Arin Keeble & Jay Shelat, 'Can we stop saying "post-9/11" now?'
Join us in the first of this year's BACLS seminars for a talk and Q&A discussion with Arin Keeble (Edinburgh Napier) and Jay Shelat (Ursinus College). We'll hear from Arin and Jay about the shared focus of their recent and forthcoming solo and collaborative work - Keeble's Twenty-First Century Fictions of Terrorism was published by Edinburgh UP in 2024, Shelat's No Place for Home: Terror and Race in Literature After 9/11 will be published by University of Minnesota Press in 2027. Their talk draws on work that is the basis for a forthcoming article in Public Books.
Covering texts including Kevin Nguyen’s My Documents, Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and Adania Shibli's Minor Detail, the talk will consider the ongoing use of “post-9/11” as a period marker in literary studies and beyond and open discussion on twenty-first century periodisation. We ask this question – “can we stop saying post-9/11?” – not just because it’s been a quarter of a century since the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. Indeed, while numerous world-historical events have occurred over the last twenty-five years, many of which might qualify as a “watershed moment” or “historical turning point,” and while we might question event-based logics more generally in our age of “crisis ordinariness,” we return here to the language of “9/11.” The enduring prevalence of this term as a periodising marker is troubling. After all, the continued use of “post-9/11” to describe everything from foreign policy to literature and culture, reinforces the notion that the seismic changes of the early twenty-first century are a consequence of a single act of terrorism. The very real shifts in the world order that followed the attacks have actually been driven by America and its allies’ imperial responses to them, often manifest as amplifications of long-standing agendas. Echoes of the ideological work the term “post-9/11” has done, can now be seen in the way a new term, “post-October 7,” is used to strip the event it describes of historical context. Yet, while we are eager to challenge the common usage of “post-9/11,” we simultaneously, and perhaps paradoxically, feel it is important to keep “9/11” in sight, and to continue exploring cultural responses to the attacks in order to understand and resist the present turn to fascism in America.
We'll hear from Keeble and Shelat for around 30mins, before opening up for audience discussion and Q&A.