Cultural Resistance, 9/11, and the War on Terror Sensible Interventions Popular Culture and World Politics Series

Cultural Resistance, 9/11, and the War on Terror: Sensible Interventions offers a fresh account of the enduring cultural legacies of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks and the global war on terror through the critical lens of cultural resistance. It assesses the intersecting ways that popular culture has been deployed as oppositional practice in the post-9/11 context by documenting a collection of media texts, including a political hip hop album, a TV sitcom, a best-selling novel and studio photographs. Deviating from the conventional discursive and representative axis of mourning, nationalism and commemoration, this multimedia assemblage contests and rearticulates the political meanings, affects and visualizations of the war on terror and its global consequences.

Drawing on the theoretical work of Jacques Rancière, the book also argues that these cultural artefacts are extending cultural resistance by shifting the scenes and methods of opposition to the realm of the sensible, or sensorial experiences. Never celebratory, the book encapsulates the potential of cultural practices against restricted post-9/11 regimes of visibility and audibility in the public sphere, but it also remains attentive to their blind spots, contradictions and constraints. This book offers a new angle to consider the events of 9/11, the war on terror and their continual effects, one that blurs established visions of patriotism and grief.

1: Timely convergence: 9/11, resistance, and popular culture.

2: A New Target of Resistance: Rancière’s paradigm of the sensible

3: An American Tale from the Margins: Decentring 9/11 Narratives

4: Restaging the War on Terror and Nationhood: Political Rap’s Sonic Resistance

5: Oppositional Banality: Watching Ordinary Muslims in Little Mosque on the Prairie

6: Faces of the Enemy: Taliban Fighters in a Photography Studio

Conclusion

Jenifer Chao is a Lecturer in the Leicester Media School at De Montfort University. Her research is situated at the confluence of cultural analysis, in particular visual culture, and International Relations. It focuses on the diverse ways that politics and aesthetics converge – most often with oppositional intentions – to address issues such as identity, globalization and terrorism. Her research articles have appeared in NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies and Media, War & Conflict.