CFP: Handbook of the Cultural Legacy of 9/11. (under contract with Springer)

 Edited by:

 Marc A. Ouellette, Old Dominion University, (mouellet@odu.edu) and Peter Pericles Trifonas, University of Toronto

From the instant the first news reports appeared, the events of 11 September 2001 changed the way texts are created, produced, shared, and received and with them the way we read, speak, think and understand our day-to-day existence changed, as well. Winston Wheeler Dixon’s early collection, Post-9/11 Film & Television (2004) attempted to capture the initials changes, as did Lynn Spiegel’s (2004) field defining essay. However, “9/11” has had and indeed continues to have a thorough and lasting impact on American culture, writ large. Here, we take an important cue from Susan Jeffords’ studies of what she calls “Vietnam representation” (1989, 1992), which includes “films, novels, personal accounts, collections of observations and experiences, and political and social analyses” (1989, p. 1). Importantly, the texts need not deal directly with the events; rather, they bear the traces, archetypes, themes, and images that invoke the germinal event and its outcomes. It is no mistake that the American Movie Classics network ran Red Dawn (1984) in heavy rotation in late 2001 and early 2002, nor is it an accident that the film was remade in 2012, with the plot altered to include a member of the “axis of evil. No episode of Friends, with its stock images of the “twin towers,” will be the same. Moreover, the presence lingers in other forms and other texts, particularly given the Trump regime’s threats of “Gitmo,” deportations, and the return to Bagram.

As we reach the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attacks, we invite scholars in a host of disciplines to think through how “9/11” conditions the production, distribution, and reception of texts. Here, we mean texts in the truest sense, from the tiniest representation to works of art, poetry, novels, film, television, music, games, and other media. Moreover, 9/11 functions both centrifugally and centripetally, changing how texts produced both prior to and after the attacks are perceived and interpreted. Thus, we also invite scholars to theorize and consider whether post-9/11 representation has become a distinct mode or whether the weight of Vietnam representation lingers, particularly in the valourization of veterans, as the hagiography of American Sniper clearly suggests. We are still living with and experiencing the consequences of that day and the immediate responses to it. Indeed, such was the response to an earlier special issue of a journal that the project on the cultural legacies of 9/11 has grown into this handbook.

Topics might include but should not be limited to the cultural productions and constructions of

 Allegories of 9/11 and/or the war on terror

• Artefacts and productions that changed after 9/11 (e.g., Red Dawn and 1990s action movies, reinterpretation of the Vietnam era and experience)
• Sci-fi/fantasy and themes of the war on terror (e.g., Battlestar Galactica)
• Ideas of cities and “fly over America.”
• Music, popular music, and musical forms
• Zombies, vampires, and the post-9/11 shaping of monsters
• Social media, podcasts, and other emerging forms
• War poetry, war elegies, and other poetic interventions
• Sport and games as surrogates for war, the projection of nationalism and patriotism
• Popular culture for children, including toys, TV, apps and games
• Education and pedagogy
• Cultural memory, cultural geographies, space and place
• The culture and representation of veterans, "POGS" and others
• Journalism, editorial, and the production of “news”
• Language and semiotics, particularly the reshaping of what can and cannot be said.
• History and popular histories
• Memes, gifs, images, and other short digital media forms
• Cultural resistance and activism, including slow activism
• Political extremism and the return of right-wing populism
• The cultural play and performance of patriotism
• Post-9/11 games and gaming, whether video, table top, and card games
• The reshaping of the gender order in post-9/11 cultural productions
• Genre and/or genre theory, including industrial, audience and institutional expectations
• Ethnography and the multiple layers of community
• Cult media productions, their fans and their producers
• The limits of populism and of media effects
• Paratexts and user-developed content,

Again, this is only a list of suggestions and the editors welcome other topics that explore the ways in which 11 September 2001 has become an inflection point for considerations of popular culture for the last twenty-five years.

Proposals (roughly 500 word abstracts) are sought by 15 Aug. 2026.

Completed papers are due by 1 Dec. 2026 and no later than 1 Jan. 2027.

Please send proposals, papers, and queries to Marc A. Ouellette, mouellet@odu.edu; ouellema@gmail.com