When I offered to review this book for JFRR, I was coming off a semester teaching American folklife that paid considerable attention to culturally nuanced expressions of grief and remorse. Two of the texts I used—Kenneth Foote’s Shadowed Ground and Sean Willentz’s and Greil Marcus’s The Rose and the Briar—served as catalogs of the varied responses communities bring to large and lesser episodes of death and mourning. Several students in my class gathered information on local shrines that dot the Baltimore landscape, assemblages of objects that convey a sense of individuals who died too young and the circumstances governing these tragic deaths.
I thought that I had a grasp on death and mourning on these community and individual levels, but I was curious about whether the approaches employed in course readings and fieldwork could be applied to expressions of a larger scale—say, the National September 11 Memorial. This particular memorial is the chief subject of the present study by Nicholas S. Paliewicz and Marouf Hasian Jr, and their book turns out to be a tough piece of scholarship to weave into the lesser tragedies with which my course was concerned.
This disjuncture is not exactly a weakness in the book under review. After all, the authors make no claim of finding common ground with ballads and street corner shrines. On the contrary, The Securitization of Memorial Space is really concerned with a cultural process that turns “official” memorials into social spaces whose meanings are created by those individuals who employ them to process and moderate their own personal grief.
This ostensible goal in mind, one might wonder why the views of individual visitors to the National September 11 Memorial are so conspicuously absent from this book. And why human subjects are as notably absent from the fifteen poor black-and-white photographs of the site that illustrate the text. Okay—I teach at an arts college, where the visual is foremost. But The Securitization of Memorial Space seems particularly stingy where data is concerned. Readers will be best served to have garnered their own sensory impressions of the Memorial before reading this book, or best of all, visit the site beforehand. Those unable to do so might visit photographer Joel Meyerowitz’s images of the site from its immediate aftermath through the development of the Memorial in the 2011edition of his Aftermath.
In sum, Paliewicz and Hasian are long—very long—on analysis, and short—very short—on data, particularly the kind of data on comparable expressions that might provide the basis for comparative, deductive reasoning. There might be college courses for which this shortcoming is not a problem, although I can’t think of one, but for folklorists more inclined to construct conclusions upon examples—the more the better—this book is neither a broad exploration of memorial space in general nor an insightful interpretation of the National September 11 Memorial in particular.
Works Cited
Foote, Kenneth E. Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1997.
Meyerowitz, Joel. Aftermath. New York, NY: Phaidon Press Ltd, 2006, 2011.
Willentz, Sean, and Greil Marcus. The Rose and the Briar: Death, Love, and Liberty in the American Ballad. New York, NY, and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2005.
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[Review length: 532 words • Review posted on May 8, 2020]