Overview
- 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
Part of the book series: American Literature Readings in the 21st Century (ALTC)
Access this book
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
About this book
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.
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
Table of contents (6 chapters)
Reviews
“How do acts of national remembrance reproduce heteronormativity? How might a queer archive of remembrance challenge hegemonic narratives? Queering Memory and National Identity in Transcultural U.S. Literature and Culture explores a post-9/11 US context, suggesting that a queer approach to remembrance might open up new, more inclusive futures.”
—Sam McBean, Senior Lecturer in Gender, Sexuality, and Contemporary Culture, Queen Mary University of London, UK
Queering Memory and National Identity in Transcultural U.S. Literature and Culture generates ‘a queer archive of remembrance’ that challenges hegemonic iterations of mourning, national identity, citizenship, and racialised belonging in the aftermath of the events of 9/11, 2001. Through meticulous close readings of photography, art installations, film, fiction, poetry, and witness testimony, Clark not only significantly expands our understanding of what constitutes ‘9/11 culture’ but also demonstrates, in ways not previously accounted for in scholarship, how queerness intersects with forms of remembrance.
—Sinead Moynihan, Associate Professor in American and Atlantic Literatures, University of Exeter, UK
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Christopher W. Clark is Visiting Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Hertfordshire, UK.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Queering Memory and National Identity in Transcultural U.S. Literature and Culture
Authors: Christopher W. Clark
Series Title: American Literature Readings in the 21st Century
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52114-1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-52113-4Published: 22 August 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-52116-5Published: 22 August 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-52114-1Published: 21 August 2020
Series ISSN: 2634-579X
Series E-ISSN: 2634-5803
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XI, 202
Number of Illustrations: 8 illustrations in colour
Topics: North American Literature, Literature, general, Queer Studies, American Culture, Screen Studies, Cultural Studies