Post-9/11-Disaster Katrina: Reenacting American Innocence in Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun

Dave Eggers’s nonfiction book Zeitoun (2009) presents a Syrian American man who changes from citizen to potential terrorist and is detained after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The book was a huge success, but the public and the media have denounced Eggers’s representation of Zeitoun since Zeitoun’s charge of domestic violence in 2012. Focusing on how Eggers represents Zeitoun as a “good” Arab American, I examine how responses to Eggers’s Zeitoun reenact the myth of American innocence through their ignorance of society’s violence against those with an Arab or Muslim identity.