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Reconfiguration Of Ground Zero Essay

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The September 11 attack known worldwide as 9/11 was a series of four coordinated terrorist attacks by the Islamic terrorist group Al-Qaeda on the United States on that early morning Tuesday killing 2,996 people. Leaving the vast majority devastated and the recovery harsh. In the article “Tourism And Sacred Ground” author Marita Struken focuses on the meanings that have been generated about Ground Zero, which is “… a site where practices of memory and mourning have been active tension with representational practices and debates over aesthetics: a place, one could say, defined and redefined by a tyranny of meaning” (168). Examining how reconfiguration of Ground Zero as a site of cultural memory production has produced particular narratives of redemption that participate in the production of innocence and the political acceptance of the tourism of …show more content…

The term “ground zero” in this instance defines New York as the focal point of 9/11 and the most important aspect . The problem is that the term also effectively erases the other events that happened on 9/11, including the crash of American Airlines 77 at the Pentagon and the crash of Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The reality is that the idea of ground zero being used as the blank slate or as the targeted center of the attack thus sets into motion a set of narratives about 9/11, “both the narrative of lower Manhattan as the symbolic center of the event and the narrative that 9/11 was a moment in which the United States lost its innocence” (167). Ground Zero is an “ephemeral space”, yet one charged with meaning. Meanings that have been generated through the frameworks of photographs, sacred ground, dust, and consumerism . Although these frameworks in the article display the act of commemoration it devotes to the tragedy, it also conveys the argument as to their controversial stances on memorializing the

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