Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Series Editors' Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 History
- 2 Politics
- 3 Mass Media
- 4 Cinema
- 5 Literature
- 6 Photography and Visual Art
- Conclusion
- Appendix A Timeline
- Appendix B Synoptic biographies
- Annotated bibliography of further reading and texts cited
- Index
1 - History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Series Editors' Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 History
- 2 Politics
- 3 Mass Media
- 4 Cinema
- 5 Literature
- 6 Photography and Visual Art
- Conclusion
- Appendix A Timeline
- Appendix B Synoptic biographies
- Annotated bibliography of further reading and texts cited
- Index
Summary
From the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ to ‘New Empire Revisionism’
American citizens looking to the historiography and intellectual history of the early war on terror for evidence that 9/11 was a moment of historical rupture may have been disappointed by what they found. While the post-9/11 period prompted new nuances in existing historiographies and intellectual traditions, some of them surprising, a more obvious trend was the revitalisation of established approaches and traditions that had languished since the end of the Cold War either below the radar of mass public exposure or beyond the bounds of political and intellectual ‘respectability’. The result was an immediate and almost seamless blending of debates about foreign policy and national security into the mainstream of contemporary American culture wars.
One explanation for 9/11 and the war on terror that rapidly became common coinage in the US and the West, often in reduced form as popular cliché and mass media soundbite, suggested that Islam and the West were engaged in a ‘clash of civilisations’. The idea had a variety of sources in the West, including ‘Orientalist’ stereotypes about the exotic ‘otherness’ of Easterners embedded in elite and popular cultures. After 9/11 the concept was most often associated with an essay entitled ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ by Samuel P. Huntington, which was first published in the academic journal Foreign Affairs in 1993, and then expanded to book-length in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1997).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- 9/11 and the War on Terror , pp. 7 - 30Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2008