Abstract
Amy Waldman’s 2011 debut novel The Submission may be read as an exercise in alternative history; in 2003, a jury is gathered in New York City to select the design for a memorial commemorating the victims of 9/11. When the chosen designer’s name is finally revealed, his identity as an American Muslim comes to the attention of the public, and controversy ensues about the appropriateness of his submission. Following the reactions of about a dozen different characters to the memorial selection process, the narrative revolves around the role of public art in the memorializing of collective traumas, the complexities of processes of collective mourning and public commemoration. As Félix Duque has argued, it is through such monuments that national identity has been traditionally codified as “the public” (2001, 167). This chapter sets out to explore several fundamental issues regarding the politics of commemorating 9/11, which Waldman’s novel brings to the forefront: the role it may play in enacting the redefinition of communal ties in the process of cultural trauma; the difficulties in the identification of the legitimate agents through which such redefinition is to be carried out (what Jeffrey Alexander would call “carrier groups”); the visibility and representation of victims in the public sphere; and the risks of manipulation and appropriation of the public sphere by interest groups.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Bibliographical References
Alexander, Jeffrey C., Ron Eyerman, and Bernard Giesen. 2004. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Anderson, Benedict. [1983] 2006. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
Badiou, Alain. [1993] 2001. Ethics. Translated by Peter Hallward. London: Verso.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevski’s Poetics, translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bauman, Zygmunt. 2001. Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World. London: Wiley.
Bercovitch, Sacvan. 1993. The Rites of Assent. New York: Routledge.
Cleave, Chris. 2011. “Review of The Submission.” Washington Post, 15 August. https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/book-review-chris-cleave-reviews-the-submission-by-amy-waldman/2011/08/14/gIQAD2CgHJ_story.html?utm_term=.2628b816fafd. Accessed on 30 November 2016.
Duque, Félix. 2001. Arte público y espacio político. Madrid: Akal.
Edkins, Jenny. 2003. Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Frost, Laura. 2014. “Archfictions: Constructing September 11.” In Transnational Literature and Culture after 9/11: The Wrong Side of Paradise, edited by Kristine A. Miller, 198–220. London: Routledge.
Gauthier, Tim. 2015. 9/11 Fiction, Empathy, and Otherness. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Gray, Richard. 2011. After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Keeble, Arin. 2014. The 9/11 Novel: Trauma, Politics and Identity. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Khadem, Amir. 2015. “Paucity of Imagination: Stereotypes, Public Debates and the Limits of Ideology in Amy Waldman’s The Submission.” In Representing 9/11: Trauma, Ideology and Nationalism in Literature, Film and Television, edited by Paul Petrovic, 67–78. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Knight, Cher Krause. 2008. Public Art: Theory, Practice and Populism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lorentzen, Christian. 2011. “Shave for Them: Review of The Submission.” London Review of Books (33)18. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n18/christian-lorentzen/shave-for-them. Accessed on 30 November 2016.
Mihaila, Rodica. 2014. “Healing the Nation, Memorializing Trauma: Ground Zero and the Critique of Exceptionalism in the Recent American Novel.” In Mapping Generations of Traumatic Memory in American Narratives, edited by D. Mihalescu, R. Oltean and M. Precup, 286–299. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars.
Miles, Malcolm. [1997] 2005. Art, Space and the City. London: Routledge.
Mouffe, Chantal. 2000. The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso.
O’Gorman, Daniel. 2015. Fictions of the War on Terror: Difference and the Transnational 9/11 Novel. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Pacifici, Robert Wagner and Barry Schwartz. 1991. “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past.” American Journal of Sociology 97 (2): 376–420.
Pease, Donald. 2009. The New American Exceptionalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Simpson, David. 2006. 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Smelser, Neil J. 2004. “Epilogue: September 11, 2001, as Cultural Trauma.” In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman and Bernard Giesen, 264–282. Berkeley: University of California Press.
The Association of Public Art. “What is Public Art?”. Adapted from Penny Balkin Bach. 1992. Public Art in Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. http://www.associationforpublicart.org/what-is-public-art/. Accessed on 30 November 2016.
Waldman, Amy. [2011] 2012. The Submission. London: Windmill.
Winter, Jay. 1995. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Martín-Salván, P. (2017). Public Art and Communal Space: The Politics of Commemoration in Amy Waldman’s The Submission . In: Martínez-Alfaro, M., Pellicer-Ortín, S. (eds) Memory Frictions in Contemporary Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61759-6_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61759-6_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-61758-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-61759-6
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)