Blowback: The Rewriting of American Imperialism After the Cold War

Blowback: The Rewriting of American Imperialism After the Cold War seeks to understand how the forces that gathered in the last decades of the twentieth century as the cold war came to an end---in particular, globalization, the diffusion of neoliberal rhetoric into everyday life, and triumphalist accounts of the end of the cold war---have shaped the historical imagination of contemporary American fiction. I examine fiction that looks back at U.S. proxy wars in Latin America and the Pacific from after the cold war's end. This fiction situates these wars within a long history of U.S. imperialism and maintains that history's relevance to the contemporary moment, resisting the post-cold war era's embrace of amnesia.;The novels this dissertation assembles deploy what I call an archival imagination to revise the narratives that emerged during the post-cold war period. Their archival imaginations are shown in the importance given to archives within the stories as well as in formal techniques, such as including historical documents within the text. Thematically, these texts address the problems and promises of archives---the paradoxes of historical writing and the dangers and responsibilities of backward glances. Joan Didion's The Last Thing He Wanted (1996) takes a critical look at historical archives and their potential for documenting injustice in the context of the Iran-Contra affair. Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) challenges traditional histories of imperialism and unfolds a theory of belonging that works against empire's legacies of domination. Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters (1990) analyzes the slow violence (to borrow a term from Rob Nixon) wrought by imperialism in the Philippines and its effects on memory and history writing. Maxine Hong Kingston's The Fifth Book of Peace (2004) archives stories of loss from the Vietnam War to the war in Afghanistan to develop a theory of a positive peace. Beginning with stories of war and ending with Kingston's story of peace, Blowback encourages a renewed interest in the concept of peace.