Refiguring Difference: Imaginative Geographies and “Connective Dissonance” in Three Novels of the Iraq War

Abstract

This article analyzes three contemporary novels that engage with the most recent Iraq war: Point Omega by Don DeLillo (2010), Gods without Men by Hari Kunzru (2011), and The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers (2012). It argues that the novels produce a kind of “connective dissonance” that works to redress what Judith Butler has described as a dehumanizing “derealization of loss” in the context of Western media representations of the war on terror.

Keywords::

• Iraq war
• Hari Kunzru
• Don DeLillo
• Kevin Powers
• imaginative geographies

Acknowledgments

This article emerged from a conference paper given at the “Iraq War Culture” conference organized by Dr. Joseph Brooker at the Centre for Contemporary Literature, Birkbeck, University of London (1 March 2013).

Notes

Notes

¹ Drawing on an essay by Robert Stam, Gregory suggests in Geographical Imaginations that “[t]he media constructed […] ‘a fictive We’—interpellated into an imaginary community—whose vantage point was carefully established to both privilege and protect the (American) viewer through the fabrication of (‘Allied’) innocence and the demonization of the (Iraqi) enemy” (204).

² For an example of one such review, see Burnside. Although possibly a Guardian editorial slip, Burnside's otherwise perspicacious article contains the sentence: “Like his narrator, Kevin Powers was a soldier in Iraq for two years, serving in Mosul and Tal Afar.”

³ For “shock and awe” campaign and attack on Fallujah, see “Iraq Profile: Timeline”; for “Highway of Death,” see Gregory, Colonial Present (165–67).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel O'Gorman

Daniel O'Gorman recently completed a PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, on difference in global Anglophone fiction after 9/11. He has taught contemporary literature at Oxford Brookes University and has published articles and book chapters on Dave Eggers, Judith Butler, and Salman Rushdie.