So politicized, so fraught, and so painfully disappointing, the process of memorialization of the events of 9/11, symbolically focused on Ground Zero in New York City, was in many ways entirely predictable from the first months after September 11. [...]
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Understanding Katrina
Weather Media and Homeland Security: Selling Preparedness in a Volatile World
by Marita Sturken
Hurricane Katrina exposed social inequities within the United States in stunning relief. As such, it is quite typical of weather disasters which, with rare exceptions, impact the poor in significantly higher numbers, though rarely is this exposure so dramatic and so widely disseminated. As an event that has rendered visible the failed infrastructure of U.S. […]
After September 11
Memorializing Absence
by Marita Sturken
It has been said quite often since September 11 that Americans are standing at a juncture of history, that, on that date, the world changed forever into a ‘before’ and an ‘after.’ Such proclamations of radical breaks in historical consciousness have happened before, of course. Writing in 1924 about the experience of modernity, Virginia Woolf […]