O'Brien, Sarah
(2019)
Disrupting Memory: Trauma and Fictions of the ‘War on terror’.
PhD thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth.
Abstract
This thesis explores the ways in which transnational fiction in the post-9/11 era can intervene
in discourse surrounding the ‘war on terror’ to advocate for marginalised and excluded
perspectives. This study conceptualises global political discourse—as it relates to the ‘war on
terror’ and its attendant conflicts—as characterised by incongruity, with transnational
memory frames instituted in Western nations centralising 9/11 as an instance of unique
trauma and wilfully excluding the historical and ongoing experiences of Afghans and Iraqis
under Western—and mainly American—hegemonic violence. I employ recent developments
in trauma studies to understand the ways in which dominant frameworks for conceptualising
trauma in the West contribute to this exclusion, failing to account for the type of ongoing
suffering common to non-Western, colonial and postcolonial contexts. Specifically, I
examine the ways in which authors positioned here as representing marginalised perspectives
in the context of the ‘war on terror’, such as Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner), and Nadeem
Aslam (The Wasted Vigil, The Blind Man’s Garden) respond, in various ways, to these
challenges and present narratives that disrupt framings of the 9/11 attacks as a singular
instance of global rupture, making space for alternate voices and experiences related to the
invasion of Afghanistan. The final chapter also participates in this disruption, examining texts
by Ben Fountain (Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk) Phil Klay (Redeployment) that
interrogate the Iraq War as a cynical and imperialistic endeavour, exploring the phenomenon
of perpetrator trauma. I argue that the authors studied in this thesis each employ a range of
approaches—translation of complex cultural trauma into single catastrophic events,
landscapes marred by suffering, the depiction of ghosts and hauntings— that reveal a ‘war on
terror’ and a violent American hegemony that is underpinned by an exclusionary but
influential memory discourse in America and other Western nations.
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