘poses questions about […] different registers of time’. Timothy Clark (2012), meanwhile, foregrounds the ‘derangements of [spatial] scale’ that attend the analysis of climate change. Bearing these comments in mind, this article examines the ways in which Philipp Meyer’s (2009) American Rust attempts to reckon with the mutable dynamics of the Anthropocene. Exploring the social and environmental degradation of the American Rust Belt, Meyer posits the post-industrial era as a period of conjoined economic and ecological precarity. The narrative veers across temporal and spatial scales, linking the casualties of the Rust Belt to other stories of dispossession and dislocation. Ultimately, however, Meyer’s novel suggests that the study of literary planetary memory must examine not just the scales, but the speeds that inform cultural and critical practices of remembrance as well, analysing the uneven memorative velocities that shape the representation of diverse forms of loss across human and more-than-human milieux.

Memory, Law, and Justice after 9/11

This book has argued that representations of 9/11 have recurrently been mediated by certain frames of memory (the psychoanalytic rhetoric of trauma, the triumphalist tropes of the jeremiad, and the analogical templates of Americanised Holocaust memory) in the American public sphere over the past thirteen years. These paradigms, all of which were culturally prominent prior to the attacks, have shaped the articulation of September 11 across diverse cultural, critical, and political forums. Whilst the media upon which this analysis is based are not, of course, representative of the sum of 9/11’s memorial culture, they point to a number of issues that require further exploration. Firstly, they underline the absolute impression of American innocence (and exceptionalism), eliding more difficult elements of US history. Secondly, they suggest a convergence of public and private spheres, evidencing both an over-personalisation of political discourse (as in the mobilisation of trauma post-9/11 examined in Chapter 1) and an abstraction of private loss (as in the transformation of victims into national symbols analysed in Chapters 2 and 3), leading to an appropriation of personal experience. Thirdly, these frames project a contradictory relationship to otherness. On the one hand, their standardising bent appears antithetical to alterity, yet, on the other, the continual reinforcement of a national culture of memory, and the affirmation of its particularly American attributes, enacts an imaginary ringfencing that symbolically separates the United States from the rest of the world.

The New American Jeremiad after 9/11

The previous chapter examined the predominance of trauma as a frame of memory after 9/11, arguing that its centrality in the American public sphere can be at least partially explained by widespread subscription to the attacks as a moment of national unhoming. This chapter considers attempts to ‘rehome’ the United States by reconnecting post-9/11 American society to the founding mythologies of the nation. Whilst the narratives considered in the last chapter tended to personalise geopolitical concerns, many of the discourses analysed below evidence an oppositional tendency to nationalise private experience. Similarly, whilst my analysis of American trauma culture after September 11 exposed the ways in which existent academic and popular conceptions of trauma had been mobilised in political discourse following the attacks, here I identify a converse process through which historic ideologies of exceptionalism and triumphalism have been absorbed into official, vernacular, and commercial memorial culture in the wake of 9/11. This pattern has, once again, facilitated the development of a series of intrinsically politicised memorative regimes, perpetuated by their conscription into a dominant frame of memory: the American jeremiad. As the following analysis will argue, the jeremiad has operated as the exemplary mythic vehicle for the national imaginary from the early seventeenth century and can be seen in resurgent form in American memorial culture after 9/11.

American Trauma Culture after 9/11

In just sixteen words, Hernan Poza III (a former volunteer firefighter and, at the time of 9/11, a social worker in New York City) encapsulates the central tropes that have framed reactions to September 11 across multiple discursive realms: firstly, in media coverage and political rhetoric immediately following the attacks; secondly, in early critical theory; thirdly, and must enduringly, in the corpus of 9/11 trauma fiction, which forms the main focus of this chapter. Poza writes: this is for history this is overwhelming this is not real this is the new world (Poza 2003, 19)

Analogical Holocaust Memory after 9/11

Building upon recent critical attempts to foreground the comparative properties of memory, this chapter examines the ways in which cultural and political discourses have sought to construct analogical frames of reference for 9/11. I focus upon the widespread recourse to the Holocaust as a point of reference for September 11, investigating the convergence of two pre-existing cultural discourses in the American public sphere: the ‘Americanisation’ of the Holocaust in memorial culture from the early 1990s, and the mobilisation of the Holocaust in support of US military intervention in foreign policy rhetoric in the post-Cold War period. Contrary to recent critical attempts to construct ethical paradigms of transcultural memory, in these discourses recourse to Holocaust memory paradoxically results in a renationalisation of American memorial culture and a corresponding reassertion of American exceptionalism. In the decade since September 11, the pre-eminence of the Holocaust has ensured that certain memorial constellations have been ignored and the traces of their paths erased in favour of less problematic acts of historical analogy. Accordingly, I suggest that it is not always the most visible points of connection that offer the potential for ethical modes of remembrance, but the hidden histories, the forgotten memories, whose relationship to 9/11 presents the most important claims to attention.