9/11 literary studies are characterized by an enduring whiteness, which detrimentally flattens and skews our understandings of the attacks. 9/11 was not an affront to whiteness, and its consequences —…
Archive for September, 2021
Girls Like Us
In summer 2014, as Israel’s war on Gaza intensified, Israeli actor Gal Gadot uploaded a selfie to Facebook that drew worldwide attention. It showed Gadot and her daughter covering their…
In Poetry’s Field: 9/11, Forever War, and Growing Theory
In this Forever War, what good has come is hard to identify (some would argue a modicum of greater safety, but for whom?) but the bad greets us daily. The…
Saturday, Witnessing, and the Cultural Logic of Rehabilitation
Toward the end of Ian McEwan’s Saturday, when the protagonist Dr. Henry Perowne is operating on the man who had just earlier invaded his home and “terrorized” his family, the…
Culture War on Terror
At the Southern Baptist seminary where I attended college at the turn of the millennium, chapel was held three days a week. We gathered at 10am on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and…
Texturizing 9/11 in the Flat World: Screen Culture, Endless War, and the Literature of Terror
In the memorable words of John Updike, who witnessed the 9/11 attacks from a Brooklyn high-rise, 9/11 “had the false intimacy of television, on a day of perfect reception.”1 But…
Introduction: Legacies — 9/11 and the War on Terror at Twenty
September 11 has an afterlife. Merely experiential, historical time does not tell the full story. Time acquires a spectral dimension. The collapse of the towers is not their true ending….
The 9/11 Commission Report and the Limits of the Bureaucratic Imagination
The 9/11 Commission Report begins, like any cosmopolitan pastoral, with the weather, with a constellation of placid and ordinary sites, with everyday people waking up and moving into the world.1…