Post-9/11 Historical Fiction and Alternate History Fiction

Transnational and Multidirectional Memory

Pei-chen Liao

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030524913
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030524920
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Drawing on theories of historiography, memory, and diaspora, as well as from existing genre studies, this book explores why contemporary writers are so fascinated with history. Pei-chen Liao considers how fiction contributes to the making and remaking of the transnational history of the U.S. by thinking beyond and before 9/11, investigating how the dynamics of memory, as well as the emergent present, influences readers' reception of historical fiction and alternate history fiction and their interpretation of the past. Set against the historical backdrop of WWII, the Vietnam War, and the War on Terror, the novels under discussion tell Jewish, Japanese, white American, African, Muslim, and Native Americans' stories of trauma and survival. As a means to transmit memories of past events, these novels demonstrate how multidirectional memory can be not only collective but connective, as exemplified by the echoes that post-9/11 readers hear between different histories of violence that thenovels chronicle, as well as between the past and the present.

© The Author(s) 2020

P.-c. LiaoPost-9/11 Historical Fiction and Alternate History Fictionhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52492-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Beyond and Before 9/11: A Transnational and Historical Turn

Pei-chen Liao¹

(1)

Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan

Pei-chen Liao

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

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 commentators 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 government,” which “may constitute the ‘end point of mankind’s ideological evolution’ and the ‘final form of human government,’ and as such constituted the ‘end of history’” (1992, xi). By “history,” Fukuyama did not mean “the occurrence of events” but rather “a single, coherent, evolutionary 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 stunning 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 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—indicates that “something marks a date, a date in history” and that “‘something’ . . . 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 prominent 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 critical attention to writings that “try to reimagine disaster by presenting us with an America situated between cultures” and that, by “deterritorializing 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 likewise challenged American centrism in their studies of transatlantic, immigrant, 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 challenges 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, the national, and the transnational—in American historical thought” (1033). In the aftermath of 9/11, Amy Kaplan’s 2003 presidential address to the American Studies Association and Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s 2004 address advocated, in a similar vein, a transnational approach to de-centering the U.S. Both Kaplan and Fishkin were concerned with American foreign policy and ways in which the Patriot Act, in the name of liberty and democracy, rendered the U.S. a borderless, omnipotent empire that exercised its power over the world while depriving immigrants living in the U.S. of basic human rights. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 and their aftermath are argued to have also played a part in bringing into being the “globalizing narrative” or the “worlding of American literature” (Savvas and Coffman 2019, 208 , 206).³ The shifting of the critical paradigm toward the transnational may have been suggested in the 1970s, but it had turned so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Beyond and Before 9/11: A Transnational and Historical Turn
• 2. “The Second Coming”: The Resurgence of the Historical Novel and American Alternate History
• 3. “America First”: Perpetual Fear, Memory, and Everyday Life in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America
• 4. Neo-Internment Narratives: Post-9/11, Cross-racial, and Intergenerational Memories
• 5. “Walking a Tightrope”: Nostalgia, American Innocence, and Exceptionalism in Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin
• 6. Worlding Alternate Histories of the Post-9/11 Era: The Transnational Trend, Normalization, and the Dynamics of Memory
• 7. “Our Pearl Harbor Moment, Our 9/11 Moment”
• Back Matter