Richard Beck presents "Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life" in conversation w/Colette Shade

Richard Beck presents "Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life" in conversation w/Colette Shade

Saturday, October 19th 2024
7:00 pm
Red Emma's
A groundbreaking history of how the decades-long war on terror changed virtually every aspect of American life, from the erosion of citizenship down to the cars we bought and TV we watched—by an acclaimed n+1 writer.

“Richard Beck, like many people alive today, has spent his adult life living in the shadow of 9/11, and Homeland _is a devastating inquiry into the new world that day created.”—Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America_

For twenty years after September 11, the war on terror was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. With all of the military violence occurring overseas even as the threat of sudden mass death permeated life at home, Americans found themselves living in two worlds at the same time. In one of them, soldiers fought overseas so that nothing at home would have to change at all. In the other, life in the United States took on all kinds of unfamiliar shapes, changing people’s sense of themselves, their neighbors, and the strangers they sat next to on airplanes. In Homeland, Richard Beck delivers a gripping exploration of how much the war changed life in the United States and explains why there is no going back.

Though much has been made of the damage that Donald Trump did to the American political system, Beck argues that it was the war on terror that made Trump’s presidency possible, fueling and exacerbating a series of crises that all came to a head with his rise to power. Homeland brilliantly isolates and explores four key issues: the militarism that swept through American politics and culture; the racism and xenophobia that boiled over in much of the country; an economic crisis that, Beck convincingly argues, connects the endurance of the war on terror to at least the end of the Second World War; and a lack of accountability that produced our “impunity culture”—the government-wide inability or refusal to face consequences that has transformed how the U.S. government relates to the people it governs.

To see American life through the lens of _Homeland’_s sweeping argument is to understand the roots of our current condition. In its startling analysis of how the war on terror hollowed out the very idea of citizenship in the United States, Beck gives the most compelling explanation yet offered for the ongoing disintegration of America’s social, political, and cultural fabric.

Richard Beck is an editor at n+1 magazine. He is the author of We Believe the Children and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Colette Shade’s writing has appeared in The New RepublicThe NationInterview MagazineThe Baffler, and Gawker. She writes about the culture, politics, and history of the 90's and the 2000's. Her first book, Y2K, is out in January 2025 from Harper Collins.

RSVP on withfriendsSee all upcoming events

Location and hours

3128 Greenmount Avenue
Baltimore, MD

Tuesday-Saturday 9AM-9PM
Sunday 10AM-4PM

Get in touch

Email: info@redemmas.org

Phone: (410) 601-3072

If you'd like to propose an event, please fill out this form. If you have questions, email us at events@redemmas.org.

Follow us

Twitter

Facebook

Instagram

Youtube

Mastodon

Get our newsletter