Security and Terror: American Culture and the Long History of Colonial ModernityWhen in 1492 Christopher Columbus set out for Asia but instead happened upon the Bahamas, Cuba, and Hispaniola, his error inaugurated a specifically colonial modernity. This is, Security and Terror contends, the colonial modernity within which we still live. And its enduring features are especially vivid in the current American century, a moment marked by a permanent War on Terror and pervasive capitalist dispossession. Resisting the assumption that September 11, 2001, constituted a historical rupture, Eli Jelly-Schapiro traces the political and philosophic genealogies of security and terror—from the settler-colonization of the New World to the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond. A history of the present crisis, Security and Terror also examines how that history has been registered and reckoned with in significant works of contemporary fiction and theory—in novels by Teju Cole, Mohsin Hamid, Junot Díaz, and Roberto Bolaño, and in the critical interventions of Jean Baudrillard, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and others. In this richly interdisciplinary inquiry, Jelly-Schapiro reveals how the erasure of colonial pasts enables the perpetual reproduction of colonial culture. |
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Afghanistan aftermath Agamben Amalfitano American anticolonial Arendt argued articulation biopolitical Butler capital capitalist century Changez chapter Chile choc en retour Cold War colonial modernity colonial rationality contemporary context critical critique of spectacle culture dialectical Díaz discourse economic empire enactment Enzo Traverso erasure European exception Fanon fiction fukú genealogy Giorgio Agamben global North Guantánamo Guantánamo Bay Hardt and Negri highlighted history of colonial Homeland Security Homo Sacer human Ibid imagined imperial imperialist Iraq Islamist terror Julius labor liberal literary literature logic long history Marx metropole military modern security project modes narrative nature neoliberal novel Open City Oscar Wao particular perpetual planetary political postcolonial primitive accumulation racial Reluctant Fundamentalist resistance Retort Revolution Roberto Bolaño rupture Savage Detectives security and terror September 11 Slavoj Žižek Social Security space story struggle sublime technologies theory trans trope United University Press violence War on Terror words writes York Yunior Žižek