Recovering 9/11 in New York

This collection of essays offers a rich variety of approaches to how people and institutions in greater New York have sought to find meaning in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, now a decade on. The views and practices documented here join memory, recovery, and rebuilding together to form a vital new chapter in New York’s metropolitan history. Contributors contest the dominant nationalist narrative about 9/11 to generate a more local and socially-engaged form of scholarship that connects directly with the experiences of people who lived or came to work in New York that fateful day and the years that followed. In doing so, these essays give academics and clinical professionals an opportunity to reflect upon and work with the people of a community – in this case, metropolitan New York – as essential partners, and even the main protagonists, in creating new paradigms to capture the significance of these events and their aftermath. The collection is comprised of sixteen essays by experts drawn from a wide range of scholarly and professional fields. They investigate how people across the New York metropolitan region initially responded to and have since remembered the events of September 11th as they rippled out into the city, the surrounding metropolitan region, and the nation at large. They engage directly with the emotional and psychological aftermath of the attacks, approaching the questions of healing and teaching from a variety of institutional, professional, and non-professional perspectives. The volume concludes with a selection of essays that grapple with the challenge of “Representing 9/11.” Contributors to this section evaluate contemporary novels and films that have risked engagement with deep narrative traditions to translate the recent memory of public events into resonant stories and imaginative language. Readers are invited to consider how all these responses – in literature, memorials, media representations, and the words and actions of diverse individuals – still contribute to the complex, yet inescapable challenge of making meaning of 9/11.