The Security Imaginary
This application is for twelve months’ full-time research leave to enable the completion of a monograph titled The Security Imaginary and a research visit to the Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience at Durham University (UK). The Security Imaginary argues for a new understanding of literature’s cultural and political significance in the age of security. It explains how and why contemporary U.S. fiction has responded to the expansion of American national security culture in the twenty-first century, exposing the historical, ideological, and formal connections between fiction, feelings and experiences of security and insecurity, and the national security state. It shows that contemporary fiction has re-imagined what it means to be vulnerable and secure at a time when we inhabit an ever-broadening landscape of security. Encompassing works from new and established writers, the fiction examined here maps how security concerns and practices saturate the political and the social, and shape how we imagine global and data networks, mobility, risks, uncertain futures, and new modes of security citizenship. Drawing connections from the security landscape to the formal and affective contours of contemporary fiction, the monograph explores the political force of literary engagements with security. The security state is no longer simply a source of protection, it contends, but a system that exacerbates the insecurity of vulnerable populations.
Final report
The aim of this project has been to explain how and why contemporary U.S. fiction has responded to the expansion of American national security culture in the twenty-first century, and to expose thereby the historical, ideological, and formal connections between fiction, feelings and experiences of security and insecurity, and the national security state. Drawing on examples ranging from popular entertainment to avant-garde literature, its main contribution to contemporary scholarship is showing that contemporary fiction has re-imagined what it means to be vulnerable and secure at a time when we inhabit an ever-broadening landscape of security. In doing so, it reveals the central, formative role of security in the development of contemporary fiction, and shows how this fiction registers developments in the history of security, including the post-Cold War growth of the security state, the self-empowerment of individuals to take responsibility for their own security and that of others, the expansion of the security framework to include economic, environmental and humanitarian issues, among others, and, as a result, the emergence of an increasingly insecure society. Throughout, it draws on theoretical insights from security studies, risk theory, and biopolitics that explain security as a form of governance that seeks to manage contingencies and to fabricate the social order through the distribution and management of uneven life opportunities among the population.
The key findings of this project are the following:
• It understands security as a social form, rather than a policy issue, which expresses itself through material practices, affects, and the fabric of human and nonhuman existence. Security seeks to model and order worlds for individuals, communities, and nationalities, mediating thereby what is possible and valued, and thus protected, within a given space.
• It argues that the contemporary landscape of security and insecurity is made visible and accessible primarily through cultural work and media that invoke, represent, and model threats to life and ways of managing disorder, ranging from the police and military to individual efforts. Contemporary U.S. fiction provides mediated access to the processes whereby a logic of security animates the political and social landscape and transforms these domains by making questions of security central to politics and citizenship.
• It shows that contemporary U.S. fiction should be understood as a site for the struggle over the value of security. This fiction often coheres around the desire for security—to feel secure—understanding security as a condition of citizenship and a prerequisite for freedom and social legitimacy. Yet the security state is cast as worsening the insecurity of vulnerable populations, whether through foreign wars, border control, or the policing of urban spaces. This fiction lends itself to articulating critiques of how security sorts between protected and unprotected individuals and communities.
The project’s main output is a research monograph entitled The Security Form: Contemporary U.S. Literature and the Problem of Insecurity. Parts of the research monograph have appeared earlier in very different forms in peer-reviewed journals and essay collections, and the completed monograph is intended for open-access publication with an international publisher. The initial drafts and chapter outline of the monograph have been revised in light of the key findings of the project, with the five chapters of the monograph foregrounding what I have identified as a struggle over the value of security in contemporary U.S. fiction. Chapters One and Two, respectively, turn to popular fiction that identifies with the goals, if not the institutions, of the security state, and to autofiction that shows how the logic of security animates narratives of everyday trauma and resilience. Chapter Three turns to African American and migrant writing detailing the violence done by the security state, while Chapter Four examines experimental writing invested in the abolition of this state. In conclusion, the final chapter engages with recent reactionary, illiberal work that shows how fantasies of civil war and ethnic cleansing are driven by a desire for a state of permanent security. The chapter organization is intended to appeal to scholars working in the intersections of contemporary culture and politics.
The benefits of the project for the study of contemporary US fiction are threefold:
• The study opens up a new perspective on contemporary U.S. fiction by showing how security and reflections on security are central to this literature;
• It introduces into contemporary literary studies novel theorizations from security studies and risk theory, showing thereby how these theories can productively be brought to bear on contemporary fiction;
• It casts fresh light on some key claims regarding contemporary fiction concerning its relation to economic neoliberalism, and the waning of the state as a significant factor in our understanding of literary culture by uncovering within contemporary fiction a concern with the politics of security and the security state.
The project has benefitted greatly from an extended writing period abroad, and the argument and chapter revisions have been refined through ongoing conversations with research communities at the University of Sussex and Durham University. The invited keynote address at the annual conference of the Irish American Studies Association also provided an invaluable opportunity to test the argument of the project.
The key findings of this project are the following:
• It understands security as a social form, rather than a policy issue, which expresses itself through material practices, affects, and the fabric of human and nonhuman existence. Security seeks to model and order worlds for individuals, communities, and nationalities, mediating thereby what is possible and valued, and thus protected, within a given space.
• It argues that the contemporary landscape of security and insecurity is made visible and accessible primarily through cultural work and media that invoke, represent, and model threats to life and ways of managing disorder, ranging from the police and military to individual efforts. Contemporary U.S. fiction provides mediated access to the processes whereby a logic of security animates the political and social landscape and transforms these domains by making questions of security central to politics and citizenship.
• It shows that contemporary U.S. fiction should be understood as a site for the struggle over the value of security. This fiction often coheres around the desire for security—to feel secure—understanding security as a condition of citizenship and a prerequisite for freedom and social legitimacy. Yet the security state is cast as worsening the insecurity of vulnerable populations, whether through foreign wars, border control, or the policing of urban spaces. This fiction lends itself to articulating critiques of how security sorts between protected and unprotected individuals and communities.
The project’s main output is a research monograph entitled The Security Form: Contemporary U.S. Literature and the Problem of Insecurity. Parts of the research monograph have appeared earlier in very different forms in peer-reviewed journals and essay collections, and the completed monograph is intended for open-access publication with an international publisher. The initial drafts and chapter outline of the monograph have been revised in light of the key findings of the project, with the five chapters of the monograph foregrounding what I have identified as a struggle over the value of security in contemporary U.S. fiction. Chapters One and Two, respectively, turn to popular fiction that identifies with the goals, if not the institutions, of the security state, and to autofiction that shows how the logic of security animates narratives of everyday trauma and resilience. Chapter Three turns to African American and migrant writing detailing the violence done by the security state, while Chapter Four examines experimental writing invested in the abolition of this state. In conclusion, the final chapter engages with recent reactionary, illiberal work that shows how fantasies of civil war and ethnic cleansing are driven by a desire for a state of permanent security. The chapter organization is intended to appeal to scholars working in the intersections of contemporary culture and politics.
The benefits of the project for the study of contemporary US fiction are threefold:
• The study opens up a new perspective on contemporary U.S. fiction by showing how security and reflections on security are central to this literature;
• It introduces into contemporary literary studies novel theorizations from security studies and risk theory, showing thereby how these theories can productively be brought to bear on contemporary fiction;
• It casts fresh light on some key claims regarding contemporary fiction concerning its relation to economic neoliberalism, and the waning of the state as a significant factor in our understanding of literary culture by uncovering within contemporary fiction a concern with the politics of security and the security state.
The project has benefitted greatly from an extended writing period abroad, and the argument and chapter revisions have been refined through ongoing conversations with research communities at the University of Sussex and Durham University. The invited keynote address at the annual conference of the Irish American Studies Association also provided an invaluable opportunity to test the argument of the project.