Security and Terror: American Culture and the Long History of Colonial Modernity

By Eli Jelly-Schapiro

When in 1492 Christopher Columbus set out for Asia but instead happened upon the Bahamas, Cuba, and Hispaniola, his error inaugurated a specifically colonial modernity. This is, Security and Terror contends, the colonial modernity within which we still live. And its enduring features are especially vivid in the current American century, a moment marked by a permanent War on Terror and pervasive capitalist dispossession. Resisting the assumption that September 11, 2001, constituted a historical rupture, Eli Jelly-Schapiro traces the political and philosophic genealogies of security and terror--from the settler-colonization of the New World to the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond. A history of the present crisis, Security and Terror also examines how that history has been registered and reckoned with in significant works of contemporary fiction and theory--in novels by Teju Cole, Mohsin Hamid, Junot D az, and Roberto Bola o, and in the critical interventions of Jean Baudrillard, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and others. In this richly interdisciplinary inquiry, Jelly-Schapiro reveals how the erasure of colonial pasts enables the perpetual reproduction of colonial culture.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520295374
• ISBN13: 9780520295377
• Release Date: May 2018
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.0"