Susana Araújo

Ominous Homelands in World Cinema examines contemporary films from a range of national settings that expose and critically engage with representations of “Homeland” – a term that resurfaced with renewed intensity in the United States through the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11 and gained traction across Europe, contributing to the formation of new securitarian configurations whose impact has resonated globally. By drawing on contemporary films from different national contexts, and relating these with emerging political discourses, this book explores some of the new meanings and images associated with ideas of home and land. The analysis also traces how notions and representations of “Homeland” in popular culture have increasingly become infused with themes of security and control, not only linked to terrorism but also progressively connected to a number of other global processes such as the so-called “refugee crisis,” the emergence of new geopolitical powers, wars and the rise of authoritarian leaders and nationalistic movements in different parts of the world. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in media and film studies, American studies, cultural studies, critical security studies, international relations, contemporary history and global studies.

Moving Images of (In)Security and the Rise of Neo-Nationalisms

Ominous Homelands in World Cinema

Extending the study of post-9/11 literature to include transnational perspectives, this book explores the ways in which contemporary writers from Europe as well as the USA have responded to the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the ensuing 'war on terror.' Transatlantic Fictions of 9/11 and the 'War on Terror' demonstrates the ways in which contemporary fiction has wrestled with anxieties about national and international security in the 21st century. Reading a wide range of novels by such writers as Amy Waldman, Michael Cunningham, Frédéric Beigbeder, Ian McEwan, Joseph O'Neill, Moshin Hamid, José Saramago, Ricardo Menéndez Salmón, J.M. Coetzee and Salman Rushdie, Susana Araújo explores how the rhetoric of the 'war on terror' has shaped recent representations of the city and how “security” discourses circulate transatlantically and transnationally. By focusing not only on 9/11 but also on the way subsequent events such as the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq are represented in fiction, this book demonstrates how notions of “terror” and “insecurity” have been absorbed, reworked or critiqued in fiction. Araújo examines to what extent transatlantic relations have reinforced or challenged new fictions of “white western middle class captivity.”

Images of Insecurity, Narratives of Captivity

Transatlantic Fictions of 9/11 and the War on Terror

Marta Pacheco Pinto

João Ferreira Duarte

I took a trip down to L’America To trade some beads for a pint of gold. Jim Morrison As the title indicates, Trans/American, Trans/Oceanic, Trans/lation points towards the International American Studies Society’s aims to promote cross-disciplinary study and teaching of the Americas regionally, hemispherically, nationally and transnationally. But it also reflects, less strategically but more forcefully, the heterogeneous and often unexpected themes, topics and motifs addressed in this forum. These articles are revealing in that they give face and expression to the evolving trends and preoccupations in the field. In various ways and from different disciplinary angles, the essays explore key questions in International American Studies: what have been the symbolic and material relations between the “Americas” and the “USA,” and between “America” and the “World”? What are the meanings and workings of these four entities when examined across nations, cultures and languages? In what ways does American experience contribute to the global (re-)production of social, cultural and economic practices?

Susana Araújo

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