Cultures of the War on Terror: Empire, Ideology, and the Remaking of 9/11 (review)

The introduction to this slender book sketches out a cogent and important argument. Holloway suggests that the near truism that 9/11 was a day when "everything changed," a day that that created a "historical rupture" in the recent fabric of America, was in fact freighted with political and geo-political implications that help justify the war on terror and mask substantial continuities in post-Cold War American imperialism. Unhappily, much of this argument gets lost in the body of the text.

The first two chapters provide intellectual and political context and background through an examination of major critics and defenders of the "clash of civilizations" thesis and the related idea of a post-Cold War "American Empire"—Huntington, Ferguson, Ignatieff, Bacevich, Paul Kennedy, Chalmers Johnson, and others—followed by a look at how these ideas actually played out in the halls of power of the Bush administration, shaping the "unitary executive" thesis and eventually the main components of the war on terror: the Bush Doctrine, the Iraq War, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and the rest.

The remaining chapters cover the "culture" side of things, looking at treatments of 9/11 and the war on terror in the mass media, movies, novels, and the visual arts. Not surprisingly, given his previous work, the visual arts chapter is the most original and successful. The chapter on the mass media focuses heavily on the media's uncritical early acceptance of the Bush administration's self-serving understanding and presentation of the post 9/11 world. The treatment of movies and novels feels thin and unfocused, with an idiosyncratic and seemingly haphazard selection of often mediocre works that doesn't always contribute much to the thesis, discussions of movies such as The Alamo, M. Night. Shyamalan's The Village, The Kingdom of Heaven, or the television series Lost being cases in point.

Holloway has produced a useful introduction to a particular slice of American culture during the Age of Bush II, but too often promising themes dissipate into relatively isolated and disjointed essays. Especially in the second half of the book, the individual parts do not add up to a significant whole. It is perhaps caviling to complain about academic language and disciplinary jargon that have become common custom, but approaching matters such as the war on terror and torture as forms of "representation," "rhetorical constructions," or "a series of stories" (4) constructed by the politically powerful has the inadvertent effect of denigrating or even obfuscating serious subject matter.

Overall, this is a worthwhile interdisciplinary attempt to shed light on a complex, controversial topic that is still very much in flux. Holloway deserves significant credit for taking on a challenging endeavor, but we can also hope and expect that better and more substantial successors will soon be available.