History, Narrative, and the War on Terror

The assumption that September 11, 2001 constituted a historical rupture enabled the advent of the War on Terror and disabled its critical apprehension. Beginning to counter the trope of rupture, this Introduction locates the paradigms of security and terror—the core conceptual tropes of contemporary and American and global culture—within the long history of a specifically colonial modernity. After outlining this history—its rationalities of accumulation and governance—this Introduction poses the problem of representation, the question of how the colonial present is historicized and theorized in works of contemporary fiction and theory.

“Choc en Retour”

The contemporary theorization of security and terror, this chapter demonstrates, is less a direct and autonomous critical project than a synthesis of three categories of critique: the critique of spectacle; the critique of the politics of exception; and the critique of global capital qua empire. Each of these categories of critique is conditioned by but unevenly revelatory of the “choc en retour” of colonial rationality to the metropole—the boomerang return, to the postcolonial North, of imperial forms of governance and accumulation. This unevenness, this chapter argues, is an effect of, and reveals, theory’s symptomatic nature—the ways in which theory often echoes the form of its critical object.

“All the World Was America”

Though ubiquitous in contemporary political discourse, the trope of “security” is under-historicized. Countering ahistorical accounts of “post-9/11” political-economic order, this chapter situates the contemporary manifestation and twentieth-century evolution of security rhetoric and practice within the long history of colonial modernity at large. It proceeds through an examination of three elemental relations: security and property, security and race, and security and emergency. The security state emerges to guarantee the process and outcome of capitalist accumulation, in the colony as in the metropole. The securing of private property is enabled by and in turn reinforces race thinking and practice. And the enactment of emergency or exception legitimates the preemptive and punitive violence of the security state.

“This Is Our Threnody”

Using moments of putative rupture as a lens onto the past and the world, the fiction of Roberto Bolaño articulates two genealogies—the hemispheric (and global) history of neoliberal counterrevolution and the planetary history of capitalist, colonial modernity. Revealing the histories cast in shadow by the global reach of capital and empire, Bolaño’s work, this chapter demonstrates, simultaneously meditates on literature’s ambivalent relationship to cultures of historical erasure. Literature, Bolaño’s fiction insists, is both one mechanism through which the blank spots in our vision are formed and normalized, and one urgent site of resistance to the apparatuses of fetishism and reification.

“A General Principle of Democracy”

“Terror,” like “security,” is a keyword of contemporary political and economic order. This chapter denaturalizes the term’s latter-day resonance via an examination of its longer history within the context of a specifically colonial modernity. The politics of terror, this chapter contends, are expressed in and by three primary modalities. In the first instance, terror—the sublime terror of the state of nature—is a pretext for the imposition of imperial power. In the second instance, terror is a method employed by the imperial security state to guarantee the conditions and outcome of capital accumulation. Finally, terror is a strategy of resistance to colonial violence.

Rupture and Colonial Modernity

This Epilogue begins by highlighting the narratives and processes of historical distortion that imagine the War on Terror as a past-tense event and absolve the War on Terror of its manifestly imperial substance. It then turns to a consideration of cultural texts that counter the cycle of historical erasure and imperial reproduction—in particular a growing body of War on Terror veterans’ narratives that illuminate the lingering effects of war’s traumas. In brief dialogue with two novels in particular—Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life—this Epilogue offers a summary reflection on the false beginning and false endings of the War on Terror.

“Vanishing Points”

This chapter engages works of fiction that counter both the ahistorical affirmation and ahistorical critique of U.S. Empire with historicist renderings of the current conjuncture. In particular, this chapter is guided by a discussion of three postcolonial novels—three works that locate the present within the long history of colonial modernity: Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Resisting the exceptionalism of the “post-9/11” frame, these novels reveal the colonial histories that haunt the present. But they also self-reflexively betray, in their form as well as their content, the persistent and pervasive force of the trope of rupture and related modes of erasure.