Global anniversaries and cultural rupture: September 11, COVID-19 and ethical cultural change

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses the role of anniversaries of global events or crises to understand how their practice of memorial storytelling manages and governs cultural narratives of crises in ways that obscure more productive approaches to resistance. Drawing on the 30th Anniversary of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (2022) as a call for new cultural approaches to anniversaries, this paper investigates their productive role in new imaginaries for ethics of cohabitation, interdependency and liveability. Anniversaries of global crises as rituals of interdependency and belonging can, it is argued, be critically understood not as instances of historical rupture but as moments of ontological adjustment. Building on the recent work of Judith Butler, it is suggested that such ontologies centre on the relationship between interdependency, equality of grievability and infrastructural supports for care, all of which must be apprehended from poststructuralist cultural perspectives. If cultural studies is to play an advocacy role towards ethical change, then making sense of how global anniversaries can highlight rather than obscure marginal ethical practices is a starting point for cultural change towards more equitable and liveable global cohabitation.

KEYWORDS:

• Anniversaries
• September 11
• COVID-19
• Butler
• ethics

Acknowledgments

Parts of this paper were presented as a keynote presentation at the June 2022 Cultural Studies Association of Australasia conference (hosted by Edith Cowan University, Western Australia), titled ‘Bodies of Hostility: Apprehending Violence in Contemporary Culture’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.