Terrorism Before the Letter
Benito Cereno and the 9/11 Commission Report
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5839308 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Bryce Traister (Department of English, University of Western Ontario, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2013 |
| Volume | 43 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 23-47 |
| Publication date | 2013-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Canadian Review of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-7720 • E-ISSN: 1710-114X |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/cras.2013.002 |
| OpenAlex | W2045784108 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 14 |
This essay argues that Herman Melville's 1855 novella, Benito Cereno, serves as a historical model for thinking through the construction of paranoid narrative in the 9/11 Commission Report. Melville's text invites a consideration of slavery's role in the preservation of status quo politics, and reveals the means by which the disclosure of secrecy becomes a condition for the legal fiction of slavery to persist. In purporting to reveal the hidden plot of contemporary anti-US terrorism, the US government's 9/11 Commission Report similarly manufactures an acceptable political fiction that compensates for a still deeper failure to promote democratic structures of feeling in response to national trauma
Novella · Plot (graphics · Theme (computing · Crime and Detective Fiction Studies · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy
To wake the nations
Roads to Rome
Against All Enemies - Inside America's War On Terror
The Clash of Civilizations
Selections from the Prison Notebooks
The Culture of Commemoration
The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style
Patrick Henry and His World
The Slumbering Volcano
Materializing Democracy
The Slumbering Volcano
The Modernizing Imperative
The Clash of Civilizations
Residues of Justice
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |