Reviews

Abstract

many academics have written of the 'unprecedented trauma' and 'unspeakablity' of the attacks (Greenberg 2003). Lucy Bond importantly warns of 'the dangers of homogenising cultures of remembrance' (2) and that, in particular, the frames of memory through which 9/11 has become commemorated seek to coalesce around 'discourses of patriotism and freedom' (8) through a number of modes. Bond charts the progression of these modes through what she describes as an initial state of mourning, to the politicization of the attacks, and into a more recent stage, whereby there remained a tendency 'to reflect the personalised introspection of the earlier critical responses' (9). It is here that Bond's monograph makes its first intervention, suggesting that 9/11 still remains a relevant and 'interruptive force in American culture' (10). In conjunction with her innovative formulations of transcendental memory and montaged commemorative discourse, Bond suggests that the 'normative preconceptions and conventions that shade, and to some extent, determine the shape of memory' (11) can be interrogated and uses a diverse range of commemorative artefacts in order to do so.Bond firstly explores the entrenched effects of 9/11 on contemporary American culture. As she posits, the event created 'a historical divide so trenchant that there could be no negotiation, no dialogue, between "before" and "after"' (16). Without the critical space needed to interrogate these two temporalities, 9/11 has been allowed in both cultural and academic fields to remain woefully under-critiqued. In Chapter 1, Bond interrogates the paradigm of trauma culture that manifests itself as a homogenous lens through which the