Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Marita Sturken is a professor of culture and communication at New York University. She is the author of Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering and a coauthor of Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture.

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""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"

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TOURISTS of HISTORY

Duke University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................................................ixIntroduction...............................................................................................11. Consuming Fear and Selling Comfort......................................................................352. Citizens and Survivors: Cultural Memory and Oklahoma City...............................................933. The Spectacle of Death and the Spectacle of Grief: The Execution of Timothy McVeigh.....................1394. Tourism and "Sacred Ground": The Space of Ground Zero...................................................1655. Architectures of Grief and the Aesthetics of Absence....................................................219Conclusion.................................................................................................287Notes......................................................................................................295Bibliography...............................................................................................319Index......................................................................................................333

Chapter One

In the first few months of 2002, the shoe and clothing designer Kenneth Cole ran an advertising campaign with the theme "Today Is Not a Dress Rehearsal." Cole is known for his quirky and often politically inflected advertising campaigns. He stands out among advertisers who deploy social awareness themes in their advertising campaigns both because he publicly contributes to charities, including many AIDS support groups, and because he writes the ad campaigns himself. The "Today Is Not a Dress Rehearsal" campaign featured a series of ads in which male and female models dressed in Kenneth Cole clothes and accessories were posed in domestic settings amid traditional furnishings: a rustic wooden table, a worn leather couch, and so on. Each image, with its soft hues of beige and brown, was accompanied by a different tagline: "On September 12, People Who Don't Speak to Their Parents Forgot Why"; "On September 12, Fewer Men Spent the Night on the Couch"; "On September 12, We Used Protection in the Bedroom, not the Mailroom." One ad, which features a man's hand touching a woman's hair, with wedding ring and Kenneth Cole watch noticeably displayed ("Men's Croco Leather Strap Watch W/Multi Function Dial $150"), reads "On September 12, 14,000 People Still Contracted HIV."

Kenneth Cole's "Today Is Not a Dress Rehearsal" campaign was one of the most sophisticated produced in the first months after 9/11. It spoke to the sense of crisis in the moment, and the sense of a necessary rearranging of priorities after the shock of the events of 9/11, a moment when family disputes seemed petty and worth forgetting; it also made reference to the many ongoing world crises that should not be overshadowed by 9/11, such as the AIDS epidemic. In these ways, the campaign resisted much of the exceptionalist rhetoric that defined post-9/11 discourse. Yet the ultimate intent of the Cole campaign was not simply to jolt potential consumers into putting 9/11 in perspective: it was to provide a sense of comfort in the face of fear and loss. The soft colors, muted tones, and scenes of domestic calm are selling warmth and reassurance. At the time, Cole's marketing director stated, "The world was not ready to see another typical fashion ad. Kenneth was very specific about wanting to show a relationship, warmth, humanness-moments most people would actually relate to." By marketing domestic contentment, these ads are selling the reassurance that one can be socially aware and safe.

The social message of the ads is at times offset by the occasionally jarring elements within them. In one ad, for instance, a young woman lounges on her back on a worn wooden table, eating strawberries from a bowl while a dog eats from a bowl beneath the table. A wallet with dollar bills peeking out at the edges lies next to her on the table and a Kenneth Cole leather bag is slung casually across the chair. In this context, the tagline "Today Is Not a Dress Rehearsal" reads ironically, if not comically: the image conveys not simply comfort but a sense of careless privilege. Writes Richard Stamelman, "We must recognize, as Kenneth Cole has instructed us to do, that fashion is no longer the rehearsal it once was but reality itself. Fashion now articulates, reiterates, and coincides with the reality effect put in force by September 11 itself."

The selling of comfort is a primary aspect of the affirmation of innocence in American culture. While the Cole campaign represents a relatively nuanced manifestation of comfort consumerism, it can be seen in the context of the long history of the marketing of domestic comfort as a means of reassuring the national public of the cohesion of the nation. In the post-9/11 context the selling of national comfort takes on certain implications; in particular, it is a means of erasing subsequent U.S. aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq (the role of those who need comfort erases the role of the aggressors). As a country that has defined itself consistently in relation to an external danger, a country defined by fear (founded and unfounded), the United States has been shaped in many ways by discourses of security, defense, and comfort. One of the primary expressions of this national discourse has been consumerism and the marketing of products to defend the home and to provide domestic simplicity in a world of chaos and threat.

In this chapter, I examine the relationship of consumerism to comfort, innocence, and security as it has manifested in American culture during the 1990s and in the post-9/11 era. How is it that the fear of an enemy and an abstract sense of danger have shaped national identity and notions of citizenship? How have consumer practices helped to enable this discourse of security, defense, and paranoia? It is my aim to make connections between the post-cold war trends of the 1990s (in which the "search" for an enemy to define our national identity took the form of increasingly mainstream paranoid cultures and the rise of a prison state and right-wing militias) and the post-9/11 culture, defined by threat and security concerns. In both these contexts, national identity is constructed through practices of consumerism. This consumerism infuses lifestyles of comfort and security with national meaning and speaks to individual consumers (consumers seeking comfort and reassurance as much as pleasure) as part of the nation.

DEFENDING THE HOME AND HOMELAND

The United States has consistently defined itself in relation to a sense of external threat and as a state that is continuously endangered. David Campbell writes that the "boundaries of a state's identity are secured by the representation of danger integral to foreign policy." He notes that U.S. foreign policy justified the invasion of Iraq in 1990 by articulating Iraq's invasion of Kuwait as a threat to the United States. Thus are imperialist policies expressed through and justified by concepts of security. William Appleman Williams writes that the definition of security in American history has often been synonymous with world control. He notes that...