Plotting Justice: Narrative Ethics and Literary Culture after 9/11

3. Moral Crusades: Race, Risk, and Walt Whitman’s Afterlives

165 3. MORAL CRUSADES Race, Risk, and Walt Whitman’s Afterlives The changes wrought by the terrorist attacks of September 11 to our collective understanding of race, risk, and their correlation have been dramatic. In the immediate aftermath of those events, a nationwide system of social control was put into motion, aimed largely at racial, ethnic, and religious outsiders in ways that fed on and further fueled the confusion and the desire for retaliation of the American population at large. Fear of and the need for protection against outsiders of all kinds were on everybody’s minds as all struggled to make sense of what the attacks would mean for the future of the nation and for their own personal lives—two discrete realms that suddenly became deeply interconnected. Central to this postcatastrophic climate was a sense of perplexity and disorientation about the structural failures that had led to such a major fissure in the social system, resulting in frustrations that were ultimately channeled into the War on Terror. In the previous chapter I examined the ethics and aesthetics of retributive fictions and racial scapegoating in texts whose perspectives were signally white and, as such, governed by moralistic idioms of innocence and victimization. In this chapter I seek to offer a fine-grained analysis of racial perceptions as they manifest themselves across a range of post-9/11 fictions that trouble the ethics of victimization from the opposite end of its racial binarism: the perspective of the stigmatized Other. Once investigated , I believe, these underexamined works, particularly those by ethnic American writers, can help unpack the role of literature in responding to the erosion of human rights and civil liberties in the War on Terror. A chief limitation of post-9/11 fiction, Richard Gray has convincingly 166 moral crusades demonstrated, resides in its failed or absent “encounters with strangeness.” According to Gray, writing since September 11 hasn’t yet risen to the important challenge of “facing the other, in all its difference and danger,” a challenge that needs to be met “not just because of obscene acts of terrorism committed by a small group of people, but because the U.S. has become, more than ever, a border territory in which different cultures meet, collide, and in some instances collude with each other” (135). Yet to project an insular worldview onto post-9/11 fiction as a whole would be to overlook what may be called “the second wave” of post-9/11 novels, which clearly attempts to deal with America’s liminal position between historical borders and cultures. Specifically these novels are more intently focused on the racial fear and anxiety sparked by the attacks (and by the official response to them) in the lives and minds of people previously inured to the domestic repercussions of distant international affairs. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, a national rhetoric fueled by misconstrued patriotism rushed to vilify and marginalize persons of an allegedly suspicious racial makeup through what I call moral racialization, a strategy that informs the first three novels I examine here: Chitra Divakaruni ’s Queen of Dreams, Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country , and Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land. I argue that American literature after 9/11 has replaced the moral discourse around race with a more ambivalent ethical approach that coheres around risk as key to the cultural animosities of late modernity. Significantly racial profiling is folded within and partly defused by this conceptualization of risk. My approach assumes a difference between morality (referring to the set of values prescribed by a particular community or situation) and ethics (the broader philosophy that investigates the principles behind moral judgment ), a distinction that establishes the moral as a subset of the ethical (B. Williams 6). I want to use this partial distinction between morality and ethics to define the problematic overlap between racial profiling and discourses of risk. While Divakaruni’s and Halaby’s novels only obliquely invoke accident and coincidence to mitigate racial determinism, the novels I discuss in the second part of this chapter—Gayle Brandeis’s Self Storage and Michael 167 moral crusades Cunningham’s Specimen Days—more clearly stage the transition from racial formation to risk as a way of harnessing and defusing post-9/11 social tensions. This second section lays out my understanding of an ethics of risk in more detail, a concept that...