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America After 9/11 Ethnic Diversity and Patriotism in John Updike’S Terrorist

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America After 9/11 Ethnic Diversity and Patriotism in John Updike’S Terrorist America After 9/11 Ethnic Diversity and Patriotism in John Updike’s Terrorist KATHERINA DODOU ________________________ a ________________________ Introduction HE TOPIC OF A MERICAN SELF -PERCEPTION and identity has re- ceived renewed critical attention in the period following the 11 Sep- T tember 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The political discussion in their immediate aftermath was dominated by a view of the attacks as an unprovoked act of terrorism, as well as by calls for a new sense of allegiance to America and American politics on both the national and the international level. As Susan Faludi has argued, after the attacks Americans were not merely involved in military combat abroad, they were “enlisted in a symbolic war at home, a war to repair and restore a national myth.”1 Faludi is primarily interested in the resurgence of traditional gendered stereotypes; nonetheless, she highlights larger investments in national myth- making which sought to unify the American citizenry against a common enemy and to promote a patriotic version of national identity. The form of patriotism which emerged after the attacks posited diversity and liberalism as specifically American properties, against the supposedly in- tolerant, backward-looking society associated with terrorists, and, by exten- sion, with Islam and Arabs.2 This idealization of America was coupled with a 1 Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (New York: Metropolitan, 2007): 13. 2 Judith Butler addresses the binary relationship established between America and Islam in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006): 1–18. 178 KATHERINA DODOU a resurgence of xenophobia and racism. The wave of anti-Arab and anti-Mus- lim sentiment in the public space was followed by alarmist litanies on immi- gration and restrictive legislative amendments. Most notably, the Patriot Act, which enabled ethnic profiling, or the targeting by state intelligence of indivi- duals (mostly men) of “Middle Eastern appearance” as suspects of terrorist acts, fostered the “ideological exclusion” of minority groups.3 At the same time, patriotic rhetoric on American unity has emphasized the need for alle- giance to the nation-state so as to foster national concord.4 The issue of multiculturalism in post-9/11 America is dealt with in John Updike’s Terrorist (2006), a novel centrally concerned with emerging con- ceptions of national and ethnic identity following the September 2001 attacks. The present essay addresses the complexities of American patriotism and ethno-national identity construction in the new millennium in relation to Up- dike’s novel. Situating Terrorist in a polarized cultural climate, in which the American government views the nation as a bastion of liberalism against what it has defined as its uncivilized foes, the essay examines Updike’s treatment of America’s self-image in the aftermath of the attacks. I will argue that in Terrorist, Updike responds to the attempt to reinvigorate myths of America. In particular, he sets his sights on visions of American exceptionalism that enable a self-perception of American society as an ideal, and American poli- tics as morally unassailable. As Donald E. Pease has indicated, American exceptionalism is a form of nationhood which has supplied “a prerequisite horizon of intelligibility for the understanding of American events.”5 While this conception of national iden- tity developed from a complex set of assumptions with roots in early settler ideology, its present form relies on a conviction that tolerance of diversity and liberal individualism are cornerstones of American society. The belief in American exceptionality includes a number of other features, among them an understanding of America as a nation with a “Manifest Destiny,” as the “Nation 3 David Cole, “Let’s Fight Terrorism, Not the Constitution,” in Rights vs. Public Safety After 9/11: America in the Age of Terrorism, ed. Amitai Etzioni & Jason H. Marsh (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003): 36. 4 For an elaboration of the ways in which the Bush administration represented America as a “multiculture whose members were united through their collective parti- cipation in the newly declared Global War on Terror,” see Donald E. Pease, The New American Exceptionalism (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009): 153–79. 5 Pease, The New American Exceptionalism, 7–8..
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