Committed to Memory: Remembering "9/11" as a Crisis of Education

Abstract

<p>This study considers the pedagogical significance of mourning and remembrance in the context of the commemorative culture surrounding the “9/11” attacks on America, which have stimulated recent explorations of what it might mean to commit to ethical remembrances of the dead. Critical of “9/11” memorial discourses that provide justifications for heightened “homeland” security and military mobilization in the “War on Terror,” this project not only addresses the educative force of memorial-artistic responses in creating meaning out of mass deaths, but also dissociates the concept of the public memorial as foremost an apparatus of the state, private corporations, and other institutions which seek to use memorials towards amnesiac or ideological objectives. Analyses of the memorial responses addressed in this project unpack how particular modes of remembering “9/11” and its victims are themselves reflections upon the meanings and objectives of collective remembrance. The project first explores the “September 11^th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows” organization and how it negotiates the ways public sentiment is mobilized “in the name of” victims and their families. Through an analysis of Art Spiegelman’s <em>In the Shadow of No Towers</em>,<em> </em>I examine the capacity of graphic narrative to bear witness to traumatic events and speak to their legacies in non-hegemonic ways. Lastly, the project explores how Samira Makhmalbaf’s film <em>God, Construction and Destruction</em> calls for the re-evaluation of strategic memorial practices that risk reducing “9/11” remembrance pedagogies to universalizing modes of remembrance that further subjugate already marginalized communities. Stimulated by such memorial responses that interrogate conventional practices and assumptions of collective remembrance, the project argues that the public remembrance of “9/11” is a crisis of and for education: that is, an important occasion to seek and call for modes of remembrance and sites of pedagogies that foster an openness to the critical and transformative force of historical trauma.</p>