The City Since 9/11 The City Since 9/11 Literature, Film, Television Edited by Keith Wilhite FAIRLEIGH DICKINSON UNIVERSITY PRESS Madison • Teaneck Published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Copublished by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 FORBES BOULEVARD, SUITE 200, LANHAM, MARYLAND 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2016 by Rowman & Littlefield All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-61147-718-4 (cloth : alkaline paper) ISBN 978-1-61147-719-1 (electronic) TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America [I]t’s in the city, above all, that we are compelled to face, with sober senses, our real conditions of life and our relations with our fellow humans. —Andy Merrifield, Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City (2002) Acknowledgments My interest in urban spaces and city literature dates back to graduate school at The University of Iowa, starting with Barbara Eckstein’s seminar on Urban Reconstruction and American Literature of the 1940s and 1950s. That interest has continued to influence my research and teaching. Before proposing this collection to Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, I had the opportunity to develop courses at Siena College on “The City in U.S. Literature” and “American Literature after 9/11.” Inspired by enlightening class discussions with my students, I proposed and then chaired a panel on “The City in Literature after 9/11” at the 2013 Northeast MLA Convention in Boston, MA. That conference panel and the ensuing discussions led most directly to the development of this collection, and I would like to offer special thanks to my fellow participants on that panel, whose work also appears here: Tim Gauthier, Karolina Golimowska, and Hilary Thompson. In addition, I would like to thank friends and colleagues whose assistance and critical insights made this book possible. Rachel Stein provided important feedback and guidance on an early version of the book proposal. Harry Keyishian, director of Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, offered generous encouragement and understanding as I worked with the contributors to bring this book to press. I am also grateful for the diligent work by Brooke Bures and Caitlin Bean at RLPG. A research fellowship from the Committee on Teaching and Faculty Development at Siena College allowed me to devote focused time during the summer to the research and editing work this project required. I owe special thanks to Erich Hertz, Heidi LaVine, and Justin St. Clair for their rigorous readings of my introductory essay. Finally, I want to express my deep appreciation to Jennifer Warnecke for her unwavering support. Introduction The City Since 9/11 Keith Wilhite “Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center.”[1] In The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), Michel de Certeau begins his chapter “Walking in the City” from this “totalizing” perspective, free from “the city’s grasp,” a disembodied “viewpoint and nothing more,” blind to “the rumble of so many differences” on the streets below where “[t]he ordinary practitioners of the city live.”[2] Although this specific vantage point has vanished, the implied god’s-eye view remains essential to a kind of metaphysical apprehension of New York City. From the open-air deck, de Certeau found the perfect realization of a “scopic” desire: “The 1370 foot high tower . . . construct[s] the fiction that creates readers, makes the complexity of the city readable, and immobilizes its opaque mobility in a transparent text.”[3] After September 11, in the absence of the towers, literary and visual representations have sought both to clarify and to complicate this fiction of comprehensibility amidst the welter and anxiety of contemporary urban life. For more than a decade now, writers and filmmakers have implicitly tried to render “the city readable,” but their work also poses important questions about representation and perspective: at what distance and from whose vantage point do we read the cityscape? In Open City (2011), Teju Cole offers an approximation of de Certeau’s synoptic viewpoint when the narrator, Julius, returns to New York after a visit to Belgium. From the window of the plane, Julius sees Manhattan stretched out below him, and the view reminds him of a scale model of the city at the Queens Museum of Art. He notes, however, that “it was the real city that seemed to be matching, point for point, his memory of the model.”[4] He recalls the intricate details of rivers and roads, skyscrapers and piers, and “the pair of gray blocks . . . representing the persistence, in the model, of the World Trade Center towers, which, in reality, had already been destroyed” (151). The passage subtly layers the illusory notion of the city as “transparent text”: the model duplicates, at scale, the god’s- eye view from the plane. Yet Julius’s pointed reference here to the “persistence” of the towers in the model, and in memory, also alludes to the significant ways representations of space mediate our encounters with the physical environment. Here, he invokes a spatial model to make readable and textually present, as it were, what is no longer visible on the landscape. One is even tempted to say that, between these competing “fictions” of readability, the model is the more authoritative as it provides the reference point against which Julius matches “the real city.” Charting this intersection between aesthetic representation and the material conditions of urban space, The City Since 9/11 posits that the contemporary metropolis provides a significant context for rethinking theoretical concerns about narrative, identity, home, and vulnerability in an era of global insecurity. While keeping a sharp focus on New York, the volume also includes critical accounts of Baltimore, Copenhagen, Canton, London, and Mumbai as its authors think through contemporary debates about globalization, postmodernism, structural inequality, and the economic and social life of cities. Previous scholarly works have raised important questions about trauma and the failure of language when confronted with extreme loss. Judith Butler’s Precarious Life (2004) provides a valuable touchstone for this field of study. “There is something unrepresentable that we nevertheless seek to represent,” Butler writes, “and that paradox must be retained in the representation we give.”[5] Although several chapters collected here acknowledge this representational paradox, the authors neither dwell on the limits of language nor do they spend much time on now-familiar debates about the “failure” of literature or the “abdication of ambition.”[6] Instead, this book aims to examine how writers and filmmakers have reimagined cities since September 11, as well as how 9/11 has altered the real and imagined cartographies of the urban spaces where we live, work, consume, and gather as part of a larger network of social and political relations. Yet the “since” of the volume’s title also implies an examination of the city attuned to its history—to the ways literary and visual representations reinvent or subvert modernist urban tropes, for example, or how contemporary texts uncover traces of the frenetic and vulnerable post-9/11 metropolis in the distant past. In her influential study City Codes: Reading the Modern Urban Novel (1996), Hana Wirth- Nesher argues that “[j]ust as for the city dweller the city itself is a text that can never be read in its totality, the modern urban novel acts as a site for the problem of reading cities.”[7] In the literary works she examines—including modernist exemplars by Dreiser, Ellison, James, Woolf, and Joyce—Wirth-Nesher contends that “the urban setting is the locus for the tensions and contradictions in the novel and in the historical moment, both inscribed into the cityscape.”[8] The City Since 9/11 updates this line of thinking, uncovering the ways fiction, film, and television map the “tensions and contradictions” that trailed in the wake of September 11. If, as Wirth-Nesher suggests, “the chronotope of the modern urban novel is a space that conflates the public and the private,”[9] then, as a whole, this book argues that the chronotope of post-9/11 urban texts is a paradoxical space of permanence and vulnerability—a convergence point for anxieties about globalization, economic inequality, imperial history, postmodern virtuality, and future terror. This collection also advances lines of inquiry related to modern urban history and, as Robert Beauregard insightfully argues in Voices of Decline (2003), the ways representations shape and influence our understanding of physical environments. Whereas Wirth-Nesher argues that the modern novel inscribes “the problem of reading cities,” Beauregard invites readers to consider how those city spaces are, in turn, affected—even constructed—by the public discourse on “urban crisis.” He argues that “the discourse is not merely an objective reporting of an incontestable reality but a collection of contentious interpretations. The ‘real world’ provides material for discourse, but these understandings are then mediated socially through language.”[10] As suggested above, in Cole’s Open City, one cannot easily disentangle encounters with the real world from discursive or visual attempts to understand those spaces. For Beauregard, the pervasive discourse of urban decline demonstrates how “the city is used rhetorically to frame the precariousness of human existence in a modern world.”[11] The City Since 9/11 extends this interest in the rhetorical use of urban space to the contemporary era, specifically by exploring what it means to write and read the city “in the shadow of no towers,” to co-opt Art Spiegelman’s provocative phrase. The contributors to this volume theorize the city as a contested site, shaped by prevailing post-9/11 discourses concerning personal precarity, homeland security, neoliberalism, and the war on terror, but also haunted by the threat of disasters yet to come—the absence in the landscape that registers loss and foretells future menace. As this collection attests, the city emerges as a critical object of inquiry in a diverse array of works: from more intimate portraits by Jonathan Safran Foer, Joseph O’Neill, and Silver Krieger to the global scale of William Gibson’s Blue Ant Trilogy; from the “undercity” in Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers to the inner city in David Simon’s The Wire to the abject urban peripheries in The Bridge and The Killing; from historical fiction by Colum McCann and Amitav Ghosh to the “virtual” postmetropolis in Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City, Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, and Ronald Sukenick’s Last Fall; from a zombie-plagued New York City in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One to a parallel America entangled in civil war in Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark; and from the infertile, near-future world of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men to the fantastic reimagining of post–World War I Paris in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo. Yet, despite this eclectic range, the literature, film, and television analyzed here share a similar interest in the post-9/11