The focal point of the conference will be the September 11, 2001 Oral History Narrative and Memory Project of Columbia’s Oral History Research Office, an oral history archive of 600 life stories of diverse New York City communities. The collection documents the multiple ways that “difference” – in the form of geography, cultural memory, ethnic identity, class, gender, generation, religious and political affiliation – affects how individuals are subject to and assign meaning to historical catastrophe, both immediately after the event and in the months and years following.
The conference will begin with a morning panel that lays the groundwork for the discussions we hope to stimulate throughout the two days. Panel One, “Injured Cities/ Threshold Catastrophes” will address the temporality of urban catastrophe, looking both at the populations that are most vulnerable and most deeply affected by injury — those on the threshold of catastrophe, to borrow a term from Israeli theorist Ariella Azoulay — and at ‘wounded cities’ in the aftermath. Panelists are urban sociologist Saskia Sassen, cultural theorist Azoulay and cultural geographer Karen Till.
Injured Cities: Urban Afterlives seeks to initiate a new collective memory of the events of 9/11, 2001, that arises from the local and urban, but also the global experiences of those most directly – and differently – affected. The first afternoon will focus on a series of dialogues organized by Mary Marshall Clark (Director of the Columbia University Oral History Research Office) that stage an encounter between oral history narrators who will testify to the crucial ways in which “difference” became a threat to the construction of a national collective memory of 9/11—a threat that endangered the national consensus that quickly formed for global retaliation. As a creative extension of the discussions of the opening day, the conference organizer are planning to host an evening performance of Testimony to the Ruins by the acclaimed Colombian theater group Mapa Teatro at Miller Theater.
Day Two of the conference will be organized around three interdisciplinary and international panels of noted artists, architects, scholars, journalists, and practitioners. Panel Four, “Citizens, Immigrants, Aliens in the Aftermath,” will think through the politics of belonging and unbelonging that result in the wake of catastrophic events, as well as the demographic injuries that fracture cities with potentially catastrophic effects. Panel Five, “Spatializing Afterlife” will engage the expressive cultural forms through which urban artists, planners, activists and policy-makers have engaged catastrophe, and how they have responded to their enduring wounds through the spatio-physical re-visioning of injured cities. The final panel “Art and Archive After Catastrophe” will focus on artistic responses to urban catastrophe, and the creative modalities that transform them into acts of redress and renewal.
Participants include Ariella Azoulay, Nina Bernstein, Teddy Cruz, Ann Jones, Dinh Q. Lê, Anne McClintock, Shirin Neshat, Walid Raad, Saskia Sassen, Karen Till, Clive van den Berg, Eyal Weizman and several narrators from the 9/11 Oral History Project; moderators Gerry Albarelli, Carol Becker, Hazel V. Carby, Tina Campt, Andreas Huyssen, Mary Marshall Clark, Saidiya Hartman, Rosalind Morris, Diana Taylor, and Mabel Wilson; and conference co-organizers Tina Campt, Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, Lorie Novak, and Laura Wexler.
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