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72 C H A P T E R 3 Globalism or Nationalism? Cai Guoqiang, Zhang Huan, and Xu Bing in NewYork In spring 2003, photographs of Chinatown taken by Lia Chang after the 9/11 terrorist attacks were on view as part of the exhibition “Recovering Chinatown: The 9/11 Collection,” held at the Museum of Chinese in the Americas in New York City. Lia Chang’s photographic works effectively documented the experience of Chinese New Yorkers during and after the 9/11 tragedy. The attack on the World Trade Center inflicted profound damage on Chinatown’s economy, especially its tourist services, garment shops, and restaurants, and the Asian community in Chinatown has never really recovered. Among the affected Chinese New Yorkers is Zhang Hongtu, an accomplished artist whose ironic Chairman Mao portraits were exhibited at various museums and published in art journals and scholarly books worldwide.1 Originally from Beijing, Zhang has lived in New York for the past two decades and regards the city as his home. As “a true New Yorker,”2 Zhang has participated in two exhibitions commemorating September 11. One was organized by Exit Art in New York in January 2002, where he exhibited his photographic installation Missing Mona Lisa, in which pictures of the missing people after 9/11 overlap with Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece. Mona Lisa in this installation seems like a pensive mourner gazing at the victims of the World Trade Center attack from a long-ago past. In the days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, people from New York’s art community lamented that art was pointless in the face of such horrors, but they began planning trauma-oriented art programs, and artists “returned to their studios, sometimes in loft buildings that were once in the towers’ shadows.”3 Zhang Hongtu was among those New York artists who felt obligated to help the 9/11 victims. In New York, many people have mulled over the political and philosophical meanings of September 11. In a New York Times article, Richard Bernstein Globalism or Nationalism? 73 surveys a public reaction to the events from both the right and the left. According to Bernstein, a controversial response from the left is that of Susan Sontag (1933–2004), who said that “the attacks were aimed not at American freedom but rather at ‘the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions.’”4 “The other common critique offered by the left,” Bernstein continues, “is...that American policies and actions around the world caused the anti-American fury that erupted on Sept. 11.”5 Then Bernstein presents a conflicting view between the left and the right aired on the campus of Yale University: Paul Kennedy, the Yale University professor best known for his book warning against American imperial overreach, provoked a stir when he asked students to imagine how they would feel if the United States were small and the world dominated by a unified Arab-Muslim state. “In those conditions, would not many Americans grow to loathe that colossus?” he asked, “I think so.” This prompted a rejoinder from Donald Kagan, a Yale classics professor and a conservative on foreign affairs, who said that Mr. Kennedy’s comments were a “classic case of blaming the victim.”6 Like Kennedy, Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007), in The Spirit of Terrorism, has voiced a by now familiar opinion on the issues of terrorism, American hegemony, and globalization: “It is what haunts every world order, all hegemonic domination —if Islam dominated the world, terrorism would rise against Islam, for it is the world, the globe itself, which resists globalization.”7 With the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we are confronted , says Baudrillard, with the “pure event” that concentrates in itself “all the events which have never taken place.” We had all dreamt of this event because it was impossible “not to dream of the destruction of American monopolistic power.”8 This remark may sound very “anti-American,” but it is a feeling shared by some Americans themselves. Fareed Zakaria, an editor for Newsweek and a CNN world affairs analyst, pointed this out in his cover story “Why America Scares the World,” on the eve of the Iraqi war: “What worries people around the world above all else is living in a world shaped and dominated by one country—the United States. And they have come to be deeply suspicious and fearful of us.”9 It is from...

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