LITMIR.BIZ

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progress, and an impulse to array unique moments of the past on a single chain of cause and effect, like the “beads of a rosary.” Benjamin argued instead for an understanding of history as catastrophe, and a concomitant apprehension of the “constellation” that connects one’s present to other epochs across time. This conceptualization of history’s substance and shape is clarified by what Benjamin termed the “tradition of the oppressed,” which teaches us—upon its own return—that the state of emergency within which we live has long been the rule in the colonized world. The postcolonial reverberations of Benjamin’s interlocking insights will be audible, I hope, throughout this book.

      RUPTURE AND THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION

      The conjoined political formations of the War on Terror and Homeland Security sanction a multitude of social processes—from war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, to extrajudicial incarceration in Guantánamo Bay, to the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, to an assault on civil liberties and democratic culture within the United States. These formations also represent the state’s attempt to discursively frame the world, and U.S. power in the world, at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Following the denouement of the Cold War two decades ago, the United States struggled to devise and impose an interpretive schema that equaled, in its binary simplicity and ideological force, the opposition of the capitalist “free world” to its unfree communist antithesis. Indeed, the ascendant post-1989 idea of the “end of history”—or “New World Order,” as George H. W. Bush had it—announced an era beyond ideology. (And if history is over, narrative becomes somewhat redundant too.) The administration of George W. Bush and its enablers saw in the rupture of September 11 an opportunity not only to institute particular policies, but to compose a vocabulary and narrative that would guide U.S. global supremacy in the coming decades—that would herald not the end of history, but its urgent beginning (or resumption). The basic structure of this narrative predated the moment that conditioned its application. In 2000, the neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC) published an influential—and subsequently infamous—report entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century. This document outlined the necessity of an emboldened U.S. military apparatus, which would secure the “American homeland,” wage “multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars,” and perform “‘constabulary’ duties associated with shaping the security environment” in strategic regions across the world.²⁰ Technocratic language about defense spending dovetailed with more grandiose, and manifestly imperial, appeals to the righteousness of a “global security order” shaped in the image of “American principles and prosperity.” The report regretfully acknowledged that the transformations in U.S. military infrastructure and attitude it called for would not be realized in the immediate term—“absent,” that is, “some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”²¹ Not simply in the aftermath of, but indeed during, the “catastrophic and catalyzing” event of September 11, 2001, neoconservative officials and pundits imposed a narrative of imminent and interminable war. They fashioned this narrative out of materials already on hand—the strategic and ideological substance of documents such as Rebuilding America’s Defenses—and abiding colonial tropes of absolute civilizational difference and the white man’s burden.

      Across the aesthetic disciplines, the indistinction of the event and its narrativization provoked an acute crisis of representation. How to resist the calcification of the event into ideology? How to undo the fixity of the meaning attached to it by the security state? The early and still emblematic instances of the 9/11 novel responded to these questions by refusing any political or historical emplotment of the attacks. Works such as Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (2006), Lynn Sharon Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall (2005), Helen Schulman’s A Day at the Beach (2007), and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) revolve around the intimate lives of bourgeois citizens of New York City struggling, in the days and weeks following September 11, with the intersections of collective trauma and interpersonal—often specifically sexual—discord. Dust from the Twin Towers in a downtown loft or actual fragments of a victim’s body lodged underneath the skin of a survivor symbolize the sense that a certain security—the private, the corporeal—has been violated. These transgressions serve as metaphor for a greater violation—of the seemingly stable boundary between inside and outside, oneself and the world. The standard reaction to this violation is, in these fictions, to look and move inward—to retreat into the layered domestic spheres of self, home, city, homeland. This inward turning is joined to a corresponding temporal myopia, an unwillingness to look beyond the moment of putative rupture toward the histories to which it belongs.²²

      The title of DeLillo’s Falling Man refers to an artist who haunts the city, and enacts its collective trauma, with his unannounced restagings of a body arrested in flight—a performance that evokes the bodies that fell to their deaths from the upper floors of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, captured in iconic photographs against the buildings’ austere geometry, or beheld in person. Like the spectacle of the attacks, the falling body is suspended outside of time. Just as each televisual repetition of the towers falling reinforces the event’s historical dislocation, the Falling Man keeps our vision fixed on the moment of rupture, away from both past and future.²³ DeLillo’s novel has a similar effect. Encountering the same aporia as Žižek and Baudrillard, fictions such as Falling Man both evince and struggle to evade the ahistoricity of the image-event.

      Escaping assimilation by the conjoined logics of historical erasure and geographic myopia requires a different framing of, less than a different answer to, the problem of representation. It requires, more specifically, reckoning with the ways in which it is not only the terror of the singular spectacular event that incites the crisis of representation, but the terror of the society of the spectacle, or indeed capitalist modernity, broadly conceived—not only the towers coming down, in other words, but their existence in the first place.

      How to articulate unique moments of catastrophe with the catastrophe of history itself? How to grasp, in Benjamin’s words, “the constellation which [our] own era has formed with a definite earlier one”? These questions are posed and engaged by an emerging formation of postcolonial American novels, which locate the colonial content of the contemporary United States within hemispheric and global imperial histories. Chapter 4 focuses on three such works. Traveling across space and time, from post–September 11 New York to postcolonial Nigeria to Germany during the Second World War, Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) excavates buried histories of violence and reveals their imbrication, aboveground and below. Articulating the long global history of uneven development with militarized neoliberalism, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) highlights the “atavistic and newfangled” nature of contemporary imperial forms—the concurrence of retrograde racial imaginaries and crude methods of accumulation with hyper-modern information technologies and financial instruments.²⁴ The eponymous narrator of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) describes his native Santo Domingo as the “Ground Zero of the New World”—the site of modernity’s foundational terror, the reverberations of which remain, to borrow Édouard Glissant’s phrase, “obsessively present.”²⁵ Tracing the routes of contiguity between the fifteenth century and the twenty-first, the Dominican Republic and New Jersey, Díaz’s novel reflects upon the modes of collection and transmission—the fable or the rumor; the body; the written word—through which the long history of empire and its afterlives might be made visible.

      The term “postcolonial,” read literally, denotes the time beyond modern colonialism. In a different interpretation, however, the postcolonial names the resumption or rearticulation of colonial culture, in the metropole and the colony, after the moment of formal independence. As Simon Gikandi defines it, “postcolonialism is a code for the state of undecidability in which the culture of colonialism continues to resonate in what was supposed to be its negation.”²⁶ This definition describes precisely the (post)coloniality of the United States, which is at once the first postcolonial nation and the first neocolonial nation—an “infant empire” in the moment of independence and a fully mature, even declining, empire today. But as Jenny Sharpe has observed, when applied to the contemporary United States, the term postcolonial usually has a more limited

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