This article explores competing efforts to make sense of the 9/11 attacks within entries posted on the “Where Were You … September 11th, Two Thousand One” Internet archive. Open to written contributions for one year from 15 September 2001, the archive amassed more than 2,500 responses, with posters writing from over twenty different countries. The article begins by arguing that this repository of vernacular memories has potential to significantly broaden our understanding of how the events of 9/11 were interpreted beyond the dominant discourses of political and other elites. It then attempts to do this via a discursive analysis of three key themes traversing contributions to WhereWereYou. These relate, first, to efforts to position 9/11 within particular temporal horizons; second, to accounts of 9/11's essence and causes; and third, to articulated hopes, fears, and expectations around the attacks' future impacts. The article concludes by locating WhereWereYou within debates over the archive's status in contemporary social and political life. It argues that this specific archive's refusal to foreclose 9/11's meaning renders WhereWereYou a particularly interesting memory project for exploring the events of 11 September 2001, and for thinking through contemporary mnemonic practices more broadly.

This article examines how the experience of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks has prompted both a hardening of a narrow version of US national identity figured in prejudicial terms and, conversely, an increased willingness to explore difference as it occurs both within the US (i.e. in the relations between Americans) and abroad (i.e. in the relations between Americans and foreigners). Through close textual analysis of two feature films – 25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002) and Rendition (Gavin Hood, 2007) – this article profiles this increased willingness to explore difference as it is indexed in both the form and content of the films under discussion.

This article examines two films, James Marsh's Man on Wire and Spike Lee's Inside Man in relation to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It looks at both films as examples of the heist genre and explores the ways in which genre conventions enable the production of meaning about the terrorist attacks. The conventions of the heist film, it argues, help make sense of September 11 by producing a different set of relations to time and space that draw on the uncanny, rather than the traumatic, nature of the events. Narrating stories of transgression, both films place the horrors of September 11 in another context. Through the genre conventions of the heist, each film offers a view of New York in which the events of September 11 and the destruction of the World Trade Center stand as the center. Not yet complete in one, already destroyed in the other, the Twin Towers haunt these films. As Man on Wire and Inside Man each attempt to make sense of the world in which the city of New York is marked most powerfully by a profound absence, it is in their uses of the heist genre that they find a representational space in which to mourn the World Trade Center and the victims of the attacks.