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.

“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

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

GPSR Compliance The European Union's (EU) General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR) is a set of rules that requires consumer products to be safe and our obligations to ensure this. If you have any concerns about our products you can contact us on ProductSafety@springernature.com. In case Publisher is established outside the EU, the EU authorized representative is: Springer Nature Customer Service Center GmbH Europaplatz 3 69115 Heidelberg, Germany ProductSafety@springernature.com