Vanishing People: Politics, Preservation, and the Antiquarian Impulse in 9/11 Docudrama

Abstract

This essay identifies and describes the "antiquarian impulse" in 9/11 docudrama, arguing that fixation on 9/11's material culture undermines human agency and abdicates national responsibility by ascribing agency to 9/11's artifacts. The essay finds a precedent for this acquiescence in nineteenth-century literary antiquarianism, which used similar techniques of deflection to diminish the ongoing role settlers played in Indigenous annihilation. Though these distinct moments in literary history are not analogous, they both bend temporality to facilitate national narratives of innocence, unpreparedness, and inevitable war. Whereas nineteenth-century antiquarian literature depicts the extinction of the "vanishing Indian" as an event that had already taken place, 9/11 antiquarianism fabricates a similarly specious spatiotemporal architecture wherein the nation is beset by inevitable "failures of imagination" that are mitigated only unending, borderless wars. The essay argues that antiquarian impulse in literature and film has consequences for how we approach both human agency and twenty-first-century warfare.