Implicating hearts and minds: transcultural memory in world literatures of the global war on terror

This thesis scrutinizes the potential of postcolonial World Literatures to commemorate the US-led Global War on Terror through the lens of the implicated subject. In contrast to a first wave of post-9/11 cultural responses viewed as nationally insular and complicit with US imperial amnesia, this dissertation locates itself firmly within a second-wave of imaginative and scholarly discourse (2008-present) grappling with the injustices of the War on Terror and linking them to other legacies of colonial-imperial domination. While partaking in this strand of critical revisionism, I also challenge prevailing frameworks of ‘writing back’ that recover the memorial connections between groups conflated under the label of ‘terrorists’—Muslims and other nonwhite communities—exclusively through a lens of victim trauma and reparation. I argue that while the intervictim model of transcultural remembrance provides a crucial corrective to the post-9/11 memory regime, it often fails to account for the gray zones of imperialist violence sustained by networks of US economic, academic, and mediatic institutions. Rather than only reading for resistance from below, I compare figures and forms of racial implication in the artworks of Babak Jalali, Sinan Antoon, Yuri Herrera, and Coco Fusco in order to propose a supplementary framework for reading post-9/11 cultural production.