Transnational Trauma and Politics in Phil Klay’s Post-9/11 War Novel Redeployment

Phil Klay’s short story collection Redeployment is considered a quintessential literary text for the U. S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and won the 2014 National Book Award for fiction. This study argues that it gestures beyond the narrow American war frame to show both the physical and cultural trauma of nonwhite Other in wars during the post- 9/11 era; meanwhile, Klay subverts and deconstructs the myth of trauma hero, truly representing soldiers’ anxiety and trauma about their relationships with enemies, wars, and national power. In Klay’s view, the disillusionment of the American myth of “city upon a hill” projects intense political crises and social contradictions, including the civilian-military divide, racial conflicts, and the loss of national faith and security. And America’s way of democracy reconstruction in the Middle East is colored by ethnocentrism and cultural imperialism, thus further questioning the rationality and justice of the U. S. global counter-terrorism strategies.