Book review: Oana-Celia Gheorghiu, British and American Representations of 9/11: Literature, Politics and the Media

Abstract

Reading about representations of 9/11 on the threshold of the 20-year commemoration of the events is a revisitation of sorts that has prompted me to reactivate my personal, urban, political and cultural memory of this ‘rethinking’ moment. I have also approached OanaCelia Gheorghiu’s book with a readerly consciousness mediated by my interest in New York City and its contemporary urbanization, attuned to the various discourses that intersect therein: historical and political geographies, multi-media documentation and theories of urban space. Conjuring up a representational baggage that combines political, critical, creative, mediatic and experiential discourses is key to engaging with Gheorghiu’s book, which makes of this discursive intertextuality its very rationale. The book shows that understanding the 9/11 historical, political and cultural conjuncture is afforded, and made possible, by the porous and intersectional nature of the various discursive fields in which the events exist. The book is framed as a New Historicist/Cultural Materialist project with diverse theoretical insights from Greenblatt, Foucault, Gramsci, Althusser, Genette and Said amongst others, and grounded in the close readings of selected multimodal texts, such as the 9/11 Commission Report, media reports, US and UK presidential and prime ministerial addresses, journalistic and fictional work by American and British writers, ‘the famous [white] men in contemporary literature’ (p. 49): Don DeLillo, Martin Amis, Iain Banks, Ian McEwan, David Hare, with Amy Waldman and Mohsin Hamid as the exceptions. The book’s aim is literary: to define, typify, explore and elucidate the narratological and ideological discourses of transatlantic, neorealist 9/11 fiction as a subgenre in its own right (p. 237). In its demonstration, the 9/11 subgenre at once transcends and incorporates the typology of both trauma and historiographical metafictional, postmodernist narratives, raising questions about historical truth, reality and representation as well as scoping geocultural spaces (East/West, Occidentalism/Orientalism) and identities (the Muslim and the 1048563 DAS0010.1177/09579265211048563Discourse & SocietyBook review book-review2021