9/1 1 and the Poetics of Complicity: A Love Poem for a Hurt Nation

Abstract

In my initial, stunned thinking about the terrorist strikes, I stumbled again and again not only on my utter unpreparedness to make sense of what happened but also, perhaps even more frightening, on latent assumptions about national exceptionalism, race, class, religion, and the use of armed force. I thus found myself wondering along with Rachel Blau DuPlessis (1996), &dquo;How in the world did ideology get in my head, locked so firm?&dquo; (p. 34). Even while organizing and participating in various political responses to the War on Terrorism, I found myself struggling to make sense of the relationships among overarching critical-theoretical stabs at understanding, rapidly changing political scenarios, and my immediate personal sense of confusion and loss. Thus, like Duplessis and fellow Cultural Studies H Critical Methodologies contributors Patricia Ticineto Clough (2002) and Laurel Richardson (2002), I found