Thinking Past Post 9 11

This book offers new ways of constellating the literary and cinematic delineations of Indian and Pakistani Muslim diasporic and migrant trajectories narrated in the two decades after the 9/11 attacks. Focusing on four Pakistani English novels and four Indian Hindi films, it examines the aesthetic complexities of staging the historical nexus of global conflicts and unravels the multiple layers of discourses underlying the notions of diaspora, citizenship, nation and home. It scrutinises the “flirtatious” nature of transnational desires and their role in building glocal safety valves for inclusion and archiving a planetary vision of trauma. It also provides a fresh perspective on the role of Pakistani English novels and mainstream Hindi films in tracing the multiple origins and shifts in national xenophobic practices, and negotiating multiple modalities of political and cultural belonging. It discusses various books and films including The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Burnt Shadows, My Name is Khan, New York, Exit West, Home Fire, AirLift and Tiger Zinda Hai. In light of the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 attacks, current debates on terror, war, paranoid national imaginaries and the suspicion towards migratory movements of refugees, this book makes a significant contribution to the interdisciplinary debates on border controls and human precarity. A crucial work in transnational and diaspora criticism, it will be of great interest to researchers of literature and culture studies, media studies, politics, film studies, and South Asian studies.

This book offers new ways of constellating the literary and cinematic delineations of Indian and Pakistani Muslim diasporic and migrant trajectories narrated in the two decades after the 9/11 attacks. Focusing on four Pakistani English novels and four Indian Hindi films, it examines the aesthetic complexities of staging the historical nexus of global conflicts and unravels the multiple layers of discourses underlying the notions of diaspora, citizenship, nation and home. It scrutinises the “flirtatious” nature of transnational desires and their role in building glocal safety valves for inclusion and archiving a planetary vision of trauma. It also provides a fresh perspective on the role of Pakistani English novels and mainstream Hindi films in tracing the multiple origins and shifts in national xenophobic practices, and negotiating multiple modalities of political and cultural belonging. It discusses various books and films including The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Burnt Shadows, My Name is Khan, New York, Exit West, Home Fire, AirLift and Tiger Zinda Hai. In light of the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 attacks, current debates on terror, war, paranoid national imaginaries and the suspicion towards migratory movements of refugees, this book makes a significant contribution to the interdisciplinary debates on border controls and human precarity. A crucial work in transnational and diaspora criticism, it will be of great interest to researchers of literature and culture studies, media studies, politics, film studies, and South Asian studies.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “This is history at its most immediate and moving…A marvelous and memorable book.” —Jon Meacham “Remarkable…A priceless civic gift…On page after page, a reader will encounter words that startle, or make him angry, or heartbroken.” —The Wall Street Journal “Visceral...I repeatedly cried…This book captures the emotions and unspooling horror of the day.” —NPR “Had me turning each page with my heart in my throat…There’s been a lot written about 9/11, but nothing like this. I urge you to read it.” —Katie Couric The first comprehensive oral history of September 11, 2001—a panoramic narrative woven from the voices of Americans on the front lines of an unprecedented national trauma. Over the past eighteen years, monumental literature has been published about 9/11, from Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower, which traced the rise of al-Qaeda, to The 9/11 Commission Report, the government’s definitive factual retrospective of the attacks. But one perspective has been missing up to this point—a 360-degree account of the day told through the voices of the people who experienced it. Now, in The Only Plane in the Sky, award-winning journalist and bestselling historian Garrett Graff tells the story of the day as it was lived—in the words of those who lived it. Drawing on never-before-published transcripts, recently declassified documents, original interviews, and oral histories from nearly five hundred government officials, first responders, witnesses, survivors, friends, and family members, Graff paints the most vivid and human portrait of the September 11 attacks yet. Beginning in the predawn hours of airports in the Northeast, we meet the ticket agents who unknowingly usher terrorists onto their flights, and the flight attendants inside the hijacked planes. In New York City, first responders confront a scene of unimaginable horror at the Twin Towers. From a secret bunker underneath the White House, officials watch for incoming planes on radar. Aboard the small number of unarmed fighter jets in the air, pilots make a pact to fly into a hijacked airliner if necessary to bring it down. In the skies above Pennsylvania, civilians aboard United Flight 93 make the ultimate sacrifice in their place. Then, as the day moves forward and flights are grounded nationwide, Air Force One circles the country alone, its passengers isolated and afraid. More than simply a collection of eyewitness testimonies, The Only Plane in the Sky is the historic narrative of how ordinary people grappled with extraordinary events in real time: the father and son working in the North Tower, caught on different ends of the impact zone; the firefighter searching for his wife who works at the World Trade Center; the operator of in-flight telephone calls who promises to share a passenger’s last words with his family; the beloved FDNY chaplain who bravely performs last rites for the dying, losing his own life when the Towers collapse; and the generals at the Pentagon who break down and weep when they are barred from rushing into the burning building to try to rescue their colleagues. At once a powerful tribute to the courage of everyday Americans and an essential addition to the literature of 9/11, The Only Plane in the Sky weaves together the unforgettable personal experiences of the men and women who found themselves caught at the center of an unprecedented human drama. The result is a unique, profound, and searing exploration of humanity on a day that changed the course of history, and all of our lives.

It is tempting to regard the perpetrators of the September 11th terrorist attacks as evil incarnate. But their motives, as Bruce Lincoln’s acclaimed Holy Terrors makes clear, were profoundly and intensely religious. Thus what we need after the events of 9/11, Lincoln argues, is greater clarity about what we take religion to be. Holy Terrors begins with a gripping dissection of the instruction manual given to each of the 9/11 hijackers. In their evocation of passages from the Quran, we learn how the terrorists justified acts of destruction and mass murder “in the name of God, the most merciful, the most compassionate.” Lincoln then offers a provocative comparison of President Bush’s October 7, 2001 speech announcing U.S. military action in Afghanistan alongside the videotaped speech released by Osama bin Laden just a few hours later. As Lincoln authoritatively demonstrates, a close analysis of the rhetoric used by leaders as different as George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden—as well as Mohamed Atta and even Jerry Falwell—betrays startling similarities. These commonalities have considerable implications for our understanding of religion and its interrelationships with politics and culture in a postcolonial world, implications that Lincoln draws out with skill and sensitivity. With a chapter new to this edition, “Theses on Religion and Violence,” Holy Terrors remains one of the essential books on September 11 and a classic study on the character of religion. “Modernity has ended twice: in its Marxist form in 1989 Berlin, and in its liberal form on September 11, 2001. In order to understand such major historical changes we need both large-scale and focused analyses—a combination seldom to be found in one volume. But here Bruce Lincoln . . . has given us just such a mix of discrete and large-picture analysis.”—Stephen Healey, Christian Century “From time to time there appears a work . . . that serves to focus the wide-ranging, often contentious discussion of religion’s significance within broader cultural dynamics. Bruce Lincoln’s Holy Terrors is one such text. . . . Anyone still struggling toward a more nuanced comprehension of 9/11 would do well to spend time with this book.”—Theodore Pulcini, Middle East Journal

9/11 marked the beginning of a century that is defined by widespread violence. Every other day seems to be a furthering of the already catastrophic present towards a more disastrous tomorrow. With climate change looming over us, frequent economic instability, religious wars, and relentless political mayhem, life for what we have made of it seems more and more unsustainable. Douglas Allen insists that we look to Gandhi, if only selectively and creatively, in order to move towards a nonviolent and sustainable future. Is a Gandhi-informed swaraj technology, valuable but humanly limited, possible? What would a Gandhian world—a more egalitarian, interconnected, decentralized—of globalization look like? Focusing on key themes in Gandhi’s thinking such as violence and nonviolence, absolute truth and relative truth, ethical and spiritual living, and his critique of modernity, the book compels us to rethink our positions today.

Europe is a broad and multifaceted construct, variously understood as a geographical, political, legal, institutional, social, or cultural formation. It is characterized by numerous conflicts and processes of negotiation that have accompanied or sustained the development of normative orders and divergent conceptions of law, both in relation to individual states and to Europe as a whole. The same applies to the field of literature, language, and aesthetics; numerous myths and ideologies have shaped today’s understanding of Europe and still support it today. This volume examines how such processes were legally structured, and literarily addressed, criticized, and complemented. Its interdisciplinary perspective and open and dynamic, both dialogical and dialectical format intends to replicate the fragmented, sometimes conflicting, but always productive mosaic of voices, ideas, and concepts that have constituted and still constitute Europe, whether in the past, present, or future. Instead of resolving any of the complexities and contradictions that frame discussions on law, literature, and Europe, it aims to induce further engagement and confrontations with new and alternative visions of Europe.

Drawing on theories of historiography, memory, and diaspora, as well as from existing genre studies, this book explores why contemporary writers are so fascinated with history. Pei-chen Liao considers how fiction contributes to the making and remaking of the transnational history of the U.S. by thinking beyond and before 9/11, investigating how the dynamics of memory, as well as the emergent present, influences readers’ reception of historical fiction and alternate history fiction and their interpretation of the past. Set against the historical backdrop of WWII, the Vietnam War, and the War on Terror, the novels under discussion tell Jewish, Japanese, white American, African, Muslim, and Native Americans’ stories of trauma and survival. As a means to transmit memories of past events, these novels demonstrate how multidirectional memory can be not only collective but connective, as exemplified by the echoes that post-9/11 readers hear between different histories of violence that the novels chronicle, as well as between the past and the present.

Drawing on two decades of government efforts to "secure the homeland," experts offer crucial strategic lessons and detailed recommendations for homeland security. For Americans, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, crystallized the notion of homeland security. But what does it mean to "secure the homeland" in the twenty-first century? What lessons can be drawn from the first two decades of U.S. government efforts to do so? In Beyond 9/11, leading academic experts and former senior government officials address the most salient challenges of homeland security today.