9/11 Culture

9/11 Culture serves as a useful introduction to the complexities of American culture in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. With a broad purview that includes film, music, literary fiction and other popular arts, the volume is designed for anyone interested in quietly probing how American cultural agents and audiences have “acted out” and “worked through” the national trauma of 9/11. Written in an accessible language, and unburdened by academic jargon, 9/11 Culture constructs a number of common-sense approaches for the study of all of the works of art—high, low, and in-between.

Offering balanced examinations of a catalogue of artifacts culled from high (and low) culture—film, music, photos, memorials, comic strips, fiction, telethons, poetry—Melnick probes the silly as well as the superseding ways that 9/11 has exerted a shaping force on a wide range of practices, from the politics of femininity to the poetics of redemption. The ample pedagogical material—film- and discographies, introduction, and teachers preface—accompanying 9/11 Culture suggest to users the many ways one might begin tracking the cultural resonances of 9/11.

Jeffrey Melnick is Associate Professor of American Studies at Babson College. He is author of two books on Black-Jewish relations: A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song (1999) and Black-Jewish Relations on Trial: Leo Frank and Jim Conley in the New South (2000). Melnick is an active public speaker has appeared many times on local and national radio and television.