One defining aspect of Acker's work in the early seventies was her use of terrorism as a contribution to world revolt. Revolutionary terrorism is one of the recurring themes in this volume, but it receives its most literal treatment in this chapter. Here, I relate the turbulent and violent moments of late American counterculture in Acker's early works to two revolutionary movements: twentieth-century militant Maoism and nineteenth-century Russian terrorism. The Burning Bombing of America: The Destruction of the US (1972) and I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining (1974)1 are two works which will be my lodestars. They both document the employment of images of violence and destruction for political purpose; both relate religious patterning to radical politics; both establish transhistorical and transnational political links; and both relate libidinal desire to revolutionary ends. These two works will allow me to track the development of Acker's early literary configurations of radical politics from the aesthetics of an exploding bomb and the politics of dissolution in Burning Bombing towards sacrifice-based models of political subjectivity in Nymphomaniac.

The terrorist turn

The 1962 Port Huron Statement may have diagnosed the ills of American society and, in doing so, communicated a mildly idealistic set of demands, but it was not a call for radical action. The first years of the SDS were relatively violence-free. The students mostly engaged in intellectual discussions working towards a peaceful resolution of the issues of inequality, racism, poverty and unemployment. But the 1960s saw violence erupt at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy and the failure to stop the Vietnam War through peaceful protest. The rebellious spirit of the age was inflamed by race riots in numerous American cities, while multiple liberation and workers’ struggles in the developing world furthered the mandate for militarism. It was only a matter of time before radical movements would emerge from these crises, and the SDS would transform itself into a radical revolutionary force. Burning Bombing explores that transition.

The terrorist bomb pervades Burning Bombing. It not only constitutes a means of destroying the urban landscape, but also subtends the novella's fragmentary structure.