Reframing 9/11 - 9781441119056

"Looking well beyond the most obvious and familiar tales of contemporary terrorism and counter-terrorism to survey a twenty-first century America burdened and buoyed by a decade-long War on Terror, Reframing 9/11 offers an ambitious collection of theoretically savvy commentaries focusing on a wide array of popular texts, from zombie movies and video games to the Left Behind bestsellers and Bruce Springsteen's The Rising. Together, these essays explore the multivocal, disturbing, and tangled legacy of 9/11 as it reverberates culturally, politically, and socially through a globally stretched and strained America." Gregory A. Waller, Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University

September 11th, 2001, remains a focal point of American consciousness, a site demanding ongoing excavation, a site at which to mark before and after "everything" changed. In ways both real and intangible the entire sequence of events of that day continues to resonate in an endlessly proliferating aftermath of meanings. Presenting a collection of analyses by an international body of scholars that examines America's recent history, this book focuses on popular culture as a profound discursive site of anxiety and discussion about 9/11 and demystifies the day's events in order to contextualize them into a historically grounded series of narratives that recognizes the complex relations of a globalized world.

Essays in Reframing 9/11 share a collective drive to encourage new and original approaches for understanding the issues both within and beyond the official political rhetoric of the events of the "The Global War on Terror" and issues of national security.