Conference Abstracts
45. Slocum, David; New York University:
“Post-9/11 New York as Post-colonial City”
The attacks of September 11, 2001, specifically on
the World Trade Center in New York City, can be seen as a moment
of double destabilization of the status of contemporary cities as
post-colonial or imperial entities. More obviously, that day’s
events and their aftermath confirmed that the Western and Northern
metropolis, and seat of empire, was itself subject to actions and
processes not directly initiated by it but from “outside.”
Yet of equal import, the day’s events -- and, especially,
their visual representation through technological media -- illustrated
the instability fundamental to the very dualisms upon which colonial
or imperial cities, social relations, and identity claims are founded;
as Tom Conley puts it, these shifting and ephemeral mediations “impose
and simultaneously take away a sense of identity and belonging on
a vast and anonymous public.”
The theoretical underpinnings of this position are Homi Bhabha’s
formulations regarding the contingency of identity and meaning in
contemporary experience. For Bhabha, the transnational is a space
and site for translation of meaning generated by difference. Difference,
however, exists both between national or other, say urban, formations
and within those specific formations and the subjectivities given
meaning through them. Some of the very dualisms conventionally essential
to urban discourses (city/country, center/periphery, public/private)
are problematized in the process.
Bhabha’s theorizing has a decidely culturalist emphasis that
richly informs analysis of media production and especially consumption.
The eventual positioning of Western media viewers/consumers vis-à-vis
9/11, and the construction/contextualizing of the day’s events,
sought to re-establish both meanings about New York as imperial
city and the subjectivities drawn from them. Especially important
here was the resulting construction of terrorism, especially through
a discourse of civilizational (i.e., irreconcilable cultural) conflict,
and the vast mobilization of political, economic, and military resources
to combat its purported threat. It should be noted that preoccupation
with the figure of the terrorist as archaic actor out of joint with
Western modernization epitomized the deflection of attention from
the structural economic, social and historical conditions of the
post-colonial world in favor of the pathological, often culturally
defective individual actor.
To be added to scrutiny of these constructions is a recognition
that technologies of media are not neutral in their operation. Media
theorists since Guy Debord have posited spectacle as an ongoing
and self-perpetuating process of culturally- and ideologically-specific
consumption and, as such, the basis for establishing and regulating
specific social relations and practices. While identity and belongingness
may be still be rooted in a politics of place shaped partly by post-colonial
socio-economic political realities, in other words, contemporary
subjectivity should also be approached as a media effect -- arguably,
as a technologized re-colonization of the imagination.
The aim of the proposed presentation is to examine the September
11 attacks on New York as an occasion for de-naturalizing the colonial
and imperial relations permeating the modern/contemporary world.
The specific texts to be drawn upon for the presentation are included
in the “9/11 Virtual Casebook” developed at New York
University following September 11 in order to preserve some of the
breadth and variety of media texts produced about and after that
day. Ultimately, the goal is to use these media texts and discourses
about New York City as the basis for discussing the instability
of contemporary belongingness and subjectivity that the attacks
upon the city evidenced and that the thoroughly mediated post-colonial
city foregrounds.
Back
|
