Cultivating Critical Eyes: Teaching 9/11 through Video and Cinema

The odds of achieving a mature historical understanding are stacked against us in a world in which Disney and MTV call the shots.

Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts ¹

In the days immediately following the devastating events of 9/11, the Bush administration and the corporate media seemed as if they were conspiring in an infectious spread of convenient binaries: cowards and heroes, terrorists and freedom fighters, evil and godliness, us and them. This pervasive "Jihad vs. McWorld" ² view had the same effects as a horror movie, which, in Stephen King's explanation, "takes away shades of gray" and "urges us to put away our penchant for analysis and to see things in pure blacks and whites." ³

For many of us with an aversion to such simplicity, the crisis of 9/11 had the opposite effect: it created an opening and the impetus to examine our troubled world from new and multiple perspectives. As one editorial in the New York Times of October 21, 2001, put it, the crisis of 9/11 and the new war on terrorism provided "an opportunity to stimulate greater interest in world affairs and history" and "an awakening for many students—[I would add teachers]—who find the outside world is not as distant as they had thought." ⁴

The Brooklyn campus of Long Island University (LIU), where I teach writing and cultural studies, is located across the river from lower Manhattan. On September 11, 2001, many students and faculty watched from classroom windows as the twin towers burned and fell, and worried about the safety of relatives, loved ones, and classmates. Others walked home from LIU along Flatbush Avenue, joining crowds of people still covered in soot who escaped from downtown Manhattan on foot over the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. For all, the trauma of 9/11 was palpable. It left us clamoring for understanding as we tried to move on with classes.

To aid in understanding the tragedy and the U.S. response to the crisis, a group of progressive LIU faculty quickly organized a series of teach-ins. We questioned the mainstream media's repetitious string of images, the sudden spate of available experts on terrorism, ⁵ and the apparent agenda of manufacturing public consent for war. At a time when dissenting voices and contesting ideas seemed to be absent from public discussion, we hoped these teach-ins would provide a forum for exploring the dense map of political, economic, historical, cultural, and personal coordinates connected to the terrorist attacks.

Although similar teach-ins were taking place on college campuses across the nation, we were uniquely fortunate at LIU in that our initiatives led to a seven-week team-taught course entitled "Critically Reading the War on Terrorism." ⁶ The provost generously offered to support this tuition-free one-credit course and to make it available during the second half of the first semester to members of the general community as well as to faculty, students, and administrators. The course was put together by an interdisciplinary team of humanities faculty (three from English and one each from philosophy, media arts, and journalism) and drew approximately forty enrolled students and many drop-ins.

Several classes during the course were devoted to examining issues of representation pertaining to the crisis, including sessions on "media representations," "representing Islam," and "Hollywood and the discourses of globalization.'" The six humanities professors instructing the course sought to mine the context of the current crisis, to situate the events historically and vis-à-vis U.S. foreign policy, and to examine the language and images used by the mainstream media and the Bush administration in their efforts to galvanize the American public behind the "new war." In the main, we aimed to create a community wherein it was safe to ask difficult questions and to interrupt the dominant symbolic order, which was increasingly rendering a complicated and multihued reality in broad brush strokes of...