Post-9/11 Historical Fiction and Alternate History Fiction: Transnational and Multidirectional Memory

207 Pages·2020·1.969 MB·English

by  Pei-chen Liao

Post-9/11 Historical
Fiction and Alternate
History Fiction
Transnational and
Multidirectional Memory
Pei-chen Liao
Post-9/11 Historical Fiction and Alternate
History Fiction
Pei-chen Liao
Post-9/11 Historical
Fiction and Alternate
History Fiction
Transnational and Multidirectional Memory
Pei-chen Liao
Department of Foreign Languages and Literature
National Cheng Kung University
Tainan, Taiwan
ISBN 978-3-030-52491-3 ISBN 978-3-030-52492-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52492-0
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A
cknowledgments
I acknowledge support of the Ministry of Science and Technology in
Taiwan in funding research for sections of this book.
At Palgrave Macmillan, Allie Troyanos guided the project through its
initial stages. Vinoth Kuppan has been extremely helpful at all points. Two
anonymous reviewers provided constructive suggestions that helped me
sharpen my argument and expand my research scope.
I also appreciate the hard work and long hours put in by my assistant
Jennifer Tsai, who took part in the whole editing process and paid
attention to the details.
The faculty at the Foreign Languages and Literature Department of
National Cheng Kung University, where I have taught for ten years, have
been extremely supportive. In particular, I would like to thank Shuli
Chang, Chao-Fang Chen, and Carolyn Scott for their friendship.
Special thanks to Jackie Sumner and her parents for their hospitality
and generosity in the summer 2017 when I conducted research in
Washington, D.C. for this project.
I have presented material at the 25th Annual Conference of the English
and American Literature Association at National Chung Hsing University,
the 2017 International Conference on Life Writing at Kaohsiung Medical
University, and the 53rd ASAK International Conference at Korea
University. I thank all those who asked questions and commented on my
presentations.
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Sections of Chap. 3 appear in “‘America First’: Fear, Memory Activism,
and Everyday Life in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America,” Sun Yat-
sen Journal of Humanities, 46 (2019), 59–78, reprinted by permission of
the publisher.
Many thanks to my family for their love and confidence in me. This
book is for them.
c
ontents
1 Beyond and Before 9/11: A Transnational and Historical
Turn 1
2 “The Second Coming”: The Resurgence of the Historical
Novel and American Alternate History 21
3 “America First”: Perpetual Fear, Memory, and Everyday
Life in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America 51
4 Neo-Internment Narratives: Post-9/11, Cross-racial,
and Intergenerational Memories 81
5 “Walking a Tightrope”: Nostalgia, American Innocence,
and Exceptionalism in Colum McCann’s Let the Great
World Spin 115
6 Worlding Alternate Histories of the Post- 9/11 Era:
The Transnational Trend, Normalization, and the
Dynamics of Memory 153
7 “Our Pearl Harbor Moment, Our 9/11 Moment” 187
Index 193
vii
CHAPTER 1
Beyond and Before 9/11: A Transnational
and Historical Turn
If, according to Francis Fukuyama, the end of the Cold War marked “the
end of history,” “the end of history” ended, as several critics and com-
mentators have suggested, on September 11, 2001.1 In 1989, in a journal
called The National Interest, Fukuyama published an article “The End of
History?” which in 1992 he turned into a book, The End of History and
the Last Man. In his book, Fukuyama argued that the end of the Cold War
testified to “the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a system of govern-
ment,” which “may constitute the ‘end point of mankind’s ideological
evolution’ and the ‘final form of human government,’ and as such consti-
tuted the ‘end of history’” (1992, xi). By “history,” Fukuyama did not
mean “the occurrence of events” but rather “a single, coherent, evolution-
ary process, when taking into account the experience of all peoples in all”
(xii). Based on this understanding of History, Fukuyama was convinced
that the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism would
bring about “a coherent and directional History of mankind that will
eventually lead the greater part of humanity to liberal democracy times”
(xii). The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, however, struck a stun-
ning blow to Fukuyama’s argument while reviving Samuel Huntington’s
early-1990s “clash of civilizations” model. Huntington (1993) envisioned
a new phase of world politics in the post-Cold War era, in which major
civilizations, such as Western and Islamic civilizations, would clash (22,
25). Huntington’s supporters generally agreed that the terrorist attacks
perpetrated by the Islamic fundamentalists on September 11 proved his
© The Author(s) 2020 1
P.-c. Liao, Post-9/11 Historical Fiction and Alternate History
Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52492-0_1
2 P.-C. LIAO
visionary thesis. However, in “The Clash of Ignorance,” Edward Said
(2001) sharply criticized Huntington for having made “‘civilization’ and
‘identities’ into what they are not: shut-down, sealed-off entities” and for
having ignored “the myriad currents and countercurrents that animate
human history.” No matter how problematic or controversial Fukuyama’s
and Huntington’s visions of the post-Cold War era may be, the suggestion
that both American and world politics entered a new phase following
2001 appears to be quite commonly accepted by the general public. In
“Autoimmunity,” Jacques Derrida (2003) notes that “September 11 (le
11 septembre) gave us the impression of being a major event” (85). Naming
the terrorist attacks specifically with a date—September 11 or 9/11—indi-
cates that “something marks a date, a date in history” and that “‘some-
thing’ . . . should remain from here on in unforgettable: an ineffaceable
event in the shared archive of a universal calendar” (Derrida 2003, 86).
Nonetheless, was 9/11 really a history-making event? And if so, in what
sense? What does it mean to make history? And, finally, if history was really
made on 9/11, what and whose history was it?
9/11 has constantly been called an epochal event after which the
U.S. and the rest of the world could no longer be the same. Over the
intervening two decades since 9/11, there has arisen a sizable body of
novels that fictionalize the terrorist attacks and their aftermath, in an
attempt to grapple with their historical meanings. This trend is so promi-
nent that a sub-genre called “9/11” or “post-9/11” fiction emerged,
which almost immediately garnered both public and scholarly attention.
This can be readily seen in the critical acclaim and commercial success
received by novels such as Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers
(2004), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
(2005), John Updike’s Terrorist (2006), Jay McInerney’s The Good Life
(2006), Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), and Mohsin Hamid’s The
Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007).2 Just as the number of 9/11 or
post-9/11 novels being published every year has exploded, scholarly
books devoted to studying these novels and other literary works have
surged. There are essay collections like Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee
Quinn’s Literature after 9/11 (2008), followed the next year by Kristiaan
Versluys’s Out of the Blue (2009), which approaches the events of 9/11
and their literary representations through the lens of trauma, taking a line
of inquiry similar to E. Ann Kaplan’s earlier work, Trauma Culture
(2005). In addition to developing an argument about American literature
and trauma after 9/11, Richard Gray’s book, After the Fall, further directs
1 BEYOND AND BEFORE 9/11: A TRANSNATIONAL AND HISTORICAL TURN 3
critical attention to writings that “try to reimagine disaster by presenting
us with an America situated between cultures” and that, by “deterritorial-
izing America,” represent “the heterogeneous character of the United
States, as well as its necessary positioning in a transnational context”
(2011, 17). As such, Gray’s book has heralded a breakthrough in
post-9/11 literary studies, raising the bar for later scholars who have like-
wise challenged American centrism in their studies of transatlantic, immi-
grant, Muslim, and South Asian novels about and beyond 9/11, as
exemplified by Kristine Miller’s Transatlantic Literature and Culture
After 9/11 (2014), Susana Araújo’s Transatlantic Fictions of 9/11 and the
War on Terror (2015), Tim Gauthier’s 9/11 Fiction, Empathy, and
Otherness (2015), Daniel O’Gorman’s Fictions of the War on Terror (2015),
Marie-Christin Sawires-Masseli’s Arab American Novels Post-9/11 (2018),
and Nukhbah Taj Langah’s Literary and Non-literary Responses Towards
9/11 (2018).
My previous book, ‘Post’-9/11 South Asian Diasporic Fiction (2013),
partakes as well in those post-9/11 literary and American studies which
had taken a transnational turn. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 and their
aftermath have clearly intensified the need to shift the critical paradigm to
transnationalism, but calls for such a shift had actually been made much
earlier in the decade that can be traced as far back as the 1970s. Quoting
David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity to posit 1973 “as the year
in which the move to the globalized economy is inaugurated,” Theophilus
Savvas and Christopher K. Coffman (2019) also mark it “the year that
Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States was founded as a response to
the dominance of white male American literature at the Modern Language
Association conferences, and the continued circumscription of America, as
nation, and idea” (207). Immigration to the U.S., which began steadily
rising from its lowest point in 1973, was expected to pose significant chal-
lenges to “the academic projections of American innocence found in the
seminal texts of American studies—Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land
(1950), [and] R. W. B. Lewis’s The American Adam (1955)” (Savvas and
Coffman 2019, 207). Nonetheless, Ian Tyrrell’s 1991 article, “American
Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” was still cautioning its
readers against sinking into the legacy of exceptionalism, a predominant
yet mystified concept of American uniqueness with undertones of national
superiority built on the liberal tradition. Seeking an alternative, Tyrrell
(1991) then suggested the “possibilities of a transnational history,” namely
“a simultaneous consideration of differing geographical scales—the local,