Prosthetic trauma and politics in the National September 11 Memorial Museum

Abstract

The National September 11 Memorial Museum opened in New York City in May 2014. Like other memorial museums, it uses affect and experience to produce in visitors what Alison Landsberg calls a “prosthetic memory” of 9/11: an individual, personal memory of 9/11 whether or not the visitor actually experienced the event. However, the museum also constructs 9/11 as an event that is collectively, culturally traumatic. Thus, the prosthetic memory might be better conceived as a “prosthetic trauma” that, in recreating for visitors the trauma of 9/11, encourages strong identification with the victims as embodiments of the American cultural identity that was targeted by the ideology of the terrorists. In this article, I examine how the 9/11 Museum constructs 9/11 as cultural trauma and uses the act of bearing witness to create “prosthetic trauma” and a simplistic dualism between good and evil that has important political implications.