AFTER THE RUINS: THE 9/11 COMPLEX, MEMORY, AND THE GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF UNIVERSITY OF HAWAIʻI AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN AMERICAN STUDIES APRIL 2020 By Tomoaki Morikawa Dissertation Committee: Karen Kosasa, ChairPerson Elizabeth Colwill Vernadette Gonzalez Reece Jones Geoffrey White Keywords: 9/11, Battleground, Commemoration, InterPellation, Memory, The Global War on Terror, Vulnerability Acknowledgements This dissertation project would have not been possible without the assistance of many people. I want to thank Karen Kosasa who has pushed me this far. She has been the most avid reader of my writings. It is her dedicated guidance and numerous edits that enabled me to complete this dissertation. She was always willing to have a conversation with me either in person or online and provided generous support to me not only academically but also mentally. I am also grateful to my committee members, Elizabeth Colwill, Vernadette Gonzalez, Reece Jones, and Geoffrey White. Each chapter has sections that reveal how deeply I am influenced by their work. In my dissertation, I travel across time and space to the period of slavery in New York City, to Pearl Harbor, Hawaiʻi, and to the U.S.-Mexico border. Each journey was made possible because I was fortunate to work with my committee members. I must say that the Department of American Studies at University of Hawai'i at Mānoa took very good care of me. Mari Yoshihara, now the department chair, said to me, “We are watching you,” when I joined the department, and I was watched over with care for the whole of my PhD program. The UH bureaucracy is not easy to deal with, but Rumi Yoshida pushed through many things for me. Without her presence in the department office, things would have been much more difficult. I also want to express gratitude to many participants and TripAdvisor reviewers who shared their experiences and provided materials relevant to my research. They allowed me to critically reflect on my epistemological framework and complicate my thinking. Their voices added depth to my dissertation analysis. i And I would like to thank my comrades. They made my graduate life more than bearable. Special thanks to Yi-hung Liu and Andy Wang. While Yi-hung sometimes “trashed” my writings, she made me think harder, and Andy provided a space to focus on my work in Taiwan. And thank you to Jayson Parba, who cooked me salty Filipino food from time to time and allowed me to stay at his place when I was in Honolulu for my defense. ii Abstract While once a place that defined Lower Manhattan as the mecca of international business, the World Trade Center was destroyed and turned into a site of national trauma called “Ground Zero” by the events of 9/11. Right after the terrorist attacks, efforts to recover and reconstruct the site were quickly taken, and now, a memorial complex stands there. Naming it the Ground Zero memorial complex, this dissertation attempts to understand the significance of this place within the American landscape and American history. For this purpose, I closely trace the reconstruction process of the WTC site and examine the rebuilt memorial complex mainly consisting of the primary tower One World Trade Center, the memorial Reflecting Absence, and the National September 11 Museum. At the same time, I make a methodological decision to move beyond Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan in time and space. Guided by the notion that the site is the focal point of the flow of violence that is foundational to the U.S., this dissertation shifts the sites of investigation from Lower Manhattan to Vietnam, the U.S.-Mexico border, Hawai‘i, and Hiroshima. By situating the Ground Zero memorial complex within much larger contexts, I reveal that the WTC site was reconstructed into a place that sanctioned violence as a result of the American violence perpetrated globally following the 9/11 events. The Ground Zero memorial complex is thus a battleground where people may not physically lose their lives, but are encouraged to sanction the logic of the Global War on Terror as well as other ideological and physical wars waged on behalf of the U.S. To some visitors, the site may appear apolitical and neutral. It may appear to be dedicated to consoling and healing a wounded nation. However, the Ground Zero memorial complex is much more complex than it seems. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements i Abstract iii Table of Contents iv Table of Figures vi Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Exclusions, Inclusions: The Reconstruction of Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan 25 Chapter 2: The Cartography of Vulnerability: Wars and U.S. Geographies 59 Chapter 3: The Museum as a Battleground: Curating the Global War on Terror 90 Chapter 4: Encoding, Decoding: Visitor Experiences at the Ground Zero Memorial Complex 132 iv Conclusion 168 Appendix A: Email from 9/11 Memorial & Museum (Nov. 11, 2017) 175 Appendix B: Email from 9/11 Memorial & Museum (Nov. 11, 2018) 178 Appendix C: Questionnaire 181 Appendix D: Semi-Structured Interview Questions 182 Appendix E: Profile of Participants 183 Bibliography 184 v Table of Figures Figure 1: “Hibaku Saigen Ningyō” 5 Figure 2: “Visitor Rules of Conduct” 26 Figure 3: Museum Map 94 Figure 4: “Last Column” 96 Figure 5: “Slurry Wall” 97 Figure 6: A Large Map and “We Remember” 99 Figure 7: “Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning” 102 Figure 8: “World Leaders, December 7, 1988” 108 Figure 9: “Al-Qaeda in the Context of Sunni Islam, circa 2000” 114 vi Introduction May the lives remembered, the deeds recognized, and the spirit reawakened be eternal beacons, which reaffirm respect for life, strengthen our resolve to preserve freedom, and inspire an end to hatred, ignorance and intolerance. —National September 11 Memorial and Museum1 Does the state gain anything in exchange? It certainly does, but what it obtains pertains only to its own territory with respect to its own citizens. The state gains the following: that the church will not interfere with but rather approve and uphold the exercise of power by the state. The church promises to obtain for the state the consent of a segment of the governed that the state implicitly acknowledges it cannot obtain on its own. —Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks Volume II, 19752 Trajectory While walking through the National September 11 Museum in summer, 2018, my memory kept turning back to my visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum a few years earlier. For a Japanese national trained in the field of American Studies, I understood the term “ground zero” not only as a reference to the ruined World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan, but also as a marker signifying the hypocenters of the atomic bombings by the U.S. in August 1945 in Japan. For me, “ground zero” is a multifaceted term. Because my visit to the museum in Hiroshima predated my visit to the National September 11 museum in New York City, I found some of its exhibits perplexing, especially in terms of how it viewed the topic of war. The museum in Lower Manhattan, as one of the following chapters shows, affirms the Global War on 1 “Mission Statement,” https://www.911memorial.org/mission-statement (accessed February 28th). Although the National September 11 Memorial and Museum is the institution’s official name, the word “national” is often omitted. The memorial museum is a product of private and state partnership and thus not a federal institution. Its logo plain and simple: “9/11 Memorial & Museum.” And yet, as will be discussed later, this institution is anything but national. In light of this national status, I will use the official name in this dissertation. 2 Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks Volume II (Ed. and trans. Joseph Buttigieg, New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 220. 1 Terror.3 In contrast, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is thematically antiwar—and this is in line with what I was taught in schools when I grew up in Japan. I was educated to believe that war is evil.4 The museum built adjacent to ground zero in the city of Hiroshima confirms this point. The mission of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is to “[convey] to the world the horrors and the inhumane nature of the nuclear weapon and [spread] the message of ‘No More Hiroshimas,’” or no more war, “[t]hrough belongings left by the victims, A-bombed artifacts, testimonies of A-bomb survivors and related materials.5 For me, war is not something to be celebrated. When I encountered the affirmation of war in the National September 11 Museum, I was confused by the differences between the U.S. war culture and the one in which I was raised. That I found some exhibits in the museum in Lower Manhattan disconcerting does not mean that I am morally superior as a Japanese citizen in comparison to Americans. On the contrary, in Hiroshima, I was troubled by my own discriminatory responses towards others. When I saw American-looking people touring around the Hiroshima Peace Memorial park and taking photographs in front of the Atomic Dome, I inwardly condemned them: “Shame on you. You people caused this to us and you are having some fun out of it.” My reaction to them was probably no different from Americans who are troubled when they see “Japs” visiting the Pearl Harbor Historic Sites and viewing the USS Arizona Memorial in Hawai‘i.6 Or, I am not unlike 3 This war is called the (Global) “War on Terror” in the United States.