The Wounded City: Memory and Commemoration in Lower Manhattan

Abstract

This paper is about the way words, images and sites of memory have shaped remembrance and memorialisation of the events of September 11 2001 in New York. It begins with contemporary commentary and my own recollection of those events, which occurred as I was travelling to Britain, Ireland and the United States from Australia. It explores both the role of remembering in creating collective identities and the place of emotion in the public sphere. The paper draws on the work of Paul Ricoeur (1999) in discussing how the rituals of remembrance can organise the past and imagine the future. My focus is on local sites of memory: street memorials, sites of conscience and official memorials, and the way they reorder public spaces.