Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
On September 11, 2001, broadcast and print media around the world narrated the destruction of New York City's World Trade Center and the deaths of thousands of its occupants. This paper will examine the ways in which television and its appendages (the telephone, the internet, the newspaper) operated to organize the discursive meanings of this traumatic event. I will propose that between September 11 and February 2002's Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah, ideas about home, roots and rootedness (and their Others: foreignness, homelessness, nomadicism) operated as a discursive mapping of that which could otherwise not be mapped, or fully grasped. From the demonization of those nomads, migrants and others moving across borders, to the triumphant "Roots" logos on the uniforms of British, American and Canadian Olympic athletes, roots, in a sense, became the unrepresentable "real." How did television, then, in its liminal position on the borders of the home, narratively organize the spatial boundaries of inside and outside, local and global? More specifically, I want to examine how Canadian television worked to mediate the trauma of boundary dissolution in both a literal and a representational sense. Following along recent trauma theory, I want to ask: how does a nation itself experiences common symptoms of trauma? And can these fears become unrepresentable in and of themselves, so that the metaphor of home and roots stand in their place?
Repository Citation
Bociurkiw, Marusya. "Homeland (In)Security : Roots and Displacement, from New York, to Toronto, to Salt Lake City." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 3, no. 3, 2003, pp. 1–21. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol3/iss3/5
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