Security and Terror

When in 1492 Christopher Columbus set out for Asia but instead happened upon the Bahamas, Cuba, and Hispaniola, his error inaugurated a specifically colonial modernity. This is,&#160;<I>Security and Terror</I>&#160;contends, the colonial modernity within which we still live. And its enduring features are especially vivid in the current American century, a moment marked by a permanent War on Terror and pervasive capitalist dispossession.&#160;Resisting the assumption that September 11, 2001, constituted a historical rupture, Eli Jelly-Schapiro traces the political and philosophic genealogies of security and terror&mdash;from the settler-colonization of the New World to the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond.&#160;A history of the present crisis,&#160;<I>Security and Terror</I>&#160;also examines how that history has been registered and reckoned with in significant works of contemporary fiction and theory&mdash;in novels by&#160;Teju Cole, Mohsin Hamid, Junot D&iacute;az, and Roberto Bola&ntilde;o,&#160;and in the critical interventions of Jean Baudrillard, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and others. In this richly interdisciplinary inquiry, Jelly-Schapiro reveals how the erasure of colonial pasts enables the perpetual reproduction of colonial culture.