Marita Sturken, professor in New York University’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, has produced a superb trilogy of books engaging the complex processes of recent American memorialization. They are, in chronological order: Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering; Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero; and her new book, the subject of this review.
Terrorism in American Memory is, I think, the most ambitious of these books, given the many violent disruptions the nation has suffered in the post–9/11 world, which has increased the variety and intensity of memorial expression, now often an immediate language of engagement rather than a more distant expression of remembrance. Sturken understands very well how memorials are more than ever asked to serve a therapeutic function, for better or worse. She also understands that institutions combining memorial and museum present...
University of California Press