ABSTRACT
In a New York Times editorial of 12 September 2001, the events of the previous day are identified as ‘one of those moments in which history splits, and we define the world as “before” and “after”’ (‘The War against America’, 2001: n.p.). Almost two decades later, the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 appear less as a moment that single-handedly changed the course of history than as the starting point, or catalyst, for an epoch-defining conflict: the so-called ‘Global War on Terrorism’, better known under former US president George W. Bush’s notorious shorthand: ‘War on Terror’. As Marc Redfield notes in his 2009 study The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections of 9/11 and the War on Terror:
We have witnessed, on the one hand, a constant remembering and rememorializing of September 11 in publications and media events, political sloganeering, security controls, etc.; on the other hand – but is it an other hand? – such an avalanche of sickening images and narratives parading by under the banner of America’s ‘war on terror’ – Afghanistan, Guantánamo, Baghram, Abu Ghraib, the ongoing slaughter in Iraq – that the spectacular horror of 9/11 can sometimes seem strangely wan and distant on the horizon, nearly buried under the mounting wreckage.
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