AbstractAlthough responses to 9/11 have often called for unity, the process of memorializing it has proven extremely contentious. This article examines the role of disunity in modern memorialization, focusing specifically on John Adams'sOn the Transmigration of Souls, a work commissioned and premiered by the New York Philharmonic in 2002 to commemorate the victims of the World Trade Center terrorist attack. Drawing on critical theories of memorialization and on audience surveys I conducted at several performances ofOn the Transmigration of Souls, I suggest that disunity serves the process of memorializing by mirroring the experience of traumatic memory, by acknowledging loss and absence, and by negotiating regional, racial, gendered, religious, and political differences. Disunity thus encourages reflection on how multiple perspectives recast the act of memorialization. Such reflection, I argue, can inform both performance and scholarship of musical memorials toward what Judith Butler calls the “ethical responsibility” of mourning.
The Critical Turn in Education: From Marxist Critique to Poststructuralist Feminism to Critical Theories of Race