Editors’ Introduction: “To Penetrate every Wall and Home”: Insecurity and Global Terror(s)[i]

Abstract

In December 2001, three months after the attacks on the World Trade Centre (WTC) on 11th September, Don DeLillo wrote that the real target of the terrorists was “the high gloss of [US] modernity … technology … foreign policy … It was the power of American culture to penetrate every wall, home, life, and mind” (DeLillo 2001, 34). Let us begin this introduction by focusing on the words “wall[s] and home[s]” used by DeLillo. In light of US hegemony, how should we re-think and revisit notions of home and its (linguistic and physical) boundaries? How can we measure the extent of a movement that reaches “every wall, home, life, and mind”?