Call for Submissions for an Edited Collection
In a brief essay published in Parallax shortly after the 11th of September 2001, Homi K. Bhabha refutes the reductionism of the “clash of civilizations” explanation for the attacks in New York and Washington, DC, and the downed plane in a Pennsylvania field offered by too many commentators: “[T]he decision to implement and administer terror, whether it is done in the name of god or the state, is a political decision, not a civilizational or cultural practice.” Even as Bhabha makes this significant distinction, his comments point toward another question, necessarily subsequent to the events themselves: How have the political events of that September day, as well as their aftermath, affected cultural practice?
This edited collection, tentatively entitled “From Solidarity to Schism: 9/11 and After in Fiction and Film from Outside the United States,” seeks to address that question through discussions of novels, short stories, and movies from wide-ranging geographical sites of cultural production. That is, the collection’s focus is on how writers and filmmakers from outside the US represent September the 11th and any of the far-reaching events that came about because of the attacks that day. Do these fictions and films, as cultural practices, inaugurate new narrative or formal devices in their efforts to represent the attacks and/or their fallout? What manner of critique is offered, if any? Have these fictions and films ushered in a new aesthetics of terror and its consequences?
This collection will be an important supplement to the US-centered cultural and critical production addressing 9/11, providing researchers and teachers alike with resources and contexts that will allow them to broaden their own examinations of related works.
Please send all inquiries and abstracts of no more than 500 words (or full drafts of between 4000-6000 words) to the editor, Cara Cilano, at
