Constructing and Contesting the State(s) of Exception: Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and the American Transnational Novel

The paper investigates how the state(s) of exception generated by 9/11 events, post-national dreams, and uneven post-national realities are at play in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008). Constructed as a series of flashbacks from the narrative present of 2006 in London, the story is told from the perspective of the Dutch-born equities analyst Hans van der Broek, who moves to New York in 1998, experiences the social and psychological consequences of 9/11 and, progressively estranged from his wife Rachel, passively accepts her decision to return to England with their infant son leaving him behind. He seeks refuge and companionship in the immigrant world of American cricket and in his friendship with Chuck Ramkissoon, an Indo-Trinidadian immigrant, entrepreneur, and small-time gangster, whose dream of building the nation’s first multicultural cricket park in New York ends with the recovery of his body in a canal in Brooklyn. With a special focus on the decentering the novel enacts, as far as geography, history, subjectivity, and ideology, the paper aims to explore the dialectics between 9/11 anxieties and the endless promises of the American Dream, and in particular the relation between the state of emergency/exception and the national / post-national identity it engenders.