Decolonial Dystopia

This chapter reads Omar El Akkad’s American War (2017) as a decolonial dystopia that challenges and inverts imperial logic through setting and the use of violence. In the context of environmental and psychological ruin in a future America, Sara Chestnut (Sarat) becomes a violent rebel. This chapter argues that Sarat’s experience and choices can be read in the light of the early postcolonial writer, Frantz Fanon, and his seminal text The Wretched of the Earth (1961), in which violence is represented as a form of liberation. This chapter presents the novel first as a dystopia and then demonstrates the ways in which the genre has been shifted from a concern with state power to a decolonial struggle for liberation, including through self-destruction. The novel establishes geopolitical transference through its speculative scenario in which no one is invulnerable to crisis. Therefore, this chapter explores how American War destabilises the traditional victim/terrorist polarity as the reader empathises with a character who experiences radicalisation due to traumatic geopolitical upheaval.