Queering Memory and National Identity in Transcultural U.S. Literature and Culture, 1st ed. 2020 American Literature Readings in the 21st Century Series

This book examines the queer implications of memory and nationhood in transcultural U.S. literature and culture. Through an analysis of art and photography responding to the U.S. domestic response to 9/11, Iraq war fiction, representations of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, and migrant fiction in the twenty-first century, Christopher W. Clark creates a queer archive of transcultural U.S. texts as a way of destabilizing heteronormativity and thinking about productive spaces of queer world-building. Drawing on the fields of transcultural memory, queer studies, and transculturalism, this book raises important questions of queer bodies and subjecthood. Clark traces their legacies through texts by Sinan Antoon, Mohamedou Ould Slahi among others, alongside film and photography that includes artists such as Nina Berman and Hasan Elahi. In all, the book queers forms of cultural memory and national identity to uncover the traces of injury but also spaces of regeneration.

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION.. 6

THE US STATE AND 9/11

QUEER STUDIES AND IDENTITY. 15

THE GLOBAL STATE. 17

CHAPTERS

CHAPTER TWO: AMERICAN AVENGERS

GOD-GIVEN FREEDOMS

DEMARCATING SPACES. 33

BANAL AESTHETICS. 38

AC/KNOWLEDGE/MENT. 43

CHAPTER THREE: WE COULD BE HEROES. 54

VIOLENT ANIMALS. 59

MULTIVALENT DISPLACEMENTS. 64

RELATING FAILURE. 68

TRAVERSING BORDERS. 77

CHAPTER FOUR: BLACK SITES. 86

DARK IMPLICATIONS. 89

QUEER CONTROL. 101

EMPATHETIC PALIMPSESTS. 108

CHAPTER FIVE: EMERGENT QUEERS. 117

MYTHICAL MOVEMENT. 119

COMMUNITY AND BELONGING.. 125

NORMATIVE LEGACIES. 131

BATTLING FANTASIES. 138

CHAPTER SIX: CONCLUSION.. 146

INDEX. 153

Christopher W. Clark is Visiting Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Hertfordshire, UK.

Studies the impact of recent historical events and their cultural remembrance

Explores representations of 9/11, the 2003 Iraq War, detainments in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, and migration into the US during this period

Considers a diverse range of texts via the intersection of queer and memory studies