The new normal : trauma, biopolitics and visuality after 9/11 / Swatie

incl. bibliographies and index

Acknowledgments -- Introduction: After 9/11 -- Trauma 1 In the Shadow of Traumatisability -- 2 Traumatic Time, Traumatic Poetics -- 3 Trauma, Torture, Text
Biopolitics 4 The Biopolitical Subject of Torture -- 5 Biopolitics at Guantanamo Bay -- 6 Tortured Poetics and Shared Humanity: Poems from Guantanamo and 9/11 poetry -- Visuality 7 Visuality and 9/11 -- 8 'Watching' Ghosts of Abu Ghraib and Standard Operating Procedure -- Conclusion: The New Normal -- Afterword -- Works cited -- Further reading -- Index -- About the author

The New Normal explores the relation between the subject and the state after the events of 9/11 that left the world stunned. It looks at this relation through the lens of trauma for the mind, biopolitics for the body and visuality for the body politic. This interpretive frame helps examine how the 9/11 violence created a moment where the mind, body and body politic could be redefined after 9/11. In an important theoretical intervention into 21st-century American Studies, it asks what the relation between the state and those it expels from its citizenry is. It makes a special mention of sites of incarceration such as Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib as 9/11 phenomena. While referring to sources as diverse as 9/11 poetry, political and presidential speeches, journalistic accounts, atrocity photographs, and theories of trauma, biopolitics and visuality, the book argues for the presence of a new normal