Title: "God Save Us from Bourgeois Adventure": The Figure of the Terrorist in Contemporary American Conspiracy Fiction
Abstract: As if to corroborate Richard Hofstadter's famous dictum about ubiquity and surprising flexibility of conspiracy theory, recent historical events have led to a renewed interest in kind of conspiracy theories characteristic of American culture since 1960s.(1) I had already begun drafting an earlier version of this essay, geared primarily toward a reading of contemporary American conspiracy fiction during roughly same period, when bombing of World Trade Center on February 26, 1993, forced me to reconsider my initial ideas. Examining postmodern fictions like DeLillo's Great Jones Street or Pynchon's Vineland, I had planned to argue that contemporary American culture allows subversive politics to make an appearance only after it has been sanitized by a profound mood of nostalgia-primarily for Sixties as a mythical last chance for unmediated experience, authenticity, and political activism. But World Trade Center incident, subsequent police activities, arrests and extensive legal proceedings made it difficult to sustain this argument. Suddenly, public sphere was saturated with speculation on dangers of religious fundamentalist dissent from within American political landscape. For a while, public attention and interest, fueled by meticulous media coverage, was permeated with paranoid speculation; only now Western gaze, which had learned to accept images of terrorist violence from around world with complacency of all victims of media overkill, shifted from international scene to an alarmingly domestic setting. Suddenly, we ourselves were Western eyes. At same time both acts of terrorist violence and official response they had elicited seemed almost inevitable to anyone who had been following subtle changes in dominant paradigms of U.S. political rhetoric ever since end of Gulf War. There was already an acute public awareness of other, grander conflicts of which York bombing could very well be considered a local symptom. In a retroactive affirmation of vague awareness that some sort of threat was imminent, official policies, media, and public have quickly achieved a consensus as to real conflict behind bombing. Rooted firmly in Cold War and carried over into New World Order, terrorist activities must stem from clash between Western democracies and Fundamentalism. A requisite trope in collective political imagination, this conflict has rapidly acquired all essential features of what Hofstadter describes as cultural paranoia. Unlike critics of Edward Said's caliber who have tried to understand American responses to Islamic fundamentalism, and consequently events like bombing of World Trade Center, in a complex political context defined by phenomena of decolonization and aftermath of classical imperialism, conspiracy theories that are still widely endorsed in public domain seek to transform subversion, radical nationalism, [and] native arguments for independence into attitudes whose chief feature is that they constitute a threat.(2) It is important to keep in mind, though, that neither Cold War origins of conflict nor cultural differences between antagonists disappear under influence of these paranoid theories and conspiratorial speculations. While politicians and columnists will easily agree on facts behind bombing, their function in authoritative historical narrative, and implicitly narrative itself, still needs to be determined. The terrorists responsible for York bombing are instantly identified with what Said calls the overscale images of `terrorism' and `fundamentalism' (p. 290). Larger than life, their iconic presence must sustain a cultural machinery whose function is to systematically generate vast and homogeneous cultural abstractions, an argument Said himself has already made in his earlier, seminal Orientalism and has reiterated and expanded in more recent Culture and Imperialism. …
Publication Year: 1996
Publication Date: 1996-06-22
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 9
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