Borders, Refugees, and Spaces of Amnesia: Omar El Akkad's American War

Abstract

This paper examines American War, the first novel by the US-based Canadian writer Omar El Akkad, 7 to highlight climate and war refugees as a “ghosted community,” one strategically placed within a national “space of amnesia,” and to later configure a mirror of otherness able to return to the political community a predication of its homogeneity. Then, as nation-statecentred discourses of patriotism are challenged by the ambivalence implemented by the making and unmaking of borders in the novel, attention is paid to the vigilance on the spaces of adjacency. The confinement of refugees in camps and the existence of detention centres to annihilate contemporary threats embodied in the terrorist combatant illustrate how the political sovereignty relies on borders created on exemption. The multiplicity of narratives around the novel protagonist, Sara T. Chestnut (Sarat) helps interrogate the sovereignty that the nation-state claims over historical interpretation, while readers are challenged into spaces of ethical compromise to detect the (mis)use of alterity in the service of patriotically vested ideologies.