The Difference a Date Makes: “9/11” versus “1973” in the Global History of NYC

DARA ORENSTEIN, George Washington University

September 11, 2023, 5:00-6:00pm
Vita Nova, Scripps College

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It seems safe to say that the Twin Towers stand for globalism. Ever since they fell on the morning of September 11, 2001, they have endured as something much larger than local landmarks. Whether abstracted on magazine covers, sanctified in street murals, or domesticated in snow-globes, these two skyscrapers have come to signify the scale of American influence abroad, albeit with their brand of imperial cosmopolitanism now understood as more vulnerable than invincible. They hate us ‘cause they ain’t us, as the bumper stickers put it, with a drawing of a firefighter and a flag. But mythology is not history. To apprehend the Twin Towers teleologically in light of their destruction is to flatten our appreciation of how they functioned and how they were represented, and thus why they mattered, during the three decades that they held sway in the capital of capital, New York City. After the suits-with-shovels dedicated them in 1973, how exactly did the workers in and around these buildings interact with global capitalism from 9 to 5? Aside from the tourists visiting the observation deck, where was the world at the World Trade Center? Where was “Europe”? The Iron Curtain? Where were the lines of demarcation between the East and the West? And what sorts of documents might serve as illuminations of the banal operations of these borders and boundaries, given that much of the archival record relevant to such questions was lost on 9/11? As a preview of a larger project, this talk will spotlight two artifacts of the rise of the Twin Towers during the long 1970s, a New York Telephone phone book published specifically for the “World Trade Area” in 1977, and a work of performance art by a Belgian artist that was installed outside between the buildings and the harbor during the summer of 1982.

Dara Orenstein is an associate professor of American studies at George Washington University, where she teaches courses on cultural history and cultural theory. Her first book, Out of Stock: The Warehouse in the History of Capitalism, is about the long and little-known history of export-processing zones in the United States. A propos of her presentation at Scripps, she was born at the Kaiser in Harbor City and raised in Modesto, and she spoke with a Queens, NY, accent until around age 6.