Bent But Not Broken: Remembering Vulnerability and Resiliency at the National September 11 Memorial Museum

ABSTRACT

The National September 11 Memorial Museum (also called the 9/11 Memorial Museum) produces a rhetoric of resilience that provides visitors with a dominant and constitutive frame for public memory without necessarily overcoming contestations, perspectives, and mnemonic partialities that have shaped Ground Zero’s rhetorical meaning. Resilience can politicize mourning by breeding nationalism and overlooking political responsibilities, but it can also provide structures of representation for making sense of overwhelming tragic events. This article observes this dialectical tension between vulnerability and resilience by attending to the way objects visually orient visitors within a context of collective identity at the 9/11 Memorial Museum.

KEYWORDS:

• Commemoration
• forensic architecture
• public memory
• resilience
• September 11 Memorial Museum