Marking Time in Memorials and Museums of Terror: Temporality and Cultural Trauma

• In Event: 2331 - Moral Crisis and Meaning in the Sociology of Culture

Abstract

The theory of cultural trauma focuses on the relationship between shared suffering and collective identity. From this perspective, events become traumatic when they threaten a group’s foundational self-understanding. As it stands, the theory has illuminated profound parallels in the experience of societal suffering across space and time. Yet focusing on identity alone cannot explain the vast differences that scholars document in the outcomes of the trauma process: namely, while some traumatic events become the basis for moral universalism, generating a capacity to forge connections between an in-group’s suffering and that of out-groups, others have the opposite effect, leading to particularism and closure. Returning to the interdisciplinary literature on trauma, I argue for incorporating temporality as a twin pillar of the trauma process, distinguishing between acting out (re-experiencing a past event as the present) and working through (situating a painful event within historical context). A comparison of three U.S. sites of memory dealing with terrorism—the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum, the September 11 National Memorial and Museum, and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, along with its companion Legacy Museum—illustrate the distinction.

Author

• Christina Simko, Williams College