Identity, Representation, and the Politics of Recognition

This paper compares the construction of memory with respect to the form, function, and phenomena of identity, representation, and recognition existent in the six final Pentagon Memorial Competition entries commemorating the September 11, 2001 attack on the Pentagon. Compared in the context of the politics of recognition, equal dignity, and difference, formal negotiations between the specific and the universal, the singular and the multivalent, indicate the competition process is concurrent with a movements against the anonymity of mass killing in America. Comparison also reveals the definition, production, and reception of memorial architecture in the United States is not critical of difference – the Pentagon Memorial Competition does not engage a critical discourse pertaining to the politics of recognition, the commemoration of violence, nor the construction of memory in a multicultural society. We must ask and discern ‘who is represented,’ ‘who is remembered,’ as well as ‘what are we commemorating?’

Volume Editors
Marilys R. Nepomechie & Robert Gonzalez

ISBN
0-935502-54-8