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Floods, fortresses and cabin fever: worlding “Domeland” security in Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun and The Circle
This article offers a contrapuntal reading of Dave Eggers’s journalistic account Zeitoun and his novel The Circle. It considers how and why both are preoccupied with the kinds of (in)security discourses, stretching from Hurricane Katrina through the implosion of Syria and into imagined futures, that have shaped and continue to shape our cultural and geopolitical imaginaries. The article argues that Zeitoun and The Circle develop the transnational commitments of Eggers’s earlier work in particular ways. In so doing, both call upon their readers to challenge the reductive, invariably taxonomical rhetoric associated with the kinds of security questions that proliferate in the aftermath of events such as 9/11 and Katrina. By exploring what Rob Nixon calls a “transnational ethics of place” in these two texts, Eggers interrogates paradigms such as “development,” as well as affiliated ideas of US exceptionalism. In their formally and conceptually distinctive ways, I argue that both Zeitoun and The Circle ask readers to imagine the possibilities of “worlding” these discourses in more generative terms. By recalibrating some of the defining security questions of our time, Eggers invites us to conceptualize and engage with them more fully.
History
Publication status
- Published
File Version
- Accepted version
Journal
American Literary HistoryISSN
0896-7148Publisher
Oxford University PressExternal DOI
Issue
4Volume
28Page range
721-739Department affiliated with
- English Publications
Full text available
- Yes
Peer reviewed?
- Yes
Legacy Posted Date
2016-09-07First Open Access (FOA) Date
2018-09-15First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date
2016-09-06Usage metrics
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