Towards a Worldly Post-9/11 American Novel: Transnational Disjunctures in Joseph O'Neill's Netherland (original) (raw)

The general consensus among critics of contemporary US culture seems to be that the events of 9/11 have wrought far-reaching alterations in the nature of US state power with consequences that we have yet to fully comprehend. For instance, in his magisterial The New American Exceptionalism, Donald Pease argues that earlier versions of American exceptionalism revolved around a "structure of disavowal" that functioned as an ideological masking strategy, making citizen-subjects envision the nation through a fantastical lens that "eradicated the difference between the national ideal U.S. citizens wanted and the faulty nation they had, by representing America as having already achieved all that a nation could be." 1 Following the 9/11 attacks, however, the Bush administration inaugurated a "State of Exception" that "did not require this [earlier] structure of disavowal because it was its construction of itself as The Exception to the discursive norms of American exceptionalism that constituted the grounding authority of its power to rule" (180). This new exceptionalist regime openly revealed the US state's intentions as, in George Steinmetz's words, "domestically authoritarian and geopolitically imperialist." 2 In short, the policies of the US state after 9/11 are defined by a constrictive tightening of focus in the domestic arena as well as by an expansive engagement in maintaining global power. In Pease's suggestive comment, the US state's management of domestic populations in the post-9/11 climate took a deterritorializing turn as the state became "dissociated. .. from the territorially bound nation" and, instead, a geographically nebulous "homeland security state" with the same exceptionalist norms put in its place. This had the consequence of making US citizens "internal émigrés who migrated from the nation to the homeland." 3