Tourists of History

by Sturken, Marita

• ISBN13: 9780822341222
• ISBN10: 0822341220
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780822390510
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-11-30
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

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 the two primary outcomes of the bombing of the 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 a World Trade Center snow globes, FDNY teddy bears, and Oklahoma City Memorial t-shirts and branded water, as well as re-enactments 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 have 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.

Author Biography

Marita Sturken is a professor of culture and communication at New York University

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Consuming Fear and Selling Comfort	p. 35
Citizens and Survivors: Cultural Memory and Oklahoma City	p. 93
The Spectacle of Death and the Spectacle of Grief: The Execution of Timothy McVeigh	p. 139
Tourism and "Sacred Ground": The Space of Ground Zero	p. 165
Architectures of Grief and the Aesthetics of Absence	p. 219
Conclusion	p. 287
Notes	p. 295
Bibliography	p. 319
Index	p. 333
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