Dissent from the Homeland: Essays after September 11 (Paperback)

Whether illuminating the narratives that have been used to legitimate the war on terror, reflecting on the power of American consumer culture to transform the attack sites into patriotic tourist attractions, or insisting that to be a Christian is to be a pacifist, these essays refuse easy answers. They consider why the Middle East harbors a deep-seated hatred for the United States. They argue that the U.S. drive to win the cold war made the nation more like its enemies, leading the government to support ruthless anti-Communist tyrants such as Mobutu, Suharto, and Pinochet. They urge Americans away from the pitfall of national self-righteousness toward an active peaceableness—an alert, informed, practiced state of being—deeply contrary to both passivity and war. Above all, the essays assembled in Dissent from the Homeland are a powerful entreaty for thought, analysis, and understanding. Originally published as a special issue of the journal South Atlantic Quarterly, Dissent from the Homeland has been expanded to include new essays as well as a new introduction and postscript.

from Dissent from the Homeland:

"An economy based on waste is inherently and hopelessly violent, and war is its inevitable by-product. We need a peaceable economy."—Wendell Berry, conservationist, farmer, essayist, novelist, and poet

"’God Bless America’ is not a hymn any Christian can or should sing. At least it is not a hymn any Christian can or should sing unless it is understood that God’s blessing incurs God’s judgement."—Stanley Hauerwas

"The hardest thing in the world is to know how to act so as to make the difference that can be made; to know how and why that differs from the act that only releases or expresses the basic impotence of resentment."—Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury

“[I]t is instructive to step away for a moment and to deny that it is natural and self-explanatory for masses of people to be devastated by catastrophe in which they have lost no one they know, in a place with which they have no particular connections. Is nationality really such a natural function of human or even social being? . . . [I]s pity or sympathy really so innate a feature of the human constitution?”—Fredric Jameson

"America is threatened by the most powerful enemy in its history, the administration of George W. Bush."—Frank Lentricchia

Contributors. Srinivas Aravamudan, Michael J. Baxter, Jean Baudrillard, Robert N. Bellah, Daniel Berrigan, Wendell Berry, Vincent J. Cornell, David James Duncan, Stanley Hauerwas, Fredric Jameson, Frank Lentricchia, Catherine Lutz, Jody McAuliffe, John Milbank, Peter Ochs, Donald E. Pease, Anne R. Slifkin, Rowan Williams, Susan Willis, Slavoj Zizek