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Holding On to 9/11: The Shifting Grounds of Materiality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Laura E. Tanner
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Abstract

Cultural theorists interrogating the appropriation of 9/11 through nationalist, capitalist, and media forces have tended to deauthorize the general public's embodied and affective responses to that event. Instead of disavowing claims of mourning unsupported by geographic proximity or material connection, this essay situates such responses in contemporary screen culture to consider how the shifting grounds of materiality complicate the experience of bodily location at every level from the perceptual to the political. Using photographs, fiction, museum exhibits, and survivor accounts, the essay explores how the transformed relation between subjects and objects defines our apprehension of 9/11 in material, technological, and phenomenological terms. The complex dynamics of perception and embodiment unveiled through these representations suggest the need to rethink categories of experience and affect to accommodate new paradigms of proximity and connectedness increasingly liberated from the measures of geography and the borders of the body.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 127 , Issue 1 , January 2012 , pp. 58 - 76
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by The Modern Language Association of America

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