This edited collection aims to respond to dominant perspectives on twenty-first-century war by exploring how the events of 9/11 and the subsequent Wars on Terror are represented and remembered outside of the US framework. Existing critical coverage ignores the meaning of these events for people, nations and cultures apparently peripheral to them but which have - as shown in this collection - been extraordinarily affected by the social, political and cultural changes these wars have wrought. Adopting a literary and cultural history approach, the book asks how these events resonate and continue to show effects in the rest of the world, with a particular focus on Australia and Britain. It argues that such reflections on the impact of the Wars on Terror help us to understand what global conflict means in a contemporary context, as well as what its representative motifs might tell us about how nations like Australia and Britain perceive and construct their remembered identities on the world stage in the twenty-first century. In its close examination of films, novels, memoir, visual artworks, media, and minority communities in the years since 2001, this collection looks at the global impacts of these events, and the ways they have shaped, and continue to shape, Britain and Australia’s relation to the rest of the world.

This book explores the ways in which transnational fiction in the post-9/11 era can intervene in discourse surrounding the "war on terror" to advocate for marginalised perspectives. Trauma and Fictions of the "War on Terror" conceptualises global political discourse about the "war on terror" as incongruous, with transnational memory frames instituted in Western nations centralising 9/11 as uniquely traumatic, excluding the historical and present-day experiences of Afghans under Western—specifically American—hegemonic violence. Recent developments in trauma studies explain how dominant Western trauma theory participates in this exclusion, failing to account for the ongoing suffering common to non-Western, colonial, and postcolonial contexts. O’Brien explores how Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner), Nadeem Aslam (The Wasted Vigil, The Blind Man’s Garden), and Kamila Shamsie (Burnt Shadows) represent marginalised perspectives in the context of the "war on terror".

Introduction: The Politics of Memory in the Post-9/11 Era -- Monuments and Voids: The Proliferation of 9/11 Memory -- The Objects That Lived, the Voices That Remain: The 9/11 Museum -- Global Architecture, Patriotic Skyscrapers, and a Cathedral Shopping Mall: The Rebuilding of Lower Manhattan -- Visibility and Erasure: Memory and the "Global War on Terror" -- The Memory of Racial Terror: The National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum.

‘Love is not consolation, it is light’ From the author of Maps for Lost Lovers and The Wasted Vigil comes a novel set in the months after 9/11, when Western armies invaded Afghanistan—a story of love, hope and grief, of uncorrupted faith and of what it means to be alive. Jeo and his foster-brother Mikal leave their home in Pakistan to help care for wounded Afghans. Within hours of entering the wide-horizoned Afghan landscape, Mikal and Jeo are separated and, emerging from the carnage, Mikal begins his search for Jeo. But his deepest wish is to return home—to the young woman he loves and who loves him, Jeo’s wife. The Blind Man’s Garden maps a place both phantasmally beautiful and chilling. Taking us on a journey from Al Qaeda’s hideouts in Waziristan and American-built military prisons to a family left behind—Mikal’s and Jeo’s blind, regretful father, Jeo’s resolute wife and her superstitious mother—it unflinchingly examines war and brotherhood, devastation, separation and remorse, while celebrating the redemptive power of nature, art and literature.

In "Archives of the Insensible" anthropologist Allen Feldman presents a genealogical critique of the sensibilities and insensibilities of contemporary warfare. Feldman subjects the law to a strip search, interrogating diverse trials and revealing the intersecting forms of bodily and psychic subjugation that they display. Throughout, ethnographic specificities are treated philosophically and political philosophy is treated ethnographically through deconstructive description. Among the cases he examines are the interrogation of Ashraf Salim at the Combatant Status Review Tribunal at Guantanamo; the kangaroo court of American soldiers who murdered Gul Mudin, an Afghani noncombatant; Gerhard Richter s forensic paintings of the disputable suicides of a Red Brigade cell in Stammheim prison; Radovan Karadzic s forensic allegations against the corpses attributed to his shelling of a market in Sarajevo; the trial of the police officers who beat Rodney G. King and the latter s judicial lynching by video montage; Jean Luc Godard s film class at Sarajevo where visual facts are indicted for no longer speaking for themselves; and Jacques Derrida standing naked before his cat while awaiting apocalyptic judgment. Through his analysis of these and several other cases, Feldman shows how state power arises "ex nihilo "in the chasm between violent events themselves and the space where political meaning is made. He aims to reverse sovereign logic, the whole task of which is to transform what Foucault called the enigmatic dispersion of human events into certified facts on which state violence is grounded. In contrast, Feldman relies on the disorientation that arises from micrological description as theory in an attempt to retard the hyperaccelerated time of war and media."

War, like all human endeavors, is at some point of consideration a cultural event; understanding it fully requires an appreciation of war's events, its cultural context, and the interaction between them. In all wars there is a simultaneous and reciprocal process by which culture and war inform each other. What this means for the War on Terror is that how the United States conducts counterterrorism is not merely an expression of policy, security, or other typical understanding of modern conflict, but also an expression of culture--the ways in which the war has been explained, understood, and mythologized. Traditional approaches in political science, international relations, and security studies can be supplemented and amplified by methods more familiar in philosophy, history, and cultural studies for a deeper insight into events and their meaning, specifically in the war's mythologization and the power of its narratives to help shape and be shaped by events.