The area surrounding New York’s World Trade Center was politicized immediately after the 9/11 attacks and named ‘Ground Zero’. This article discusses how orientalist tropes as well as narratives of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ and ‘sacred space’ came to be embedded there. It uses two examples to examine how such spatialized politics have impacted Arab and Muslims New Yorkers: the Park51 community centre (popularized through media as ‘The Ground Zero Mosque’), and the lesserknown Little Syria district. It sheds light on Ground Zero’s significance for Arab and Muslim belonging in the United States – specifically, how Arab and Muslim claims to space around the World Trade Center subvert Islamophobic rhetoric that casts them as outsiders and enemies, and position them instead as fully American.
This article discusses the cultural mediation, memorialization and representation of Ground Zero, New York. It considers the site not only in terms of its materiality, but also as a powerful thought concept and outlines how the space and its reception have been treated in other scholarly literature. It contextualizes this special section, which interrogates the ideologies and practices that shape the area, for not only do these craft dominant images of the space, they also challenge hegemonic representations of it. The article also points to strengths and weaknesses in extant work on Ground Zero and introduces the contributions to this special section, in order to situate them within a larger scholarly framework.
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