Event date: Wednesday 3 December 2014, 1 – 2.30 p.m.
Location: Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, Auditorium B

“Remembering 9/11: Compelling Memories, Spectacularized Mourning and the Need for a Haunting”; given by Dr. Esther Peeren (University of Amsterdam)

“The promise ‘We Will Never Forget’ is central to the American commemoration of the 9/11 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center, with the Virgil quote ‘no day shall erase you from the memory of time’ inscribed not only on the wall of the repository within the National September 11 Memorial Museum that harbours unidentified or unclaimed human remains, but also on several items sold in the museum’s gift shop. Taking as its point of departure the intersection of memory studies, trauma studies and the work coming out of the so-called ‘spectral turn’ (which, from the 1990s onwards, across the humanities and social sciences, has used ghosts and haunting conceptually to render accessible absent presences and present absences), this lecture explores the way in which the promise to ‘never forget’ 9/11 has produced a practice of cultural memory that is not so much haunting as compelling and spectacularized. The determination to remember 9/11 has become an obligation and is accompanied by an expectation that this memory will be put on display, for purposes of verification and validation. Importantly, this modified culture of memory – or memory cultus – affects not only the public remembrance of 9/11 (most notably in the newly opened Memorial Museum), but also the way its bereavements can be lived privately. Mike Binder’s 2007 film Reign over Me, which focuses on the refusal of a man who lost his wife and children on 9/11 to openly remember and mourn them, is analyzed as providing a critical commentary on compelling, spectacularized forms of memory and mourning, and their predication on a notion of work as efficient, profitable and quantifiable production. The lecture closes by proposing that, as a counterweight to the dominant 9/11 memory cultus, more haunting forms of memory and commemoration should be proposed and endorsed.”

Esther Peeren is Associate Professor of Globalisation Studies at the University of Amsterdam and Vice-Director of the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies (ACGS) and the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). She is the author of The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (Palgrave, 2014) and Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture: Bakhtin and Beyond (Stanford University Press, 2008), and co-editor of The Shock of the Other: Situating Alterities (Rodopi, 2007), Representation Matters: (Re)Articulating Collective Identities in a Postcolonial World (Rodopi, 2010), Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture (Continuum, 2010) and The Spectralities Reader (Bloomsbury, 2013).