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

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.

Lucy Bond is lecturer in the Department of English, Linguistics, and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster, UK. Her teaching and research interest comprises contemporary American literature and culture, memory and trauma studies, environmental memory, and the Anthropocene. She has published several essays on American memorial culture after 9/11 and is co-editor, with Jessica Rapson, ofThe Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory Between and Beyond Borders.