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Cosmopolitan Culture Talk After 9/11, Chris Reid

WWU Graduate School Collection

This thesis attempts to prove that 9/11 enshrined a troublesome critical ideology in America’s most vaunted book reviews and magazines. The ideology sometimes presented itself brazenly. In these cases, I follow historian Mahmood Mamdani in describing it as “Culture Talk” — a discourse that reduces history and politics (in this case, the history of Cold War U.S. involvement in the Middle East) to talk of culture or religion. At other times, however, this ideology wore the mask of “cosmopolitanism” — a loose jumble of ideas centered on the rejection of anything “tribal,” “premodern,” or “sectarian.” In reality, it is very …