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The Beginning of History and Politics: Susan Choi’s American Woman and the Shadow of U.S. Imperialism Penny Vlagopoulos (bio) During his debate with Hillary Clinton in April 2008, Senator Barack Obama was asked to defend his affiliation with founding member of the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) Bill Ayers, who has long established himself as an advocate for education and poverty reform in the Chicago area. While the agenda of the WUO, an offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) that coalesced in 1969 and went underground in 1970, revolved around the fight against U.S. imperialism both abroad and at home, its legacy is steered by its notorious bombing campaigns against government and corporate interests.1 What is striking about this line of inquiry involving Ayers, which followed Obama throughout his campaign as Democratic presidential candidate, is its assumption that the radicalism of this era is not only contagious—passed on during everyday community interactions that are stained with the color of its fervor— but also immutable, a fixed signifier of leftism run amok. In our recent history, the radicals of forty years ago have reemerged as ghostly reminders of this volatile strain of our political history. Lumped into a category of un-American belief systems, they bring an arsenal of disaffection that is dehistoricized and revised to contemporary ends. In 2003, the same year that Susan Choi published American Woman: A Novel, based on a militant organization of the 1970s called the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), sentences were handed out to four former members of the group for a murder committed during a bank robbery in 1975. Six years later, the SLA entered headlines again when one of these four, Sara Jane Olsen, was released from prison. As [End Page 127] Time magazine explained, “In one life, Sara Jane Olsen was a doting, upper-class soccer mom who drove a Plymouth minivan and was a dynamite gourmet cook. In another, she was a terrorist—and a totem of the age of violent radicalism that erupted during the 1970s.” The media rhetoric emphasizes Olsen’s double life, that “her past lurked beneath the veneer of normalcy.”2 At stake are the ethics of her dissembling, her ability to pass as a normal member of society, minivan and all. Olson presents a portentous vision: terrorists masquerading as productive members of society, presaging an unstable domestic future. What is glaringly absent from this resurrection of 1970s radicalism is any sense of a wider continuum—the global nexus of war and violence in which these groups circulated. Rather, the Bush-era political climate absorbed such markers of dissent into a kind of memorial reserve that bolstered transnational hegemony, most obviously in the Middle East. We have found ourselves in what Chalmers Johnson calls “the post-9/11 period of American enthusiasm for imperialism,” in which history appears to be repeating itself with ever-increasing breaches of sovereignty, demanding a renewed attention to the mechanisms by which U.S. imperialism regenerates.3 Choi’s narrative offers a timely interrogation of this revamped affection for empire to probe its hidden machinery in sophisticated ways. American Woman digs at the structural foundation that has led us to “the cusp of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire.”4 If terrorism is seen as an essential quality that has the power to contaminate anyone in the orbit of its carrier, then political acts are disassociated from our process of shaping them into cohesive stories about the far-reaching effects of ideology. Perhaps this is an aftereffect of a phenomenon that Michiko Kakutani articulated in the New York Times on September 13, 2001. “[L]anguage failed,” she claimed, presumably because we had entered a new phase of national(ist) violence unaccounted for in our normative—and exceptionalist— narratives about American political identity.5 If, however, the radical cadence of the 1970s leads to ideological quagmires as it reemerges in our amnesiac culture, there is also a promising fecundity at work. The fictional realm of novels, in particular, can use the representational charge emitted by “failed” language to reimagine the past and to intervene in such artificial rifts between our political inheritance and...
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