By now scholars, practitioners, government officials and others in the global community have witnessed a number of countries and their populations going through extreme destruction and trying to rebuild in the aftermath. Country case studies are invaluable for their in-depth, continuous look at how a nation-state collective and the individuals who make up that collective recover, regroup, develop, but also remain very harmed for a long time. They must live among and beside their former enemies. Studies of the resettlement of refugees in a third country offer a different view: there are varied populations arriving with different socio-cultural and economic histories and experiences, and different definitions of a normalcy to which they aspire. They are in a setting that is much different than what characterized their pre-war experiences, and they do not have to rebuild out of ashes in the place that they were born. Refugees from various countries resettling in a third country have so much in common with each other from the experience of extreme violence and having to resettle in a foreign land that one key informant suggested that we think about a "refugee ethnicity." Though they would not have wished for them, they have gained numerous new identification possibilities not available to those in the country of origin: U.S. citizen, hybrid, diaspora, cosmopolitan global citizen; refugee/former refugee survivors. But the "fit" of these identities vary, because the receiving society may perceive individuals and families along a continuum of belonging vs. "othering." In the post-9-11 era in the U.S., the "belonging" as a citizen and member of the imagined community of the nation that a refugee or former refugee is able to achieve may be precarious. Will refugees resettling turn out to be vectors of socio-political disease, infecting the new host? Or will they be vectors of development and agents of host revitalization as they realize adversity-activated development in a new environment? The U.S. "host environment" has changed considerably since the modern era of resettlement began in the 1970s and then passed through the dramatic incidents of 9-11. The "hosts" have now also undergone an experience of extreme political violence. U.S. institutions are responding to the events and subsequent wars, and have themselves been changed as they adjust practices and policies in response to the trauma experienced by the people they are meant to serve. Much is in play. The times beg for a better understanding of refugees' social experiences of resettlement in a new country, the forms of suffering and marginalization they face, and the healing processes in which they engage. We need a far better understanding of what it takes to assist refugees as they work to re-constitute social networks, recover economically, find opportunity and meaning, pursue goals, and - with receiving communities--express solidarity across social dividing lines. This dissertation calls out this problematic; and analyzes it at the multi-stakeholder site of refugee resettlement.

The purpose of this thesis is to firmly situate the fictions of contemporary Arab British and Arab American women writers who write in English within the corpus of ethnic and mainstream literary criticism. I aim to position these fictions within their historical and sociopolitical contexts. I also aim to shift the focus from the texts’ female protagonists to male and minor characters in order to explore how the writers construct both political Islam and Islam as a private faith; how they construct Palestinian Muslim masculinities; and how they respond to the events of 9/11 and the ensuing war on terror. I argue that these fictions offer some of the most astute reactions to the events of 9/11 and their repercussions. I also argue that Arab American literature in general and Arab American women’s literature in particular is more canny than its Arab British counterpart. Thus, I aim to show how Arab American literary productions refract a development from the literature of self-exploration to that of transformation allowing them a well-deserved spot in Ethnic-American literary studies and in time, mainstream American literary studies. Another of my aims is to investigate how Arab American and Arab British writers highlight the diversity of Arabs, Muslims and Islam, thus addressing essentialist reductions of Arabs and Muslims as a monolithic group. In chapter one, I investigate how Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun and Leila Aboulela’s Minaret negotiate issues such as Islamic clothing. I also question anew Arab women writers’ perceived role as “cultural commentators.” In chapter two, I explore how Laila Halaby’s West of the Jordan and Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home construct Palestinian Muslim masculinities, and how they challenge the Anglo-American stereotypical representations of Arab Muslim masculinity. In chapter three, I analyse how Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land, Frances Khirallah Noble’s The New Belly Dancer of the Galaxy and Alia Yunis’ The Night Counter negotiate cultural, political and social views of America. I aim to examine whether Halaby, Noble and Yunis’ ambiguous position, as legally ‘white’ citizens who are also members of a marginalized and religiously racialized minority, offers them a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between ‘East’ and ‘West.’ In the conclusion, I offer some suggestions for future research.

Art Spiegelman is one of the most important figures in the history of American comics. His work Maus (1980 and 1991) is arguably the landmark text in the field of comic book studies. Given the relatively recent reissue of his first collection Breakdowns (2008) and the publication of his interview/essay collection/scrapbook Metamaus (2011), it is likely that his work will continue to be the subject of critical interest. This thesis concerns the collections Breakdowns (1977 and 2008), Maus (1980 and 1991) and In the Shadow of No Towers (2004). It represents the first book-length extended study of Spiegelman s three major works. The central argument put forth in this thesis is that the Spiegelman oeuvre articulates and manifests a madness which its author perceives to underlie supposedly rational society. In support of this thesis I will employ critical models from the following fields: Holocaust studies, trauma theory, the anti-psychiatry movement, theories concerning the representation of madness, formalist analyses of comics, and Genette s narratological taxonomy.

Uppsatsens syfte är att studera porträtteringen av nationell identitet i Don DeLillos Falling Man och Amy Waldmans The Submission i förhållande till efterverkningarna av 9/11. Studien utgörs av undersökande och jämförande analyser av romanerna utifrån ett litteratursociologiskt samt postkolonialt perspektiv med fokus på nationalism, religion och commemoration.   Studien har presenterat hur amerikansk identitet har ifrågasatts och problematiserats i romanerna Falling Man och The Submission, och visat hur religion, commemoration och nationalism hänger samman med den amerikanska identiteten. En identitet som visat sig föränderlig och problematisk i efterverkningarna av 9/11. Studien har också kunnat visa att böckerna inte ämnar att lyfta fram en gestaltning av identitet som något allenarådande eller fast, utan att de istället visar hur identitet ständigt förändras och skiljer sig från karaktär till karaktär, genom problematiserandet kring tillhörighet, trygghet och trauma.

The dissertation consists of a critical preface and a novel. The preface analyzes what it terms “polyvocal” novels, or novels employing multiple points of view, as well as “layered storytelling,” or layers of textuality within novels, such as stories within stories. Specifically, the first part of the preface discusses polyvocality in twenty-first century American novels, while the second part explores layered storytelling in novels responding to World War II or the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The preface analyzes the advantages and difficulties connected to these techniques, as well as their aptitude for reflecting the fractured, disconnected, and subjective nature of the narratives we construct to interpret traumatic experiences. It also acknowledges the necessity—despite its inherent limitations—of using language to engage with this fragmentation and cope with its challenges. The preface uses numerous novels as examples and case studies, and it also explores these concepts and techniques in relation to the process of writing the novel After the Planes. After the Planes depicts multiple generations of a family who utilize storytelling as a means to work through grief, hurt, misunderstanding, and loss—whether from interpersonal conflicts or from war. Against her father’s wishes, a young woman moves in with her nearly-unknown grandfather, struggling to understand the rifts in her family and how they have shaped her own identity. She reads a book sent to her by her father, which turns out to be his story of growing up in the years following World War II. The book was intercepted and emended by her grandfather, who inserts his own commentary throughout, complicating her father’s hopes of reconciliation. The novel moves between two main narratives, one set primarily in 1951 and the other in the days and weeks immediately prior to September 11, 2001.

Like the Tribute in Light that grew phoenix-like from the ashes of the broken hearts of the artists who created it, Return to the Upright Position is a beautiful on-line collaboration amongst fourteen artists in the six months following 9/11. Conceived and edited by Caridad Svich, the play is moving and delicate and instantly brings us back to those moments when American history and sentiment were forever changed. Demoralized, terrorized, afraid, and alone, our country dragged its shocked and weary carcass from the ash, and pulled itself back up again. That is after all the American way, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, continuing to believe in a better, brighter future, in hope and possibility; returning to the upright position.

Following the terrorist attacks on America on 11 September 2001, the New Labour government enacted an unprecedented amount of terrorism legislation in the form of the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005, the Terrorism Act 2006, and finally the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008. Whilst the government viewed these terrorism laws as vital to national security, many of the measures contained in these acts, such as control orders and increased detentions, provoked intense debates over civil liberties. Much research on media-state relations in the context of responses to 9/11 have found evidence to support the elite-driven paradigm, whereby the media have been shown to fail in their adversarial ‘watchdog’ role by acting as ‘faithful servants’ (Wolfsfeld, 1997) to the political agenda. This research tested these assumptions by examining the media framing of the UK government’s legislative responses to terrorism post-9/11. In so doing, it analyses the relationship between the media and the New Labour government in the context of the policymaking process. To date, longitudinal studies that map the UK media-state nexus within the context of terrorism policymaking are lacking. This thesis therefore, addresses the lacunae in the scholarship. In terms of its theoretical framework, this thesis tests three competing models of media performance (elite-driven, oppositional and independent) on British press reporting of the parliamentary debates (Robinson et al., 2010). Methodologically, it takes an inductive approach to analysing the framing of the debates, and draws on material gleaned from interviews with four former home secretaries. The findings reveal that of the three meta-frames (national security, civil liberties and party politics), the politics frame dominated across all four case studies. Although government sources dominated the debates, the evidence suggests that they had limited influence over the news agenda, which runs contra to the elite-driven (redefined here as government-driven) hypothesis. Instead, at an aggregate level, the evidence lends greater support for the independent model. There is also evidence that some sections of the press did subject the legislation to more robust scrutiny, and thus, to some degree, fulfilled their role as political watchdogs, which supports the oppositional thesis.

This report is a preliminary exploration of the issues concerning traditional media and weblogs at two points in time. It examines the difference between the American mainstream media’s utilisation of weblogs during the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, and the utilisation of weblogs in the hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005. The mainstream media’s response to the weblog form during the attacks in September 2001 and the hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005 are examined, together with an exploration of the traditional coverage. It reveals how weblogs have become a more significant part of disaster coverage by mainstream media in the United States. These processes and the implications of these changes are explored for an understanding of how the weblog is altering our understanding of the construction and dissemination of news for the traditional media institution in the United States.

This study investigates a multilingual, multi-genre data set of 13 post-9/11 popular culture videos, produced by performative artists from across global society, which use digital media aesthetics to defy hegemonic narratives relating to Islam and the War on Terror. The languages represented across the 13 texts are English, French, Spanish and Arabic; and the popular culture genres are hip-hop, comedy, punk and parkour. The texts are grouped thematically for analytical purposes into the following categories: 9/11, War on Terror, Clash of Civilisations, and Palestine. Using the sociological manifestation of narrative theory (Baker 2006, Somers 1994) as the conceptual framework, I firstly conduct a narrative analysis of the texts focusing on themes of temporality; character/identity; and multivalence, i.e. the co-existence of seemingly contradictory narratives within a single text (Stroud 2002). I argue that a combination of aesthetics and multivalence is deployed in all the videos, despite their creative and linguistic diversity, which functions to arrest viewers out of uncritical immersion in their normative (hegemonic) narrative environment, and open a space in the affective present for new meanings and values to enter. This technique or affective practice, which I term ‘aesthetic shock’, addresses a widespread critique of socio-narrative theory; namely, the failure to account for how social agents might subscribe to new narratives that contradict their existing worldview. Secondly, the socio-narrative framework is supplemented with recent scholarship on affect (Berlant 2011, Butler 2004) and Deleuzian philosophy (1987). This permits a deeper understanding of the texts as indicative of an epistemological groundswell that is symptomatic of our unfolding moment in history, whereby contradiction and aesthetics emerge as key narrative tools for resistance to the post-9/11 hegemonic order. The two models are connected from a translation studies vantage point by the notion of ‘renarration’ (Baker 2008), offering a unique angle on the flows, patterns of exchange, and evolving identity constructs in the digital media context. Following detailed exploration of the texts and their production contexts, consistent features are drawn out in an attempt to identify emerging patterns between them. These findings include the affective practice of what I term ‘conscious individualism’, the creation of intimate publics (Berlant 2011), and a united, pluralised front against the neoliberal economic agenda for which prominent public narratives such as Samuel Huntington’s reductive ‘Clash of Civilisations’ thesis (1996) act as a smokescreen. Ultimately, it is argued that the texts should be seen as deterritorialising sites of aesthetic activism; a means for the non-elites masses across global society to creatively capitalise on the affordances of the digital era, to assert themselves against oppressive cultural narratives and affirm new modes of thinking and being the world. Expressions of political resistance such as the 13 texts analysed in this study are becoming more visible and more vital across different linguacultures as the rationalist nation-state paradigm loses currency, evoking the possibility of futures other than that of capitalist progress. I contend that we must pay close attention to such narratives –both their message and their medium – if we are to achieve a more constructive and nuanced appreciation of the chaotic and contradictory world in which we live.

The attacks of 11 September 2001 have had a profound impact for many, altering lives, perceptions, politics and policies. The last decade saw the construction of numerous memorials commemorating the events across the United States. Most prominent is the National 9/11 Memorial in New York City at Ground Zero. Highly contested in its planning and building stages, the memorial site was designed to be a national symbol of mourning, remembrance and resiliency, and has since become one of the city's most popular tourist attractions. This thesis casts the matter of memorialising 9/11 as a performance of remembering. It utilises an analytical frame that draws from theoretical resources of collective memory and performance studies to examine how and by whom public remembrances of the event are framed, performed and maintained. Theories of social remembering render it an active process. A performance lens used analytically allows for a recognition of commemorative practices not as a mode of representation, but rather as a doing, (en)acting and interacting in the moment. By understanding public remembrance as performance, this thesis explores the implications of thinking about public memory in those terms. Through ethnographic methods the research unpacks the doing of public memory in three scenarios, each with their own setting and cast of characters, and interprets how, if and when individuals subscribe to the public and/or official memory of the events being memorialised. The first is set at the 9/11 memorial. Although the performances at the memorial site occur in an institutionalised, scripted and choreographed environment, the bodily (en)acting of and at the site can shift complex boundaries and commemorative narratives. The second provides the example of commemorative walking/ running events as performed remembering. These public processions are ritual-like (re)enactments that solidify and reaffirm the politicised national commemorative master narrative of 9/11. Lastly, the annual ritual of commemoration on the anniversary of 9/11 highlights and intensifies the separation of official and vernacular public memory and shows how in both settings organisers and actors utilise embodied performance strategies to gain or regain visibility in the public sphere.