Trump/Towers: A Roundtable on Teaching 9/11 and the “War on Terror” in Our Moment

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Dialogue Format

Abstract

This panel brings together a set of scholars deeply concerned with vexed questions of racialization, representation, and the complex ways “9/11” and the “War on Terror” become common-sense terms on our campuses and beyond. Drawing from our own research, classroom experiences, and community-based work, we begin with a simple yet profound question: how should we teach (about) 9/11 and the War on Terror in a moment defined by newly-energized efforts to leverage those terms in the service of a powerful political agenda characterized by anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-Black, and anti-Arab beliefs and practices? None of us believes that the classroom can or should be a space purified of the politics and policies that—as we write this—have hailed millions of protesting citizens into the streets, airports, and government halls of the nation. We believe that our fraught political moment calls for radical pedagogies of resistance, as well as teaching that addresses the vulnerabilities and fears of students as they inherit an era of untold challenges.

The teachers, scholars, and activists comprising this roundtable are emerging scholars and veterans; they work in critical ethnic studies, film studies, art history, media studies, religious history, women's studies, immigration history and other related disciplines and interdisciplines. The shared commitment of the discussants is to engage with each other and with the audience to construct useful political and theoretical frameworks and practical classroom approaches. Our work in an out of the classroom tells us that some of the key terms likely to come into play include: “ancedotal,” “hybridity,” “opinion,” “impurity,” “truth,” and “representation.” We plan on beginning our discussion with (very) brief individual statements capturing moments of apparent success and abject failure in our classrooms. We acknowledge the necessarily contingent nature of our syllabi, assignments, lesson plans, and so on. We all know that there is nothing to be gained by pretending that our particular teaching experiences have universal application and yet so much to be learned by acknowledging our shared challenges, possibilities, and advances.

The participants gathering here want to explore together and with the ASA audience how much pressure the classroom can bear. What is possible in a 50-minute, M/W/F introductory class or a two hour weekly graduate seminar? Beyond consciousness-raising and the always-important work of insisting upon historical specificity (especially in this era of #alternativefacts) what other demands can we build into the work we do as classroom teachers? What are the politics and affective parameters of establishing our classrooms as places of safety, challenge, rigor, and progressive change? How are new(er) technologies helping to structure what is possible—and not possible—in our work? How do we manage the shared goal of acknowledging “all” voices in the classroom at such a fraught moment? The goal of this roundtable is to open as many questions as possible, develop a few trustworthy roadmaps for the work we want to do, and continue to acknowledge that our work in the classroom must engage with the everyday political depredations of our moment.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Andrew Ross, New York University

Panelists

• Jeffrey Melnick, University of Massachusetts at Boston

• Dana Heller, Old Dominion University

• Sylvia Chan-Malik, Rutgers University-New Brunswick

• Linda Y Mokdad, St. Olaf College

• David M Hernandez, Mount Holyoke College

• Thomas Stubblefield, University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth