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

This paper examines Omar El Akkad’s novel American War to highlight climate and war refugees as a “ghosted community” strategically placed within what Rob Nixon terms a “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-state-centred discourses of patriotism are challenged by the making and unmaking of borders in the novel, attention is paid to the attempt to monitor 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 political sovereignty relies on borders created on exemption. The multiplicity of narratives coalescing in the novel around Sara T. Chestnut helps interrogate the sovereignty that the nation-state claims over historical interpretation, while readers are invited into new spaces of ethical compromise to detect the (mis)use of alterity in the service of patriotically vested ideologies.