9/11 Ten Years After: History, Narrative, Memory (BAA Workshop July 14-15, 2011)

Transcription

1 9/11 Ten Years After: History, Narrative, Memory (BAA Workshop July 14-15, 2011) Venue: Amerika Haus München Organizers: Prof. Dr. Philipp Gassert (University of Augsburg), Prof. Dr. Volker Depkat (University of Regensburg), Dr. Birgit Daewes (University of Würzburg), Dr. Meike Zwingenberger (BAA) Sponsors: US Consulate General Munich, Alumni Association des Amerika-Instituts München e.v. Ten years after the events of September 11, 2001, this workshop will assess the impact of the day that supposedly changed everything. We will ask how 9/11 is being represented in historiography, literature, the visual arts, and at official as well as un-official sites of memory. Throughout the world, people think of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and on the Pentagon building outside Washington, D.C. as a pivotal event that brought their routines to a standstill. In journalism, the arts, and popular culture, references to 9/11 are ubiquitous. The terrorist attacks have been reenacted in movies and incorporated into the plot structures of novels, they have inspired songs and poems and triggered diverse forms of commemoration. Over the past decade, 9/11 has thus become the site of fierce memory battles over the meaning of the September attacks. Given the momentous nature of what happened on and in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, it is not surprising that 9/11 has been receiving so much attention throughout the world. What needs to be explored, however, is the question whether the global master narrative of 9/11 as a seminal event (René Girard) still holds true a decade later. Has 9/11 really changed the world, and who benefits from the notion that it has? Already five years after the fact, David Simpson voiced his suspicion that 9/11 did not blow away our past in an eruption of the unimaginable but much rather refigured that past into patterns open to being made into new and often dangerous forms of sense. Against this backdrop, the workshop wants to trace the emergence of the memorial patterns revolving around 9/11. It seeks to identify the cultural items defining the commemoration of 9/11 and also wants to explore which aspects have been marginalized, forgotten or purposely left out ten years after? How do representations of the events engage with the notion of radical change? 1

2 The first panel, 9/11 in the Debates of Historians and Political Scientists, will look at how 9/11 has been incorporated into historical and political science narratives. Given the recent nature of the events, historians have been reluctant to come up with answers what 9/11 meant. Some have interpreted 9/11 as a historical marker that signifies the end of the American Century. Others have focused on explaining the reactions on the September attacks within an exceptionalist framework that stressed ideology and the role of religion in American culture. A third group is mainly interested in explaining why the United States has attracted the kind of hatred that nurtures terrorism. From a political science point of view 9/11 has led to a renewed interest in questions of global governance, world systemic approaches, terrorism, new wars, and the role of the media in the context of political decision making. In addition, work on U.S. relations with the Near and Middle East has experienced a boom in history and political science. Overall, historians and political scientists have increasingly questioned the idea that 9/11 represented a historical rupture. The second panel, Representations of 9/11 in Literature and Film, will therefore investigate the memorial discourses emerging from fictional adaptations of 9/11. How do literature and the visual arts negotiate the destructive sublime (Miles Orvell)? Faced with the representational fallout from the World Trade Center s destruction, critics hastened to postulate the end of irony, the end of innocence, or even the end of postmodernism. Yet how do narrative and artistic configurations actually position themselves toward these master narratives of exceptionalism and change? What impact do they have, in turn, on post-9/11 politics, ethics, and aesthetics? Specifically, do these narratives constitute (in form, content, imagery, and structure) new modes of engaging with history? How do representational practices intervene with the global sense of (environmental, financial, military, cultural) crisis? In short, do the representations of September 11 indicate the formation of a new poetics of crisis? The third panel, Remembering and Memorializing 9/11, will look into the practices, forms and media of memor(ial)izing the September attacks. The process of remembering 9/11 set in immediately after the fact, and it continues to be a highly contested field to this very day. The spectrum of commemorative practices, forms and media is broad, ranging from spontaneous gatherings and impromptu memorials in the days and weeks after the attacks to the controversial debates on how to turn Ground Zero into a site of national memory. As different and diverse as the manifestations of remembrance and memorialization are, they all can be read as enactments of grief, heroism, and patriotism. 2

3 Program Thursday, July 14 7 p.m. 9 p.m. Keynote David Simpson (University of California, Davis): After 9/11: The Fate of Strangers Friday, July a.m a.m. Panel I: 9/11 in the Debates of Historians and Political Scientists Chair: Philipp Gassert (University of Augsburg) Speakers: Jürgen Wilzewski (Kaiserslautern University of Technology): 9-11, the National Security State and America's decline Joanne Meyerowitz (Yale University): History, Historians, and the Multiple Meanings of September 11 th a.m p.m. Panel II: Representations of 9/11 in Literature and Film Chair: Birgit Daewes (University of Wuerzburg) Speakers: Jeffrey Melnick (University of Massachusetts): 9/11 Triangles: Projecting Unity in American Film and Music After the Fall Kristiaan Versluys (Ghent University): 9/11: the Discursive Responses 2.30 p.m p.m. Panel III: Remembering and Memorializing 9/11 Chair: Volker Depkat (University of Regensburg) Speakers:. Devin Zuber (University of Osnabrück): "Sanctimony, Memorials and Sanctification: the Sacred and Profane in Re-membering Ground Zero Ingrid Gessner (University of Regensburg): Continuity or Change? The Aesthetics of Remembering 9/11" 3

4 p.m. Panel Discussion in German Herfried Münkler (Humboldt University) US Consul General Conrad Tribble Cordt Schnibben (Journalist and Author) Christoph Schumann (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg) Moderator: Franziska Augstein (Journalistin Süddeutsche Zeitung) Confirmed Speakers David Simpson (University of California, Davis) Author of 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration (University of Chicago Press, 2006). David Simpson joined the faculty of UC Davis in 1997, as the G.B. Needham Fellow and received the G. B. Needham Endowed Chair in English in Previously he taught at Columbia, University of Colorado, Northwestern University, and Cambridge. His areas of research and teaching are Romanticism and literary theory. He is a member of the editorial board of Cambridge Studies in Romanticism and of Modern Language Quarterly. He is the author of numerous books, most recently Wordsworth, Commodification, and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Situatedness; or Why we Keep Saying Where We're Coming From (Duke University Press, 2002) and The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature: A Report on Half-Knowledge (University of Chicago Press,1995). David Simpson received his PH.D. at Magdalene College, Cambridge, his M.A. at the University of Michigan, and B.A. also at Magdalene College. Jürgen Wilzewski (Kaiserslautern University of Technology) Editor of Weltmacht in der Krise. Die USA am Ende der Ära George W. Bush (WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2010). Jürgen Wilzewski joined the Technical University of Kaiserslautern as Professor of International Politics in He received his Ph.D. in Political Sciences from the University of Frankfurt in 1986 and has been a Congressional Fellow for the German Marshall Fund/American Political Science Association in Washington, D.C, and John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at Harvard. In 2006/07 he was Visiting Scholar at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of Second Image Reconsidered. Die parlamentarische Kontrolle von Militärinterventionen der USA in den 1990er Jahren (2006) and Triumph der Legislative. Zum Wandel amerikanischer Sicherheitspolitik (1999) and the editor of Defekte Demokratie - Crusader State? Die Weltpolitik der USA in der Ära Bush (2006). Wilzewski s research focuses on theories of international politics, transatlantic relations as well as American foreign politics and their social and political implications. Joanne Meyerowitz (Yale University) Editor of History and September 11 th (Temple University, 2003). Joanne Meyerowitz joined Yale University in 2004 as Professor of History and American Studies. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in She is the author of Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, (1988) and How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (2002), and the editor of Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, (1994). Previously she taught at Indiana University and the University of Cincinnati. For five years Joanne Meyerowitz edited the Journal of American History, the leading scholarly journal in U.S. history. She has won fellowships from, among others, the American Council of Learned 4

5 Societies, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the Social Science Research Council. Her articles have appeared in the American Historical Review, Journal of American History, Journal of Women s History, Gender and History, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, and other publications. Her research and teaching focus on twentieth-century U.S. history, women, gender, and sexuality. She is co-director of the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities. Jeffrey Melnick (University of Massachusetts, Boston) Author of 9/11 Culture: America Under Construction (2009). Jeffrey Melnick just joined the American Studies department at UMass and teaches courses in American cultural history and comparative ethnicity at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His interests further include the cultural history of Black-Jewish relations in the United States and the cultural impact of 9/11. Jeffrey Melnick was associate professor of American Studies at Babson College, and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. His works include Immigration and American Popular Culture (with Rachel Rubin) (University Press: 2006). Kristiaan Versluys (Ghent University) Author of the articles "9/11 as a European Event : the Novels" (European Review, 15, No , pp ) and "9/11 as the End of Irony: Frédéric Beigbeder's Windows on the World" (CinematoGraphies: Fictional Strategies and Visual Discourses in 1990s New York City, eds. Günter Lenz, Dorothea Löbbermann, 2006, pp ). Kristiaan Versluys is Full Professor of American Literature and Culture at Ghent University and the founding director of the Ghent Urban Studies Team. He obtained his Ph. D. degree from Harvard University in He has published The Poet in the City: Chapters in the Development of Urban Poetry in Europe and the United States ( ) and many articles on urban literature, in particular the literature of New York. He is a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium and a regular guest professor at the summer session of Columbia University, where he teaches a course entitled New York in Recent Fiction. In he was a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS), where he embarked on a study of the discursive responses to 9/11. Devin Zuber (University of Osnabrück) Devin Zuber teaches American Studies at the University of Osnabrück. In 2010 he received his Ph.D. in English at the City University of New York with a dissertation titled "Hieroglyphics of Nature: Swedenborg, Ecology, and Romantic Aesthetics". He received an M. Phil. and an M.A. at the City University of New York in 2006, a B.A. in English from Bryn Athyn College, PA. In 2006 Devon Zuber has published an article on "Flânerie at Ground Zero: Aesthetic Counter-Memories in Lower Manhattan." (American Quarterly 58:2 (June 2006). Ed. Marita Sturken. Journal of the American Studies Association, Ingrid Gessner (University of Regensburg) Since 2005 Ingrid Gessner is assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Regensburg. In 2005 she received her Dr. phil. with a dissertation on the topic From Sites of Memory to Cybersights: (Re)Framing Japanese American Experiences. Before coming to Regensburg Ingrid Gessner taught at the University of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and at Johannes- Gutenberg-University Mainz. 5