Journal of Transnational American Studies

This paper traces possible responses to the mutations in US state power after 9/11 by analyzing the worldly and transnational gestures of the post-9/11 American novel. Irom maps how post-9/11 fiction speaks back to the state’s hegemonic imaginaries through an analysis of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. Irom proceeds from the premise that in light of the nation’s "geopolitically imperialist" ambitions, it becomes all the more crucial to delineate oppositional transnational practices that do not repeat the hegemonizing moves of the state that often operate under the semantic guise of the "transnational." While Netherland takes up the challenge of imagining worldliness through its various counternarratives—the transnational history of cricket, the geospatial imaginary of Google Earth, and the protagonists Hans and Chuck—the essay locates its reading between the osmotic spaces wherein the constituent elements of the transnational bear varying relations of resistance, conflict, and consonance with power structures. Irom argues that these disjunctures effect an unsettled and ambivalent series of counternarratives with unstable relations to power structures. In reading the disjunctures overdetermining Netherland’s transnational entities and in locating the novel’s aspirations towards a post-9/11 worldliness between the competing pulls of globe and nation, we come to a fuller comprehension of the ways in which nation-states still exercise a spectral fascination upon the imagination and how novels might more fruitfully gesture towards challenging such tenacious hegemonies.