Veteran Activism and the Global War on Terror: Post-9/11 Narratives of Dissent and American War Literature

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Veteran Activism and the Global War on Terror is the first study of the literature of dissent that has emerged from the veterans of the global War on Terror. Spencer Ackerman's Reign of Terror stated that The most impactful activism against the War on Terror came from within the Security State itself . . . low ranking soldiers and intelligence contractors whose exposure to the war prompted them to expose it to the world. Veteran Activism examines this subculture of veterans whose stories have dramatically shifted the conversation about literature and activism. Author M. C. Armstrong introduces and explores Americas post-9/11 soldier-writers, a community that challenges pivotal contemporary assumptions about allegiance, democracy, geography, solidarity, and national identity. Chapters are organized around a triad of core conceptsparrhesia, cosmopolitanism, and dissensusand discuss authors including Elliot Ackerman, Kristin Beck, Joseph Hickman, Phil Klay, Kevin Powers, and Edward Snowden. Armstrong argues that this scene represents a literary movement and perhaps the most significant literary community since the Beat Generation, and Camp No reads the work of these writers as the loci of a dissenting overhaul of the official narratives and rhetorical maps that chart the United States Global War on Terror.

Author Bio

M. C. Armstrong is the author of The Mysteries of Haditha (2020), one of the Best Books of 2020 (The Brooklyn Rail). Armstrong, who grew up in Winchester, Virginia, embedded with Joint Special Operations Forces in Al Anbar Province, Iraq, in 2008, and has published extensively on the Iraq War through The Winchester Star. He is the winner of a Pushcart Prize., and his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Esquire, The Missouri Review, The Gettysburg Review, and other journals and anthologies. He is the holder of both a PhD and MFA and teaches English at the North Carolina A&T State University, USA. You can follow him on Twitter @mcarmystrong.