A Rhetoric of Traumatic Nationalism in the Ground Zero Mosque Controversy

In the summer of 2010, a national controversy erupted suddenly as a majority of Americans protested the building of an Islamic community center near Ground Zero. In this essay, I suggest the so-called "Ground Zero mosque" controversy makes visible the emergence of a rhetoric of traumatic nationalism that articulates suffering to citizenship and reproduces national crisis through a motif of consecration whose upshot is a conservative, bipartisan moralism. An anti-political discourse of victimization masquerading as a memory discourse of righteous sacrifice, traumatic nationalism serves as an alibi that excuses the United States from answering responsibly for the war on terror and prevents critical examination of the state of the union.