The most interesting journalistic sample embedded in the novel comes from The New Yorker. This American magazine of essays, fiction , criticism, satire and cartoons, whose audience is preponderantly made up of young and adult college-educated Democrats, according to a 2012 survey by the Pew Research Center, is known for a few controversial Muslim-related issues, one of them being the cover ‘New Yorkistan’ (December 2001). Another one depicts the presidential candidate Barack Obama in a turban, and his wife, Michele, in camouflage and wearing a weapon, with a portrait of Osama bin Laden hung on the wall in the Oval Office and the American flag burning in the fireplace. Not intended as an attack to the Obamas, but as a satire of the racist commentaries targeted at the couple, the cartoon was nevertheless considered by Barack Obama an insult to Muslim Americans. It is also worth mentioning that the famous cartoonist Art Spiegelman worked for The New Yorker and published there the blackened image of the Twin Towers which was to become the cover of his 9/11 comic book In the Shadow of No Towers (2004). Perhaps these are among the reasons why Amy Waldman chose to ‘cite’ an entire article, instead of settling for headlines, short quotations and abstracts, as in the other cases. The editor asserts Mohammad Khan’s rights to proceed with his memorial , but immediately counterbalances this statement by implying that he should not. Further on, he sees as unfair the fact that Khan is judged ‘by his fellow Muslims—not just those who brought down the towers but the significant number who believe that America brought the attack on itself or that it was an inside job of the American government’ (159). He also debunks the misconceptions about the Muslim faith which circulate in the public sphere. But he nonetheless cautions Khan against fuelling stereotypes by his refusal to explain the intentions of his design. The equivocation and ambivalence of the article, ‘the rhetorical switchbacks [which] couldn’t camouflage the demand that he address the suspicions he provoked’ (160) cause, once again, more harm than the hysterical rhetoric of the tabloids, as it makes liberals uncomfortable with Khan’s design and also triggers an endless trail of newspaper articles full of erroneous, unverified information:Mo read that he was Pakistani , Saudi and Qatari; that he was not an American citizen; that he had donated to organisations backing terrorism , that he had dated half the female architects in New York ; that, as a Muslim , he didn’t date at all; that his father ran a shady Islamic charity; that his brother – how badly Mo, as an only child, had wanted a brother!—had started a radical Muslim students’ association at his university. He was called, besides decadent, abstinent, deviant, violent, insolent, abhorrent, aberrant and typical. (161)
Such examples could be provided ad infinitum, the novel being particularly rewarding in providing instances in which the media influence public opinion in this age of manipulation, but they would only lead to the same conclusion. An example of social fresco through its renditions of the many American social/cultural/racial worlds, political through its implications for intercultural communication in America, traumatic and cathartic at the same time, an introduction to American journalism through its frequent reference to the media and, last but not least, so American that it might appear as having regional, limited addressability, The Submission is, perhaps, one of the best examples to date of the way in which fact and fiction tend to mingle in the framework of the neorealist representation of an America and Americans who have been confronted by tragedy.
The Big (Br)Other: Anti-Americanism in British Contemporary Literature
The two pieces of American 9/11 fiction featured in the previous section, and the transatlantic literary representations of 9/11 further discussed constitute, to the same extent, fictional images of the shattered self of Western civilisation. Nonetheless, the former are subjective in their representation, as the ‘spectant’ overlaps the ‘spected’, whereas the latter are inscribed in a long European tradition of disdain for everything America has ever stood for. This anti-Americanism is an instantiation of what imagologists and sociologists term phobia.
Often described as an acceptable prejudice, particularly embraced by the European elite since the end of the eighteenth century, anti-Americanism manifests itself at all levels of European intellectual life: from philosophical thinking to politics , media and arts (including literature). Symptomatically, almost every British literary production under the lens here displays, to a greater or lesser extent, instances of an anti-American attitude in the wake of 9/11, when, according to several sociologists, political thinkers, historians and journalists , negative sentiments towards America have intensified in light of the already known outcome on the international scale (the ‘war on terror’, and especially its Iraqi component). However, one should not neglect a series of other aspects that lay the foundation for what is called anti-Americanism , and which pertain more to what America is than what America does. In the eyes of the world (but reference here is made especially to Europe , on the one hand, and to the Muslim-Arab civilisation on the other), America represents the hyperpuissance (a term coined at the end of the twentieth century by the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hubert Védrine, in order to stress the idea that ‘superpower’ is too weak a word to accurately denote the American military, strategic, economic, political, technological and, last but definitely not least, cultural hegemony ).6 In fact, the blending of economic, technological and cultural influences is what has made America the huge super- (or hyper-) power that is today precisely through consent, that is to say, through the tacit acceptance and embracing of ‘the American way’ at all levels and at the heart of practically all older civilisations.
The study carries on, in the spirit of New Historicism/cultural materialism, mingling aspects from reality and fiction and eliding their differences, through a brief recourse to sociological and historical texts that tackle the concept of anti-Americanism , from its rise, after the Declaration of Independence (1776), up to the historical context of the twenty-first century. The historicist approach to European anti-Americanism illustrates a long-standing attitudinal pattern (with inherent differences through the centuries), which comes to support the thesis that the Europeans (the British, in this particular case) have never ceased to regard the Americans as their Others, and that, consequently, the mirroring stances at the fictional level may be accounted for as creditable representations of the outer reality.
As a branch of literary theory that dwells exclusively on the matter of anti-Americanism has not been established (yet), as is the case with virtually every other prejudicial standpoint (viz. racism, chauvinism, sexism and homophobia, for instance), the analysis does not apply any conventional/customary frameworks of analysis but borrows elements from cultural studies and imagology. However, it is worth mentioning that this issue was tackled not long ago by Jesper Gulddal (University of Newcastle, Australia), in a book about comparative literature entitled Anti-Americanism in European Literature. The Danish scholar, who discusses more than 50 German, French and English literary works, starting from Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit and ending with literary works emerging from the fury and indignation following the 2003 Iraqi war, such as Harold Pinter’s poetry volume War (2003) or John le Carré’s novel Absolute Friends (2003), notes that ‘anti-American ideas are woven into the very fabric of the text to such an extent that anti-Americanism, far from being incidental, rises to the status of a literary strategy’, in which direct statements and the imagery, the portrayal of characters , the structure and development of the plot and the treatment of overall themes and motifs are ‘interconnected to such a degree that anti-American attitudes can be said to dictate the composition and form of the literary work from beginning to end’ (2011, 10). Gulddal’s observation, made from a standpoint to which the author of this study does not adhere—the ‘exasperation with the simple-minded prejudices against the American other in which European authors have revelled far too often over the past two centuries’ (idem, not numbered)—legitimates the reading of Banks’s Dead Air and Hare’s Stuff Happens as anti-American in essence (that i
s, beyond the most easily identifiable anti-American utterances of various fictional characters ), and, furthermore, entitles their inclusion into a cultural tradition of Europeans’ positioning themselves as the better partner of the self/Other dichotomy.
European Anti-Americanism Throughout the Centuries
‘America, it’s time you learned how implacably you are hated’, Martin Amis says in reference to the attacks of 9/11 (2008, 3). The British novelist (who is married to an American woman, has a half-American son and ‘feel[s] fractionally American [him]self’ (1986, iii)) only points here to the deeds of the terrorists , and, by extension, to the Muslim Arabs’ hatred against ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’. Notwithstanding, strong textual evidence culled from various European sources from 1773 onwards shifts the focus of the statement towards a long tradition and integrates it in a context of European anti-Americanism that may have reached its peak in the twenty-first century. Of course, one should not consider this anti-American prejudice as absolute, since there are also sufficient instances of ‘Americanophilia’, and even of ‘Americanomania’, especially manifest in the twentieth century, starting with the craze of the 1920s, climaxing after the Second World War , and remaining steady across the whole century, with the rise of Hollywood and the expansion of an entire array of American cultural products and traditions. In the United Kingdom, pro-American attitudes have been thoroughly documented in an article by George Watson (literature professor at Cambridge, NYU), mostly on literary and cultural bases (2000, 119–26). While to dispute the existence of pro-Americanism is not in the least a purpose of the present section, it may nevertheless be argued that such attitudes have been overshadowed down the centuries by a much more accentuated antipathy, whose roots range from a deep sense of superiority to one of inferiority and awareness of European belittlement and decrease in importance at the world level. In other words, Europeans (chief among which the great powers , namely France and the United Kingdom, but also Germany and Italy) were, at first, condescending towards the ‘one Nation under God’, which they regarded as inferior and even degenerate, looking down on it much in the way in which they looked down on any other of their territorial possessions in the world—therefore, one may speak, in this case, of a hegemonic attitude of the coloniser. With the passing of time and America’s progress in all respects, especially with its (more) recent military, economic, financial and cultural domination, the balance was switched: the European superpowers fell under American influence and, consequently, came to regard America as the Other , but, this time, from the standpoint of the colonised. In the eyes of Josef Joffe, editor of Die Zeit and associate researcher at Harvard University, this latter stance may also be explained through the psychoanalytical interpretation of the inner resorts actuated by envy: ‘One need not invoke Dr Sigmund Freud to infer that success breeds envy and resentment. […] Perhaps many Europeans resent unconsciously what they no longer have—the exact qualities that once made them fierce and fearsome players in the international arena’ (2002, 68–9).
A statement by the former American President Barack Obama in an Address on the State of the Union (January 20, 2015) emphasises once more the American global dominance (which, indeed, may cause resentment at the world level, especially from the nations that have lost their hegemony to America ): ‘The question is not whether America leads in the world, but how’. To paraphrase Obama, the question is not whether America is hated by the world, but why. To find an answer to this issue, let us briefly outline the anti-American attitudes across the centuries.
In an extensive article published in 2004 and later included as an entry of the Routledge Encyclopaedia of International Relations, edited by Martin Griffiths in 2007, Brendon O’Connor, Head of the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney and an established scholar in the field of American politics , starts from the definition of anti-Americanism provided in 1988 by Alvin Rubinstein and Donald Smith: ‘any hostile action or expression that becomes part and parcel of an undifferentiated attack on the foreign policy, society, culture and values of the United States’ (1988, qtd. in O’Connor 2004, 77) and divides this reaction/attitude into four phases of development:The first phase extended from the inception of America as a European settlement to the end of World War II . In this period, anti-Americanism was largely culturally-oriented criticism premised on European superiority and American cultural inferiority.
The second phase was that of the Cold War (1945–1989). What was called anti-Americanism in this period was more politically and ideologically-oriented criticism.
The third phase of anti-Americanism started in 1989 with the end of the Cold War. This period saw a greater emphasis on the ill effects of American capitalism and Americanisation, and continues today with the focus on anti-Americanism as a dominant component of anti-globalisation.
The last phase of anti-Americanism started on 11 September 2001 with the arrival of terrorist anti-Americanism as a significant and widely discussed force. (2004, 78)
Another definition is provided by David Ellwood, in a lecture presented at the annual meeting of the Organisation of American Historians, entitled ‘Anti-Americanism: Why Do Europeans Resent Us?’ For Ellwood, anti-Americanism is defined as ‘all the commonest forms of antagonism to the nation, people, civilization and actions in the world of the United States in all its expressions’ (2003). His historical division is limited to three phases, each of them characterised by a different root of the prejudice: ‘representations , images and stereotypes (from the birth of the Republic onwards); the challenges of economic power and the American model of modernization (from the 1910s and ’20s on); the organized projection of U.S. political, strategic and ideological power (from World War II on)’ (ibid.). Perhaps, from a purist perspective, prominence ought to be primarily given here to the first category mentioned, that is, to representations , images and stereotypes ; nonetheless, since literature’s insularity within the cultural context has been long debunked, one cannot separate it from ideology, strategic policies and actions, and even from economy and finances.
A third, and more comprehensive definition of anti-Americanism , which may be easily related to the discussion on imagology and the representation of national character , is provided by Paul Hollander, Harvard Professor Emeritus of Sociology: Anti-Americanism is a predisposition to hostility towards the United States and American society, a relentless critical impulse toward American social, economic, and political institutions, traditions, and values; it entails an aversion to American culture in particular and its influence abroad, often also contempt for the American national character (or what is presumed to be such a character ) and dislike of American people, manners, behaviour, dress, and so on; rejection of American foreign policy and a firm belief in the malignity of American influence and presence anywhere in the world. (1992, 339)
From the three definitions quoted above, one might draw the conclusion that anti-Americanism covers all the elements making up history, as the economic, social, political and cultural aspects are addressed aversely and critically, although the focal point varies over the centuries. Although the economic and political dimension of the Declaration of Independence is most definitely important, the cultural aspect prevails in the first instances of European anti-Americanism , at the end of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century. Andrei Markovits, professor of Comparative Politics and author of a series of books and articles which connect anti-Americanism with anti-Semitism, remarks that ‘well before America had any power […] tropes emerged in its perception that were to become mainstays of European anti-Americanism to this day: venality, vulgarity, mediocrity, inauthenticity’ (2004, 5). Markovits addresses the question of class, claiming that anti-Americanism used to be the perquisite of the elites. His claim is supported by references to various statements and/or works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Stendhal, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, and, in terms of British writers, Charles Dickens, Evelyn Waugh and Frances Trollop
e (11). Gulddal, who openly acknowledges his affiliation with Markovits’s ideas, advances new examples of pure anti-Americanism in the poetry of the great Romantics. His claim is that poetry such as Thomas Moore’s bears all the ‘main motifs of Romantic anti-Americanism , hence also the idea of the United States as a country without history and culture’ (2011, 23–4). However, it is unclear how exactly anti-Americanism was elitist (as opposed to an alleged sympathy for the Americans at the level of the middle and lower classes) if one thinks of the positive reception of writings such as Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans or Charles Dickens’s American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit.
The Edwardian era and the interwar period witnessed a wider acceptance of the ‘American cousin’, largely due to the economic ascension and development of the United States in the decades after the Civil War. After the First World War , ‘the United States played a vital role as a creditor nation, while Great Britain became […] a debtor one. American loans not only allowed Germany to pay war debts and reparations, but also permitted the allies to set right their financial problems’ (Praisler 2000, 80). At the same time, the period witnessed a great immigration movement, both from Europe to America and from the New World to the Old. Thus, European anti-Americanism is no longer marked by that self-referentiality which Gulddal asserts to have been both a cause and an effect of the stereotyping of America in the nineteenth century:Even writers who actually visited the country were steeped in pre-established discursive patterns, and this is the real reason why we come across the same motifs time and again. Anti-Americanism is a strongly autoreferential discourse , which is characterized by—and to some extent dependent on—a certain isolation from American reality . Rather than independent observation, it draws on past accounts. It is this continuous recycling of knowledge that makes anti-Americanism a tradition. (2011, 43, emphasis in the original)
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