IngentaConnect After 9/11, or, Whither the New Americanists?

Abstract:

Following the ruptural events that took place on 11 September 2001, the Bush administration invoked 9/11 as an historical turning point that brought about a change in the entire symbolic apparatus. It resulted in the inauguration of a sociopolitical compact that was crystallized in the phrase Homeland Security State. This compact required US citizens to embrace the instinct for hatred and a compulsion toward violence in exchange for the violation perpetrated against the image of the US as invulnerable. The Bush compact was designed to establish an alliance between national security and the aggressive drives of the US people so as to incriminate dissent as a minor form of treason and to eliminate any loyalty that was more cosmopolitan than the defense of the homeland. Because this compact with the homeland was about who would make the rules and who would enforce them, it could not warrant criticism of the ethical or juridical values of those rules. Despite the state's efforts to discredit them, however, numerous Americanist scholars have undertaken critical evaluations of the present historical conjuncture. But rather than responding to such critiques of its policies and discourses, the Bush administration has characterized any criticisms directed against its terms as either anti-American or as belonging to a sociopolitical dispensation that 9/11 had rendered hopelessly obsolete. In taking up the question 'Whither the New Americanists after 9/11?', this article does not intend to consign the New Americanists project to an object of retrospection or wish to ratify the legitimacy of this artificial periodization. Rather it draws upon the differing inflections of the 'after' implicit in the question.

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