Description
Book SynopsisContends that a consumer culture of comfort objects such as a World Trade Center snow globes, FDNY teddy bears, and Oklahoma City Memorial t-shirts and branded water, as well as re-enactments of traumatic events in memorial and architectural designs, enables a national tendency to see US culture as distant from both history and world politics.
Trade Review“
Tourists of History is a fearless guide through the paranoid landscape of contemporary American culture. Marita Sturken brilliantly maps the ways consumerism and tourism offer avenues of comfort in a threatening world at the same time that they become politically disabling. From the responses to the Oklahoma City bombing to the memorials to the Twin Towers, Sturken shows how the American way of mourning and remembering the dead shores up a conviction in a timeless sense of national innocence. This exceptionally timely book reaches deep into the past and will continue to resonate in the future.”—
Amy Kaplan, author of
The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture“
Tourists of History is a great read: well written, accessible on numerous levels, and driven by a persuasive argument that links tourism, consumerism, and Americans’ understandings of themselves and their history.”—
Erika Doss, author of
Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy in American Communities“Sturken is at her best making connections among the varied strands of American popular culture and mass media. . . . Sturken's analysis of contemporary consumer culture is stimulating. . . .” -- Kenneth E. Foote * Journal of American History *
“Sturken shows how the complex interrelationship of fear and safety ultimately defines contemporary American culture and provides momentum for an episteme in which a terrorist threat is always imminent. Her book is original and powerfully insightful, and comes strongly recommended to readers of cultural studies and public history.” -- Adam Dodd * M/C Reviews *
“While she argues for the importance of remembering the tragic loss of lives in Oklahoma City, Washington, Shanksville, and New York City, Sturken urges attention be paid to a dangerous confluence of memory, tourism, consumerism, paranoia, security, and kitsch that promulgates fear in order to sell safety, offers prepackaged emotion at the expense of critical thought, contains alternative politics not always seen until after the fact, and facilitates public acquiescence in the federal government's repressive measures at home and its aggressive political and military policies abroad.” -- John F. Barber * Leonardo Reviews *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Consuming Fear and Selling Comfort 35
2. Citizens and Survivors: Cultural Memory and Oklahoma City 93
3. The Spectacle of Death and the Spectacle of Grief: The Execution of Timothy McVeigh 139
4. Tourism and “Sacred Ground”: The Space of Ground Zero 165
5. Architectures of Grief and the Aesthetics of Absence 219
Conclusion 287
Notes 295
Bibliography 319
Index 333
