ABSTRACT
American wound culture, then, preceded 9/11, but intensified in its aftermath. In Seltzer’s formulation, wound culture exists at the intersection of “the vague and shifting lines between the singularity and privacy of the subject, on the one side, and collective forms of representation, exhibition, and witnessing, on the other”. The evolution of American wound culture is too complicated to unfold in detail here. In brief, however, Kirby Farrell suggests that late twentieth-century America was characterized by a “post-traumatic mood” that came “as an aftershock of the great catastrophes of midcentury”. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the American Psychological Association issued a press release that gave the general public advice about “coping with terrorism”. Gray and Rothberg indict this corpus for eliding the geopolitical consequences of the attacks and presenting contemporary America as populated by traumatized white, middle class families.
