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Reimagining the American Landscape: Queer Topographics in Nina Berman's Homeland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 February 2020

CHRISTOPHER W. CLARK*
Affiliation:
School of Humanities, University of Hertfordshire. Email: c.clark5@herts.ac.uk.

Abstract

This article argues that Nina Berman's Homeland (2008) is a rearticulation of the US domestic landscape following 9/11. The book excavates and shapes cultural memory through image and text by examining how parts of the country responded to the 2001 events. Considering how Homeland captures what I call queer topographics of US culture, I suggest that the spaces of the everyday are mediated by Berman's framing and use of “narrative” essays, disrupting the heteronormativity of a populist rhetoric that seeks to exclude difference. Homeland ultimately offers viewers the opportunity to further redefine the US landscape through queerness.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2020

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References

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6 Anthems, particularly in country music, emphasized the attempt at a collective nationalist response. For example, Alan Jackson's “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)” was described by Rolling Stone as perfectly encapsulating “the American collective consciousness” (Kreps et al., “40 Saddest Country Songs of All Time”, Rolling Stone, 26 Sept. 2014, at www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country-lists/40-saddest-country-songs-of-all-time-158907). Bruce Springsteen, considered “the songwriter best qualified to speak to and for his country”, released an entire 9/11 album in 2002 titled The Rising (see Metacritic, “The Rising,” at www.metacritic.com/music/the-rising/bruce-springsteen-the-e-street-band). Marvel's “The Black Issue” depicted the attacks as an opportunity to unite the nation, bringing the comic's heroes and villains together in mourning (Straczynski, J. Michael, “Stand Tall,” The Amazing Spider-Man, 2, 36 (2001)Google Scholar). The subsequent intervention into Iraq was supported by 72% of US citizens according to a 2003 Gallup poll, boosting Bush's approval ratings (see Frank Newport, “Seventy-Two Perecent of Americans Support War against Iraq,” Gallup, 24 March 2003, at https://news.gallup.com/poll/8038/seventytwo-percent-americans-support-war-against-iraq.aspx). This effect was replicated in 9/11 scholarship that was often myopic and inward-looking (see, for instance, Greenberg, Judith, ed., Trauma at Home: After 9/11 (Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 2003)Google Scholar). As time has passed, dissenting voices have been given more of a platform through texts such as Waldman's, AmyThe Submission (London: Random House, 2011)Google Scholar, Hamid's, MohsinThe Reluctant Fundamentalist (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007)Google Scholar and O'Neill's, JosephNetherland (London: Harper Perennial, 2008)Google Scholar, which sought to interrogate the racial implications of nationalistic framings of memory.

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19 This is evidenced in the amount of testimony seen following the attacks, and the ways that public spaces were appropriated, a concept that Berman's collection also considers. See Haskins, Katerina V. and DeRose, Justin P., “Memory, Visibility, and Public Space: Reflections on Commemoration(s) of 9/11,” Space and Culture, 6, 4 (2003), 377–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar for further discussion of makeshift shrines, posters, and street memorials. David Grann, “The Heartbreaking Stories That Filled My Notebook after 9/11,” New Republic, 1 Oct. 2011, available at www.newrepublic.com/article/61832/families-911-victims-search-loved-ones, provides a journalistic account of those searching for loved ones, whilst Jerry Saltz, “Missing-Persons Posters,” New York Magazine, 27 Aug. 2011, available at https://nymag.com/news/9-11/10th-anniversary/missing-persons-poster, catalogues images of makeshift posters and photographs that were used to locate missing individuals.

20 Berman, Nina, Homeland (London: Trolley Press, 2008), n.p.Google Scholar

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid.

25 For an examination of the bias that portrays non-Western militarized children as threat, see Macmillan, Lorraine, “The Child Soldier in North–South Relations,” International Political Sociology, 3, 1 (2009), 3652CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For discussion of the way that militarization of Western children remains unproblematized despite the “culture of protection” that simultaneously exists around them, see Macmillan, , “Militarized Children and Sovereign Power,” in Beier, J. Marshall, ed., The Militarization of Childhood: Thinking beyond the Global South (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 6176CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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27 Ibid.

28 See Agamben's, GiorgioState of Exception, trans. Attell, Kevin (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005)Google Scholar for more in-depth discussion, including the use of extralegal measures to detain and torture those suspected of terrorist activity, known as “enemy combatants.” Agamben's theory is useful for this discussion in terms of the way that those normally considered outside the heteronormative majority of the US were absorbed following 9/11 (i.e. those identified as queer due to their nonnormative status) as a way to consolidate the nation-state against the exemplary queer – that of the brown-skinned terrorist.

29 Berlant, Lauren, “The Theory of Infantile Citizenship,” Public Culture, 5, 3 (1993), 395410, 398CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Berman, Homeland, n.p.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

33 Butler, Judith, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 26Google Scholar.

34 Ibid., 3.

35 Berman, n.p.

36 Stockton, Kathryn Bond, The Queer Child; Or, Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 1, 67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Ibid., 1.

38 Berman, n.p.

39 Berlant, “The Theory of Infantile Citizenship,” 398.

40 See Hyndman, Jennifer, “The Question of the ‘Political’ in Critical Geographies: Queering the ‘Child Soldier’ in ‘the War on Terror’,” Political Geography, 29, 5 (2010), 247–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Berman, n.p.

42 Ibid., emphasis added.

43 Ibid. GWOT is used to shorthand the term Global War on Terror here.

44 Stockton, 3, 2.

45 O'Gorman, Daniel, Fictions of the War on Terror: Difference and the Transnational 9/11 Novel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar, also discusses these divisions in terms of pitting “those who share civilizational values that the United States perceives to uphold – ‘progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom’ – against those who wish to see those values destroyed.”

46 Edelman, No Future, 11, original emphasis.

47 Berlant, Lauren, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Duhram, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Berman, n.p.

49 Ibid.

50 Pérez, A Taste for Brown Bodies, 12.

51 Tompkins, Jane, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (London: Oxford University Press, 1992), 17Google Scholar.

52 This recalls Butler's point above regarding the need to be protected from state violence whilst simultaneously being under threat of violence from that state. She writes, “To be protected from violence by the nation state is to be exposed to the violence wielded by the nation state,” thus rendering precarious all those populations to various kinds of injury and death. As such, others to the normative white nation – as in Berman's photograph – are doubly consigned to precarity, unprotected by the nation even when it claims to protect. Butler, Frames of War, 26.