Tourists of History , livre ebook

358

pages

English

Ebooks

2007

Écrit par
Sturken Marita Sturken

Publié par
Duke University Press

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358

pages

English

Ebooks

2007

Lire un extrait

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

01 novembre 2007

EAN13

9780822390510

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

4 Mo

In Tourists of History, the cultural critic Marita Sturken argues that over the past two decades, Americans have responded to national trauma through consumerism, kitsch sentiment, and tourist practices in ways that reveal a tenacious investment in the idea of America's innocence. Sturken investigates the consumerism that followed from the September 11th attacks; the contentious, ongoing debates about memorials and celebrity-architect designed buildings at Ground Zero; and two outcomes of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City: the Oklahoma City National Memorial and the execution of Timothy McVeigh.Sturken contends that a consumer culture of comfort objects such as World Trade Center snow globes, FDNY teddy bears, and Oklahoma City Memorial t-shirts and branded water, as well as reenactments of traumatic events in memorial and architectural designs, enables a national tendency to see U.S. culture as distant from both history and world politics. A kitsch comfort culture contributes to a "tourist" relationship to history: Americans can feel good about visiting and buying souvenirs at sites of national mourning without having to engage with the economic, social, and political causes of the violent events. While arguing for the importance of remembering tragic losses of life, Sturken is urging attention to a dangerous confluence-of memory, tourism, consumerism, paranoia, security, and kitsch-that promulgates fear to sell safety, offers prepackaged emotion at the expense of critical thought, contains alternative politics, and facilitates public acquiescence in the federal government's repressive measures at home and its aggressive political and military policies abroad.

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Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

01 novembre 2007

EAN13

9780822390510

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

4 Mo

TOURISTSOFHISTORY Memory,

Kitsch, and

Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero

Marita Sturken

C H A P T E R T I T L E

iii

© 2007 Duke University Press All rights reserved  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Designed by Heather Hensley Typeset in Monotype Garamond by Newgen-Austin Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. p. ii: photo by Alberto Zanella

For Dana

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

Contents

1. Consuming Fear and Selling Comfort

2. Citizens and Survivors: Cultural Memory and Oklahoma City

3. The Spectacle of Death and the Spectacle of Grief: The Execution of Timothy McVeigh

4. Tourism and “Sacred Ground”: The Space of Ground Zero

5. Architectures of Grief and the Aesthetics of Absence

Conclusion 287

Notes 295

Bibliography 319

Index 333

139

165

219

Acknowledgments

began working on this book in 2000, long before I saw I it as a book, and the intricate connections that drive its narrative took time to emerge into view. Along the way, I have been guided, prodded, challenged, and encouraged by many people, whose many conversations and suggestions have given it more depth and complexity. I could never have written this book alone, nor have I. Among those who helped the most to shape this manu-script and to challenge me to make my arguments relevant were my two readers, George Lipsitz and Erika Doss. Er-ika’s input has been invaluable—wise, insightful, and pre-cise. I am very grateful for her generous advice and the care-fulness with which she approached this project. My debt to George Lipsitz is so immense I feel I can never thank him enough. For his rigor, his insights, his demand that scholar-ship make a difference, and his extraordinary generosity, I am deeply grateful. Sarah Banet-Weiser read many of these chapters, often on short notice, and her generous and in-sightful input made it a more coherent book. I have also been aided immensely by the work of several research as-sistants, in particular Deborah Hanan, who did a fabulous job pulling together initial research for me, and Carolyn Kane, who is largely responsible for the rich group of im-ages assembled here and who was so impressively resource-

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