Ordering the chaos : family, nation, and terror in post-9/11 anglophone fiction
- UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
- Jay N. Shelat (Creator)
- Institution
- The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
- Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
- Advisor
- Christian Moraru
Abstract: Ordering the Chaos: Family, Nation, and Terrorism in Post-9/11 Anglophone Fiction argues that forms of kinship limn the interstitial junctures of nationhood and political violence; family operates as a microcosm of the state when the former necessarily renovates its dynamics in the wake of terroristic acts such as 9/11 and the War on Terror. Beyond an act of reconciliation, I assert, this metamorphosis positions organizations and places of belonging as political arenas that demand interrogation alongside the macroscopic states. Analyses about contemporary fiction largely fail to recognize the intimate reaches of such political calamity, focusing instead on geopolitics, but my analysis of kin and home considers the pervasiveness of terror and uncovers how public political violence invades the nooks and crannies of the private sphere and consequently influences its makeup and dynamics. Looking at eight novels from the U.S., Iran, Pakistan, and China, Ordering the Chaos suggests that 9/11 and the War on Terrordetrimentally shape the quotidian arenas that give our lives meaning. In focusing on the familial effects of these two events with ongoing consequences, I demonstrate how political ideologies no longer remain in the outward-facing policies of international affairs. Instead, Ordering the Chaos propounds that to fully understand the consequences of these violence historical ruptures, we must also turn to the inward, private arenas that inform our everyday lives. Because the intersections of intimate spheres and historical violence are rife with analytical potential, Ordering the Chaos employs various methodologies to study family in post-9/11 literature. Beyond close reading, I utilize queer theory, material culture studies, postcolonial theory, and genre theory to parse how 9/11 and the Forever War shape familial organization. In this way, the dissertation sits at the crossroads of many other fields such as history, psychology, and political science. Chapter one examines The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West by Mohsin Hamid and uses Moustafa Bayoumi’s notions of War on Terror culture contends that exilic practices like the PATRIOT Act and anti-Brown sentiments unmake and reorientate familial and domestic dynamics. Chapter two pairs Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland to show how objects such as keys and colored pencils harbor the trauma and memory of 9/11 and other acts of political violence; these domestic things represent the ways the past haunt and disrupt kindred organizations in the present. Chapter three continues this idea of the past’s present resonances and turns to Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows and Porochista Khakpour’s Sons and Other Flammable Objects, which situate 9/11 in a long historical timeline of kindred-damaging imperial violence. To show this, I utilize theories of exceptionalism and orientalism that unveil how familial disruption and deterritorialization are the American empire’s foremost display of force. Finally, chapter four takes a speculative turn and maintains that zombies in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One and Ling Ma’s Severance represent both the dismantling of family because of political violence and the very capitalist-colonial ideologies that effectuated 9/11. Ordering the Chaos speaks to how kinship units and acts of politically motivated violence interrelate. The dissertation illuminates the correlations between macro and micro and public and private units of social organization and trots the globe to decenter the U.S. from discourse about 9/11 and the War on Terror and to underscore that the attacks were not isolated incident. To do this, I necessarily take a global approach that affords an understanding of the Age of Terror’s reach from the historically and systemically silenced vantage points of marginalized people. In so doing, I also confront numerous ways to dismantle imperial projects that burgeoned as a response to the Towers’ collapse. Ultimately, Ordering the Chaos limns how the rhetorics of terror and the aesthetics of violence inform and mold familial and domestic dynamics.
Ordering the chaos : family, nation, and terror in post-9/11 anglophone fiction
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Created on 5/1/2022
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Additional Information
- Publication
- Dissertation
- Language: English
- Date: 2022
- Keywords
- 9/11, Family, Literature, Nation, Terror, War on Terror
- Subjects
- War on Terrorism, 2001-2009, in literature
- September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001
- Families in literature