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This chapter focuses on Ground Zero and the successive attempts to rebuild. It treats the replacement skyline of New York as a great mishap and wasted opportunity. Security measures display, on the ground, some rather new ways that political authority combines with market forces to shape the world. Although there were varied aesthetic and moral visions of what should happen at the site, the pugilist instinct predominated. Post-9/11 measures to protect the downtown called for not just any sort of buildings, but those that would show the enemy that we could build tall and powerful. The result is a different kind of building in the form of One World Trade Center, also known as “Freedom Tower.” It is argued that the “program” for the structure, still in another way, created vulnerabilities through misguided hardening up.

This chapter addresses a range of Arab-American literary and cultural texts that respond to the post-9/11 political and social terrain in the U.S. They capture and challenge homogenized depictions of Arab-Americans, forging in the process what can be identified as revisionaryor counterhegemonic spaces that redefine exclusionary conceptualizations of U.S. citizenship and belonging. In addition to problematizing simplistic types of post-9/11 patriotism that demand a unilateral type of U.S. national identity, the creation of these revisionary spaces responds to racial stereotyping, blanket labeling, and discriminatory profiling by insisting on complex representations of Arab-Americans. The chapter describes how 9/11 and other crises that happened/are happening in the Arab homeland position the formation and development of Arab-American identities within well-cemented racialized structures that hold the political relations between the U.S. and the Arab world at their center—a relationship that is dominated by U.S. political and military hegemony.

Chapter 5 explores the profusion of post-9/11 uses of “God Bless America,” beginning with the spontaneous Congressional performance on the steps of the Capitol that anointed the song as a vehicle for public mourning. Drawing on surveys and interviews of former members of Congress, the chapter attempts to discover the origins of that poignant sing-along, exploring the nature of memory, commemoration, and the role of communal singing along the way. The chapter also examines the reasons behind the newfound popularity of the song before turning to the dissent against it by those who felt that its commemorative uses represented a breach of the separation between church and state. The chapter then explores the song’s meaning in a post–9/11 world, from its use to convey support for the War on Terror to its complicated functions during Obama’s first campaign and early presidency.

In the United States, the headscarf debate has received less public attention than in Europe and Turkey. Although the majority is Protestant, many religious practices are freely exercised and enjoy wide acceptance, as the Constitution contains a particularly liberal approach to religious freedom. Moreover, secularism in the U.S. is strikingly different in its applications than the French and Turkish models of laïcité, and Germany’s idea of the “Christian Occident.” Comparatively speaking, Muslims have encountered more welcoming behavior in the U.S. than in Europe. Although there were some intrinsic tensions between the heterogeneous, Judeo-Christian dominated American religious culture and the Islamic presence, it did not cause widespread concern until recently. This relatively positive interaction has been significantly damaged following the 9/11 attacks, and “Islam” has been used as a common denominator to establish a new, inflammatory racial category. In this chapter, before considering the constitutional and legal issues of the headscarf controversy in the U.S., and hypothetical arguments potential headscarf decision in American courts, the nature of American Islam in relation to the immigration laws, social structure, political events that are increasingly impacting Muslims in America is discussed.

This chapter explores how the release of “Love and Theft” coincided with the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and how it strongly affected the album's immediate reception. This association was particularly strong due to the lyrical and thematic content of the album, which somehow seemed to “fit” the events of 9/11—fit them so well, in fact, that it led some reviewers to ascribe Bob Dylan with a prophetic quality. The connection between art and 9/11 has been a subject of lively debate ever since the terrorist attacks. Much of this debate has centered around the question of how “post-9/11 art” can help reflect on, or help deal with, the trauma of the 9/11 events.

Chapter 1 sets the stage for this book on the revival of interest in Reinhold Niebuhr as premier 20th-century American Protestant theologian and public intellectual. His complex thought eludes the usual labels of left and right, liberal and conservative, or optimism and pessimism, whether applied to politics or to religion. His gifts as preacher, thinker, and writer connect in the 21st century just as in his lifetime. “Mapping the Niebuhr Revival” traces the current interest to the post-9/11 world of the Bush presidency, but continues into the world of Barack Obama, a self-confessed admirer of Niebuhr’s thought. This initial chapter lays out the book’s argument as it moves through the themes of historical awareness, human ambiguity and sin, Niebuhr as writer, the Irony of American History as a classic text, his reception among today’s Christians, and the lasting significance and challenges of his legacy.

This chapter examines Antigone: Insurgency (2007) — a response to state measures taken in the name of national security in the USA and Canada after 9/11 — staged with a cast of three. The script treated Sophocles' text as a score into which modern material was interpolated. For example, Creon's first speech drew on both that of George Bush at ground zero on 14 September, and another by Canada's former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Antigone's list of fellow resisters included names that many would have characterized as terrorists. Yet the play ended with a vision of reconciliation: Creon holding the dead Antigone, posed like the pieta. The deconstruction of the text in Antigone: Insurgency mirrors the seeming destruction and chaos of post-9/11 society.

This chapter presents a geopolitically and historically grounded understanding of our on-screen encounter with self-sacrifice through focusing on post-9/11 film. 9/11's intense relationship to self-sacrifice and self-risk provides a potent context for understanding the full weight of the psychosocial rewards of cinema available to the Western audience. The chapter identifies and evaluates an emerging and distinctly post-9/11 thematic that operates in the narrative, aesthetic and psychic dimensions of a group of mainstream films about self-sacrifice from the mid-2000s. These films are characterised by their ethical engagement, their capacity to stage and negotiate, with some profundity, the (Western) spectator's complicity in the suffering of others. This ethical engagement and its perspicacity come under increasing scrutiny as the chapter progresses. Ultimately, the films’ negotiation of the racial and colonial unconscious of Western culture is shown to be fretful and defensive. Their US/Eurocentric perspectives naturalise white Western concerns while pretending otherwise; their ethics are inherently racialised. Rather than evade and move on from the mortal economies of mainstream cinema, these films return the spectator to the needs of the self and of the West's ‘good conscience’.

This chapter maps out the representational strategies used by television writers and producers after 9/11 to represent Arabs and Muslims as terrorists while avoiding Arab/Muslim terrorist stereotypes. It identifies a list of representational strategies used to illustrate how schematized they have become, and discusses the ideological work performed by them through “simplified complex representations”—the appearance of seemingly complex images and storylines that are in fact quite predictable and formulaic. While some of these strategies are used more frequently and more effectively than others, they all help to shape the many layers of simplified complexity. Simplified complex representations are the representational mode of the so-called post-race era, signifying a new era of racial representation. These representations appear to challenge or complicate former stereotypes and contribute to a multicultural post-race illusion or colorblindness.

This chapter examines post-9/11 films that reinforce an aggressive response towards the terrorist attacks. The most high-profile and representative of films that directly show the events of 9/11 is Gédéon and Jules Naudet's documentary film 9/11, which features probationary firefighter Tony Benetatos. The way the film depicts the ritualised burial procedures of the fire service provides a concrete focal point for a collective outpouring of grief as well as a mechanism for closure and resolution, emphasising how the move to war is underwritten with the blood of the fallen. In the documentary film In Memoriam – New York City, 9/11/01, Rudy Giuliani—former mayor of New York at the time of the attacks—says that 9/11 must be looked at in all its awfulness so that it might fuel the resolve to defend the US.

The post–9/11 wars often result in complex and chronic conditions for US service members. The ongoing need for veteran care intersects with a broader social ideal that posits normative couplehood as the sign of a successful postwar life. Both Veterans Affairs policy and sociocultural expectation are transforming family relationships into forms of care work aimed at maintaining veterans’ lives. In the shadow of soldier and veteran suicide, death looms as the possible consequence of not having or keeping these relationships. This chapter explores the nature of these complex and chronic conditions and the forms of couplehood that are entangled with them, suggesting that women’s caregiving is transformed into an afterwar work for life in which the object of care is narrowly construed as the veteran’s life itself, and the work of care is expected to last a long lifetime.

This chapter investigates how, in the post-9/11 period, the U.S. security state has collapsed the figures of Black criminal and Muslim terrorist into the term “Black Muslim”. By analyzing and combining the rhetoric and logic of the “War on Crime” and the “War on Terror”, this chapter explores the collapse of the domestic and foreign realms of U.S. power and views the prison as a site of violent containment for the Muslim International, revealing the intimacies between domestic U.S. prison regimes and the emergence of imperial imprisonment in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo, and other so-called Black sites. It also discusses how Blackness, Islam, and the Muslim Third World being front and center in the current political and popular debate within the United States of America, the U.S. continues to silence and resist the history of Black Islam and those who radically resist.

The concluding chapter considers how the legal and political arguments for detention camps in the US-led ‘war on terror’ draw on the rhetoric of emergency to reinforce the necessity for broader police and/or military powers, and to justify measures that not only contravene the principles of international human rights legislation, but which also resemble the legal, political and military techniques of European colonial powers in the twentieth century. Beginning with a discussion of the legal regime which enabled the detention of ‘enemy combatants’ at Guantánamo Bay, this chapter proceeds to consider how Muslims have been represented in the ‘post-9/11’ fiction of Ian McEwan and Martin Amis. In so doing, I try to address to what extent the ‘post-9/11’ novel participates in the dominant discourse of terrorism. As a counterpoint to such representations, the chapter then moves to consider how contemporary fiction by Muslim writers such as Mohsin Hamid and Kamila Shamsie questions and complicates the prevailing tropes and narratives of militant Islam that frame the justification of emergency measures in the ‘war on terror’.

This chapter studies the preoccupation with facial recognition technology (FRT) in the post-9/11 context. It considers claims of its technical neutrality by investigating the cultural logic that defined the technology and the practical politics that shaped system development. While the promise of facial recognition lay in its potential to individualize the terrorist threat by targeting specifically identified “terrorist” individuals, the effort to define it as a homeland security technology also made use of an implicit classifying logic, including rhetorical moves that reinforced old-fashioned notions of deviant facial types. Thus, the “facialization” of terrorism—defining non-state forms of political violence with recourse to the racist logic of a mythic and demonized facial type—was prevalent in discourse about FRT, appearing alongside claims about its technical neutrality.

This chapter addresses how the celebration and meaning of Christmas become intertwined politically and socially with societies engaged in war. It then turns to the build-up to the Second World War and examines how Christmas was appropriated by the Nazi movement for ideological purposes. Furthermore, it moves to the first Gulf War of the early 1990s. Post-9/11 America is explored, arguing that consumerism, emotion, and symbolism have been incorporated into the celebration of Christmas. The relationship between Christmas and war provides an interesting (and troubling) juxtaposition. The Nazi appropriation of Christmas was part of a wider phenomenon of National Socialist ideology that aimed to ensure public and private adherence to the Nazi creed, and the post-9/11 celebration of Christmas has largely been dominated by memory and consumerism.

Goodrum takes on the daunting task of viewing the Joker, and particularly his appearance in Christopher Nolan’s 2008 film The Dark Knight, through the lens of Slavoj Žižek. Arguing against understanding Batman and the Joker simply as opposing forces – a hero and a villain, in the traditional sense – Goodrum suggests a reading employing the Žižekian notion of the “symptom.” This reading allows a nuanced understanding of Nolan’s film, Goodrum argues, because it moves beyond seeing Batman solely as an agent of order counterposed to the Joker’s agent of chaos: “Batman’s presence makes villains mandatory, and his existence as an extra-legal force, a totalitarian blemish, renders the democracy he defends impossible.” The Joker, meanwhile, “is not a symptom of a disease afflicting the system—the Joker is a symptom of the system itself.” Neither character, Goodrum argues, appreciates this dimension of their identity, which makes The Dark Knight a particularly rich post-9/11 text.