American government Quote by The Baffler

““In an extraordinary 2012 essay in Guernica, Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie remembers the moment she noticed that no American novelists of the post–Cold War era, “who started writing after the 1980s when Islam replaced Communism as the terrifying Other,” had included the imperial experience in their Great American novels. “But that would change, I told myself,” she writes. “The nation that had intervened militarily with more nations than any other in the latter half of the twentieth century but had itself come under attack infrequently would now see its stories bound up with the stories of other places.” Instead, she observes, “the American novel continued to look inward even as the American government looked increasingly outward. September 11 did nothing to change that. So in an America where fiction writers are so caught up in the Idea of America in a way that perhaps has no parallel with any other national fiction . . . why is it that the fiction writers of my generation are so little concerned with the history of their own nation once that history exits the fifty states?””

— The Baffler