Queering Memory and National Identity in Transcultural U.S. Literature and Culture

Christopher W. Clark

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030521134
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030521141
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Literature

This book examines the queer implications of memory and nationhood in transcultural U.S. literature and culture. Through an analysis of art and photography responding to the U.S. domestic response to 9/11, Iraq war fiction, representations of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, and migrant fiction in the twenty-first century, Christopher W. Clark creates a queer archive of transcultural U.S. texts as a way of destabilizing heteronormativity and thinking about productive spaces of queer world-building. Drawing on the fields of transcultural memory, queer studies, and transculturalism, this book raises important questions of queer bodies and subjecthood. Clark traces their legacies through texts by Sinan Antoon, Mohamedou Ould Slahi among others, alongside film and photography that includes artists such as Nina Berman and Hasan Elahi. In all, the book queers forms of cultural memory and national identity to uncover the traces of injury but also spaces of regeneration.

© The Author(s) 2020

C. W. ClarkQueering Memory and National Identity in Transcultural U.S. Literature and CultureAmerican Literature Readings in the 21st Centuryhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52114-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Christopher W. Clark¹

(1)

School of Humanities, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK

End Abstract

Following the events in New York of September 11, 2001, responses generated a rhetoric of oppositionality, whereby the infamous binary of “them and us” was created as politicians focused on the “barbaric” enemy of Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. Initial reaction of shock was followed by swift and decisive countermeasures prescribed by the Bush administration in an after-period defined by a “prolonged period of ideological shoring up and military hitting out” (Simpson 2006: 4, 7). In this formulation, the United States was cast as the heroes of democracy, reifying US exceptionalism in a “narrative of supremacy” (Hartnell 2015: 50). In the months and years that followed, that political rhetoric gave way to mainstream norms that conflated Muslims and Arabs, portraying them as dangerous people, usually men, who sought to destroy the “homeland”—a newly coined term that had been naturalized as an atemporal concept. Cultural representations that dealt with such rhetoric became rife, replacing the Soviet threat that had dominated the fear-based discourse of the Cold War. Russian spies were replaced in the popular imaginary by “Islamic fundamentalists,” exemplified by shows such as the Fox Network’s 24 (2001–2014), which consequently, and perversely, fed back into state discourse, becoming a training manual for “enhanced interrogation procedures” carried out by US military operatives.¹ In this way, examples of cultural representation became more than fictional depictions, and as life began to imitate art, they had a direct effect on the formation of procedure and policy. Films such as Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012), which correlated violent interrogation with the eventual assassination of Bin Laden, further legitimized the effects of torture by showing it as an effective route to uncovering intelligence. Thus, the brutalizing treatment of brown bodies became equated with protecting both the domestic space and global spheres of influence of the United States. Increased security, designed to protect citizens, operated on a basis that only protected certain individuals. Consequently, this process redefined who was counted as a citizen.

Events like 9/11 also demonstrate the fluid dimensions of remembrance, working to establish link across sites of memory,² rather than suggesting that all forms stem singularly from one event, which can stand in as a universal model/paradigm. Thus, transculturalism becomes integral to the exploration of memory and both its impact on identity and the way that it demarcates the value of those memorialized and the ability of those who engage in remembrance. Similarly, the fluidity of queerness, as a mode of subverting “the monolithic workings of the heterosexual imperative” (Butler 2011: 18) can include the non-normativity of race, class, gender, sexuality, and (dis)-ability. The way that bodies are penetrated, violated, and have their sovereignty challenged thus shares uncomfortable similarities to the ways that national borders are also infringed, particularly in light of events such as 9/11. Certain identities become marginalized in new ways, subjugated through discourses of “us” and “them,” even while acceptance of some queer bodies can be seen through popular and artistic culture. These movements have ramifications for how events like 9/11 are perceived, the wider effects of which are controlled by the US state, continuing to expand constraints on queer lives and bodies, a process increasingly enshrined in culture discourse. The liberal-democratic ideal of a dialogic process between different nations and cultures has been overridden in favor of one prescribed by the effects of the initial political reaction to the attacks, and the subsequent state discourse. To critique this sense of nationalism was to be subjected as a “traitor” or “America-hater” (Talbot 2001). Consequently, those perceived as outside of categories of national belonging were deemed as dangerously anti-democratic, “un-American,” queer.

Terri Tomsky discusses this problematic centering by exploring the Bosnian conflict in terms of the associative links made with 9/11. Reading the Joe Sacco comic book The Fixer (2003), she suggests how panels depicting twin burning buildings mirror those of the Twin Towers, calling into question the singularity of historical events through the doubling effect that the artist creates. This approach subverts the privileges that certain forms of cultural memory such as those around 9/11 possess over others, despite the reinscription of a theoretical (and political) association with 9/11 of a historical event that would have been previously considered unrelated. Rather than simply provide ways that other historical events subvert the dominance of 9/11, this book refocuses the framing of the event itself to include previously overlooked perspectives in addition to the consideration of events tangential to the attacks. I subvert the absorption of other forms of memory through singular conceptions of events such as 9/11 that become masked as transcultural and consequently erase opposing or differing forms, sites, and processes of remembrance.

Through establishing a queer archive of remembrance, I demonstrate the way cultural representations destabilize the overriding effects of the normative prescriptions on framing memory that “function as vehicles of normative preconceptions and conventions that shade, and to some extent, determine the shape of the memory” (Bond 2015: 8, 11). Memories become reinscribed through familiar narrative patterns and paradigms of representation, often seen in 9/11 through what Lucy Bond defines as the de-critical lens of trauma, “the American jeremiad” which elevates the positioning of the United States in global memorial culture; and the analogical use of Holocaust memory, which creates an apolitical and atemporal understanding of events. Each of these rhetorical devices was utilized by the Bush administration following the attacks, shoring up a nationalist and neo-conservative response, masked as “American values.” Using texts such as photographs that respond to the memorialization of 9/11, in addition to works about the aftermath of the attacks, I demonstrate how they frame memory in ways that situate particular bodies outside of the national imaginary.

In considering these kinds of movements, memory studies has previously failed to consider the “traumatic experiences of non-Western or minority cultures” overlooking the “connections between metropolitan and non-Western or minority traumas” (Craps 2013: 2). To counteract this, I consider the connections between metropolitan and minority experiences of historical events to examine the way that queer bodies become casualties of a foreclosure of mourning, failure of representation, and the valorization of particular modes of masculinity and femininity that have been shored up since the turn of the twenty-first century. Using 9/11 as a springboard I consider queer identities and broaden the scope of pre-existing scholarly discourse that largely considers particular forms of memory, in a way that centers the experience of a Western (read: heteronormative) population. However, I work to avoid an either/or distinction between what might be termed as “mainstream” or “other.” Instead, I suggest an outward-looking assemblage of theory that works to create inclusive frameworks when deliberating cultural remembrance. As Michael Rothberg argues, global interconnected memory can move toward “a radically democratic politics” that includes “a differentiated empirical history” and “moral solidarity with victims of diverse injustices” in an ethical manner that takes into account the difference of those claiming victimhood (Rothberg 2011: 526). It is also important to recognize how certain forms of memory remain centered in the field as “limit events,” or “an event that is so traumatic that it shatters the symbolic resources of the individual and escapes the normal processes of meaning making” (Versluys 2009: 49). Events like the Holocaust and 9/11 that are often central to transcultural/transnational memory studies (even while the theoretical turn purports to destabilize such centering) thus provide limited forms of remembrance that consequently project the inherent biases of representation focused on particular groups. 9/11 remembrance often emphasizes those who can be read as white working- to middle-class US citizens, thereby privileging their experience. I move away from the centering of national depictions of 9/11 to consider it transculturally, considering how its subsequent effects and events migrate across and betw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. American Avengers
• 3. We Could Be Heroes
• 4. Black Sites: Restraining and Sustaining the Queer Subject
• 5. Emergent Queers: The “American Immigrant” and the US State
• 6. Conclusion
• Back Matter