Introduction

Abstract

The terrorist acts of September 11, 2001 (9/11) caused profound destruction in Manhattan and a loss of life to terrorism unprecedented on American soil, the scale of 9/11 prompting some commentators to declare it as a defining historical moment. Frank Rich of The New York Times stated in its immediate aftermath, “America is a different country after Tuesday” (2001), and Wheeler Winston Dixon too claimed that “in this bleak landscape of personal loss, paranoia, and political cynicism, American culture has been forever changed” (2004: 3). Several years after the event, Mitchell Gray and Elvin Wyly reported that “everyone from Paul Wolfowitz to Peter Marcuse, Donald Rumsfeld to Norman Mailer, Dick Cheney to Naom Chomsky, agrees that things are different now” (2007: 332). Others, however, located the attacks within a broader spectrum of terrorism, David Holloway arguing that “in many ways the feeling that everything changed on 9/11 was an illusion […] Catastrophic though they were, the 9/11 attacks were just one incident in a much bigger, transnational Islamist insurgency” (2008: 1). Nevertheless, the date signaled a watershed in US political history as well as marked an escalation in the spectacular possibilities of terrorism. Moreover, the media attention that had been afforded to 9/11 has intensified its persistence in public memory.