The Fear of Foreign Violence and the Narrative of American Victimization: Lessons From Three Post-9/11 Coming-of-Age Novels

The US human rights narrative imagines crimes against humanity as foreign horrors that alternately require US intervention and eclipse discriminatory domestic policies. This fantasy proliferated after 9/11 as part of a national coming-of-age story that disregards how the US violates international human rights law and restricts civil liberties in the name of state protection. This article argues that the extent to which post-9/11 novels reinforce, revise, or undermine the traditional bildungsroman correlates with the degree to which they embrace, complicate, or upend a post-9/11 coming-of-age narrative that depoliticizes crimes against humanity and imagines the US overcoming its perceived victimhood to save a threatened nation-state system. It is useful to return to the literature that responds to 9/11 to contextualize current attempts to invoke fear of foreign violence and the accompanying narrative of victimization that distorts the human rights framework and increases systemic inequalities.