For many years opposition to US foreign policy has frequently been interpreted by cultural commentators and the wider media as “anti-Americanism.” Such “anti-Americanism” has been situated as dangerous, irrational and violent, and this apparent link has been reinforced continuously since 9/11. However, by making a reading of two Iraqi weblogs which have gained significant recognition in Iraq and the West, this article challenges such a simplified definition of alternative perspectives on foreign policy as “anti-Americanism.” This article focusses on the blog entries of two Iraqis, Salam Pax and “Riverbend,” who lived in Baghdad throughout the Iraq War (2003–9) and during the subsequent years of civil unrest. It explores how their online responses to the US action in Iraq illustrate the complexity of perceived “anti-Americanism.” The bloggers do not situate themselves as “anti-American.” Instead they draw a clear distinction between opposition to US foreign policy and hostility towards America and its people, thus problematizing previous definitions of “anti-Americanism.” However, this article also recognizes that whilst these texts highlight this distinction, the negative impact of US foreign policy on Iraq since the occupation, coupled with the militarized image that America projects of itself, has caused the distinction between a disapproval of US foreign policy and an objection to US culture in broader terms to become increasingly blurred. Indeed, these narratives indicate that rather than situating 9/11 as the first move in a campaign of “anti-Americanism,” it could be argued that it is the American government's reaction to the attacks, and the impact of the subsequent occupation of Iraq, which acted as a catalyst for the growth of opposition to US foreign policy, and to some extent a rejection of US culture, in Iraq.

This article argues that far from marking a break in recent literary development, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 made less of an impact on American fiction than we often think. Critics have often accused writers after 9/11 of “retreating” into the domestic; in fact, domestic and individual narratives, often set against sweeping historical backgrounds, already dominated American writing in the late 1990s. At first, therefore, novelists handling the events of 9/11 framed them within the personal and the small-scale. In the last two years, however, writers such as Adam Haslett and Jonathan Franzen have begun publishing broader, more ambitious state-of-the-nation novels, explicitly addressing the United States' relationship with the Middle East and the impact of globalization. Yet in these novels, too, the global and the personal are tightly intertwined; again and again, writers are drawn to the domestic themes that have so often dominated American literature.

This paper contends that 9/11 remains subject to a crisis in criticism, resulting from the failure of certain strains within American studies to sufficiently separate their modes of critique from the ideological means of 9/11's manipulation. An overreliance upon themes of trauma, and a failure to observe the means by which these discourses have been compromised by their mobilization in political rhetoric, has led to the development of an interpretative void unable to produce a much-needed counternarrative. Whilst the explicit politicization of 11 September has been widely criticized, far less remarked upon is the extent to which the tropes in which 9/11 is represented have been standardized across popular, political, critical and artistic narratives. Failure to challenge the basic terms of this movement has engendered a compromised interpretative field, in which frames of reference slip too easily between the public and the personal, simultaneously militarizing mourning and sentimentalizing politics. This compromises counterhegemonic narratives, neutering the force of their thrust by presenting them as echoing, and even reinforcing, the discourses of the public–political realm. I will contend that this crisis of representation has arisen, at least in part, from the ubiquity of traumatic narratives, which have been transferred across discursive realms, disguising crucial authorial and critical differences, and seeming to validate the perspective of the state by testifying to an apparent unity of interpretation and response.

Literary criticism has debated the usefulness of the trauma paradigm found in much post-9/11 fiction. Where critiqued, trauma is sometimes understood as a domesticating concept by which the events of 9/11 are incorporated into sentimental, familial dramas and romances with no purchase on the international significance of the terrorist attacks and the US's response to them; or, the concept of trauma is understood critically as the means by which the boundaries of a nation or “homeland” self-perceived as violated and victimized may be shored up, rendered impermeable – if that were possible. A counterversion of trauma argues its potential as an affective means of bridging the divide between a wounded US and global suffering. Understood in this way, the concept of trauma becomes the means by which the significance of 9/11 could be deterritorialized. While these versions of trauma, found in academic theory and literary practice, invoke the spatial – the domestic sphere, the homeland, the global – they tend to focus on the time of trauma rather than on the imbrication of the temporal and the spatial. If, instead, 9/11 trauma could be more productively defined as the puncturing of national fantasies of an inviolable and innocent homeland, fantasies which themselves rest on the (failed) repression of foundational violence in the colonial and settler creation of that homeland, and on subsequent notions of American exceptionalism at home and, in the exercise of foreign policy, abroad, then the traumatic can be spatialized. In other words, understood in relation to fantasy, trauma illuminates the terroritalization and deterritorialization of American history. After working through various examples of post-9/11 fiction to demonstrate parochial renditions of trauma and trauma's unrealized global resonances, this article turns to Cormac McCarthy's 9/11 allegory The Road for the way in which its spaces, places and territories are marked by inextricable traumas of the past and present – and therefore for the way in which it models trauma's relation to national fantasy.

The rise of the ekphrastic poem at the turn of the twenty-first century speaks of a preoccupation with the mediated representations that are increasingly a part of perceived reality. In the wake of “terror,” what we know and how we know it are subjects of fundamental importance. Mixed-media poet Claudia Rankine turns a revealing lens on the ontological implications of how combinations of words and images construct the world, taking in the virtual and material nature of contemporary existence as well as questioning the commercial and political image-texts that constitute reality for most people. I will argue that Rankine's hybrid and complex texts are representative of an increasingly urgent need to attend to the heavily mediated nature of experience and the emotional disconnect this often entails, revealing the need for a reassessment of the responsibilities involved in making representations for public consumption.