Forever War: Culture, Coloniality, and the Long History of the War on Terror [electronic resource].

9781303299391

1 online resource (317 p.)

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Forever War explores how the War on Terror has been represented, and rendered as history, in fiction, film, and theory. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, pundits and politicians pronounced that day a historical rupture, or indeed the beginning of history itself. This historical myopia was joined in the nascent stages of the War on Terror by a geographic inwardness, as the ideal of "Homeland Security" gained discursive prominence. Forever War examines how the ahistorical and spatially confined narrative of the War on Terror has been reflected and refracted, affirmed and resisted, in cultural texts. Integrating textual analyses with cultural and political historicizations---reading cultural texts as symptomatic and diagnostic of historical reality---Forever War counterposes two strategies of representation: The first conceives of the moment of catastrophe as an abyss that blocks-off the past and the world; the second imagines the space of ostensive rupture as an opening through which deeper histories and more expansive geographies come into view. The manuscript begins within the limited historical and geographic horizons of post-9/11 New York, before venturing into the past and into the world---the planetary history of colonial modernity. Recognizing the recent past as continuous with this deeper history, and recognizing the United States as a part of this common world, is, I contend, a necessary precondition of any critical engagement with the War on Terror. Reading empire's presence within the United States, and articulating that presence with global imperial histories, Forever War argues for the urgency of, and labors to enact, a specifically postcolonial American Studies.

Books / Online / Dissertations & Theses

English

July 25, 2014

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2013.

Yale University. American Studies.