Awards

• Winner of NEPCA Book Award finalist.
• Winner of Winner, NEPCA Rollins Book Award.

Overview

The day the towers fell, indelible images of plummeting rubble, fire, and falling bodies were imprinted in the memories of people around the world. Images that were caught in the media loop after the disaster and coverage of the attack, its aftermath, and the wars that followed reflected a pervasive tendency to treat these tragic events as spectacle. Though the collapse of the World Trade Center was ""the most photographed disaster in history,"" it failed to yield a single noteworthy image of carnage. Thomas Stubblefield argues that the absence within these spectacular images is the paradox of 9/11 visual culture, which foregrounds the visual experience as it obscures the event in absence, erasure, and invisibility. From the spectral presence of the Tribute in Light to Art Spiegelman's nearly blank New Yorker cover, and from the elimination of the Twin Towers from television shows and films to the monumental cavities of Michael Arad's 9/11 memorial, the void became the visual shorthand for the incident. By examining configurations of invisibility and erasure across the media of photography, film, monuments, graphic novels, and digital representation, Stubblefield interprets the post-9/11 presence of absence as the reaffirmation of national identity that implicitly laid the groundwork for the impending invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Full Product Details

9780253015495

Table of Contents

Reviews

An engaging book with challenging things to say about post-9/11 artistic strategies, the subjectivity of viewers, and the representational paradoxes at the heart of 9/11 art. -Jeffrey Melnick, author of 9/11 Culture How can artworks elicit effective collective action? For a long time, contemporary art has been celebrated for its deployment of emptiness and absence as political strategies. Thomas Stubblefield convincingly demonstrates that this discourse doesn't work any more, and that deferring to participants to 'complete' the work has also become a lazy artistic strategy. In close examinations of the production and reception of monuments to disaster, he stirringly argues that discourses of participation and therapy supplant collective action and prepare people, once again, to receive the rhetoric of war. -Laura Marks, author of Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art 9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster is an extraordinarily brilliant academic book which has explored the 'absence of image' not only in the US media but also how it shaped the arts and culture in the post-9/11. 9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster will change how we think about disasters and tragedies. The book is a must-read for both students and practitioners of media studies. - Repository Thomas Stubblefield has written a concise, engaging, and thought-provoking work that asks the reader to reassess their knowledge and relationship to that moment and the resulting milieu of post 9/11 life in America. -ARLIS/NA Reviews Recommended. -Choice

an engaging book with challenging things to say about post-9/11 artistic strategies, the subjectivity of viewers, and the representational paradoxes at the heart of 9/11 art. Jeffrey Melnick, University of Massachusetts, Boston, author of 9/11 Culture

9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster is an extraordinarily brilliant academic book which has explored the 'absence of image' not only in the US media but also how it shaped the arts and culture in the post-9/11. 9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster will change how we think about disasters and tragedies. The book is a must-read for both students and practitioners of media studies. * Repository * Thomas Stubblefield has written a concise, engaging, and thought-provoking work that asks the reader to reassess their knowledge and relationship to that moment and the resulting milieu of post 9/11 life in America. * ARLIS/NA Reviews * Recommended. * Choice * This is a must-read for those interested in visual imagery; indeed, parts of 9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster expand our thinking in promising ways. Scholars in the area of visual culture and visual rhetoric will find Stubblefield's book particularly useful in broadening the discussion of what is not present in media images and what they tell us about what is present. * NEPCA * The book's emphasis on the erased and the invisible—and the intrinsic role these play in shaping collective memory and political ideologies—provides an important contribution to memory and visual culture studies, as well as to a broader analysis of 9/11, how that event has been written into history, and continues to be deployed as an operating force. * Journal of American History * 9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster . . . adds a fresh and insightful view on how 9/11 is perceived in American society—the day that 'refuses to enter history,' the tragedy that 'has, ineffect, not yet passed' (188). The book is a captivating account that can be recommended to those interested in US cultural studies,visual analysis, as well aslm, photography, and graphic novels to comprehend how they help their audience realize the tragedy of 9/11from different perspectives. * Journal of Popular Culture *

9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster is an extraordinarily brilliant academic book which has explored the 'absence of image' not only in the US media but also how it shaped the arts and culture in thepost-9/11. 9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster will change how we think about disasters and tragedies. The book is a must-read for both students and practitioners of media studies. Washington Book Review

Author Information

Thomas Stubblefield is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.

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