Post-9/11 Historical Fiction and Alternate History Fiction Transnational and Multidirectional Memory Pei-chen Liao Post-9/11 Historical Fiction and Alternate History Fiction Pei-chen Liao Post-9/11 Historical Fiction and Alternate History Fiction Transnational and Multidirectional Memory Pei-chen Liao Department of Foreign Languages and Literature National Cheng Kung University Tainan, Taiwan ISBN 978-3-030-52491-3 ISBN 978-3-030-52492-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52492-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Photography by Steve Kelley aka mudpig / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland A cknowledgments I acknowledge support of the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan in funding research for sections of this book. At Palgrave Macmillan, Allie Troyanos guided the project through its initial stages. Vinoth Kuppan has been extremely helpful at all points. Two anonymous reviewers provided constructive suggestions that helped me sharpen my argument and expand my research scope. I also appreciate the hard work and long hours put in by my assistant Jennifer Tsai, who took part in the whole editing process and paid attention to the details. The faculty at the Foreign Languages and Literature Department of National Cheng Kung University, where I have taught for ten years, have been extremely supportive. In particular, I would like to thank Shuli Chang, Chao-Fang Chen, and Carolyn Scott for their friendship. Special thanks to Jackie Sumner and her parents for their hospitality and generosity in the summer 2017 when I conducted research in Washington, D.C. for this project. I have presented material at the 25th Annual Conference of the English and American Literature Association at National Chung Hsing University, the 2017 International Conference on Life Writing at Kaohsiung Medical University, and the 53rd ASAK International Conference at Korea University. I thank all those who asked questions and commented on my presentations. v vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Sections of Chap. 3 appear in “‘America First’: Fear, Memory Activism, and Everyday Life in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America,” Sun Yat- sen Journal of Humanities, 46 (2019), 59–78, reprinted by permission of the publisher. Many thanks to my family for their love and confidence in me. This book is for them. c ontents 1 Beyond and Before 9/11: A Transnational and Historical Turn 1 2 “The Second Coming”: The Resurgence of the Historical Novel and American Alternate History 21 3 “America First”: Perpetual Fear, Memory, and Everyday Life in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America 51 4 Neo-Internment Narratives: Post-9/11, Cross-racial, and Intergenerational Memories 81 5 “Walking a Tightrope”: Nostalgia, American Innocence, and Exceptionalism in Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin 115 6 Worlding Alternate Histories of the Post- 9/11 Era: The Transnational Trend, Normalization, and the Dynamics of Memory 153 7 “Our Pearl Harbor Moment, Our 9/11 Moment” 187 Index 193 vii CHAPTER 1 Beyond and Before 9/11: A Transnational and Historical Turn 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 com- mentators 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 govern- ment,” which “may constitute the ‘end point of mankind’s ideological evolution’ and the ‘final form of human government,’ and as such consti- tuted the ‘end of history’” (1992, xi). By “history,” Fukuyama did not mean “the occurrence of events” but rather “a single, coherent, evolution- ary 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 stun- ning 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 © The Author(s) 2020 1 P.-c. Liao, Post-9/11 Historical Fiction and Alternate History Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52492-0_1 2 P.-C. LIAO 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—indi- cates that “something marks a date, a date in history” and that “‘some- thing’ . . . 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 promi- nent 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 1 BEYOND AND BEFORE 9/11: A TRANSNATIONAL AND HISTORICAL TURN 3 critical attention to writings that “try to reimagine disaster by presenting us with an America situated between cultures” and that, by “deterritorial- izing 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 like- wise challenged American centrism in their studies of transatlantic, immi- grant, 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 chal- lenges 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,