“‘It's about us!’. Violence and Narrative Memory in Post 9/11 American Theatre
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Ilka Saal
Trauma work entails not only the mending of physical and psychic wounds, but also the reconstruction of narrative structures. In the wake of September 11, there were, as Don DeLillo put it, “1000, 000 stories […] waiting to be told.” And yet, the nation chose to inscribe only a select few into the nation's collective memory. Ann Nelson's The Guys (2001), Neil LaBute's The Mercy Seat (2002), and Karen Finley's Make Love (2003) are paradigmatic examples of forming narrative memory in the American theater. The article shows how these dramatic narratives interact with their cultural context. It explores the ways in which these plays might speak to Judith Butler's concern for a proper ethical framing of traumatic memory, one that interlinks the mourning for the vulnerability of the self with an awareness of the vulnerability of others. So far, American theater has shown little interest in working out what Butler has called an “ethics of vulnerability.” It has frequently fallen back on either the celebratory affirmation of nationhood (Nelson) or its sarcastic questioning (LaBute). It is only in Finley's performance piece that we begin to see an attempt to move beyond such unilateral accounts of suffering.
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction. Performing Cultural Trauma in Theatre and Film. Between Representation and Experience
- Hitchcock, the Holocaust, and the Long Take: Memory of the Camps
- Playing Soldiers at the Edge of Imagination. Hotel Modern and the Representation of the Unrepresentable
- On the Charge of Memory. Auschwitz, Trauma and Representation
- Mediating Memories. The Ethics of Post-9/11 Spectatorship
- The Violin Player, the Soccer Game and the Wall-Graffiti. Rhetorical Strategies in the Border-Regions between Israel and Palestine
- Mourning as Method. William Kentridge's Black Box/Chambre Noir
- “‘It's about us!’. Violence and Narrative Memory in Post 9/11 American Theatre
- Beyond Medusa. Recovering History on Stage
- Unclaimed and Unclaimable. Memories of the RAF
- Afterimages. Post-Holocaust, Posttraumatic, and Postcolonial Cinemas
- Das Warten auf den Herrensignifikanten oder: Die Verhandlung von Zufall, Zeichen und Notwendigkeit in Thomas Pynchons The Crying of Lot 49 als Kritik des Indizienparadigmas
- Von der “(Un)Möglichkeit, sich in die Fremde hineinzuleben”. Kulturelle Assimilation als Desintegration am Beispiel von Ilija Trojanows Roman Der Weltensammler
- Rezensionen
- Liste der Mitarbeiter
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction. Performing Cultural Trauma in Theatre and Film. Between Representation and Experience
- Hitchcock, the Holocaust, and the Long Take: Memory of the Camps
- Playing Soldiers at the Edge of Imagination. Hotel Modern and the Representation of the Unrepresentable
- On the Charge of Memory. Auschwitz, Trauma and Representation
- Mediating Memories. The Ethics of Post-9/11 Spectatorship
- The Violin Player, the Soccer Game and the Wall-Graffiti. Rhetorical Strategies in the Border-Regions between Israel and Palestine
- Mourning as Method. William Kentridge's Black Box/Chambre Noir
- “‘It's about us!’. Violence and Narrative Memory in Post 9/11 American Theatre
- Beyond Medusa. Recovering History on Stage
- Unclaimed and Unclaimable. Memories of the RAF
- Afterimages. Post-Holocaust, Posttraumatic, and Postcolonial Cinemas
- Das Warten auf den Herrensignifikanten oder: Die Verhandlung von Zufall, Zeichen und Notwendigkeit in Thomas Pynchons The Crying of Lot 49 als Kritik des Indizienparadigmas
- Von der “(Un)Möglichkeit, sich in die Fremde hineinzuleben”. Kulturelle Assimilation als Desintegration am Beispiel von Ilija Trojanows Roman Der Weltensammler
- Rezensionen
- Liste der Mitarbeiter
