The Security Imaginary

This application is for twelve months’ full-time research leave to enable the completion of a monograph titled The Security Imaginary and a research visit to the Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience at Durham University (UK).

The Security Imaginary argues for a new understanding of literature’s cultural and political significance in the age of security.

It explains how and why contemporary U.S. fiction has responded to the expansion of American national security culture in the twenty-first century, exposing the historical, ideological, and formal connections between fiction, feelings and experiences of security and insecurity, and the national security state.

It shows that contemporary fiction has re-imagined what it means to be vulnerable and secure at a time when we inhabit an ever-broadening landscape of security.

Encompassing works from new and established writers, the fiction examined here maps how security concerns and practices saturate the political and the social, and shape how we imagine global and data networks, mobility, risks, uncertain futures, and new modes of security citizenship.

Drawing connections from the security landscape to the formal and affective contours of contemporary fiction, the monograph explores the political force of literary engagements with security.

The security state is no longer simply a source of protection, it contends, but a system that exacerbates the insecurity of vulnerable populations.