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Document Type

Article

Abstract

Drawing upon "Mission Accomplished," a commemorative commercial, and Lupe Fiasco’s song and music video "Words I Never Said," this article examines the degree to which these particular texts serve as narratives that speak to the "metalanguage" of race and racialized enactments, especially as these relate to U.S. racial/ethnic/national identity, in (post) 9/11 cultural productions. While each of these texts toys with race, providing a context in which to interrogate (post) 9/11 sensibilities, their engagements of race and racial politics are varied. Read collectively, they illuminate the ways race, its politics, and racial representations in a (post) 9/11 moment are interpolated in cultural productions, strategically though not uniformly, to not only engage and perpetuate, but also reify and sometimes resist fixations on the larger anxieties governing U.S. racial, ethnic, and national identity in an increasingly globalized world. Through an examination of these particular cultural productions, this article calls attention to, and indeed explicates, the conspicuous shifts in race, particularly the politics and "metalanguage" of race, in light of and in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Not only does this moment emblematize an apparent evolution in the constructions and topographies of race, but it is also embroiled with matters of American and U.S. national identity—and indeed "security," broadly conceived—in an increasingly diverse, globalized, and racialized world. What these texts reveal, ultimately, are the hegemonic and systematic ways waging a "war on terror" has functioned, in methodical and metaphoric terms, as a domestic and international warfare against a particular type of racialization—or, more precisely, against ethnic, global, racial, and ethno-religious others.

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