American Insecurities, as Seen from Abroad

The introduction to Johannes Voelz's brilliant and intriguing new study, The Poetics of Insecurity, closes with a scene from the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. Treating the episode as typical of narratives of security generally, Voelz describes the “staging of a ritual that effected the imaginary conversion of vulnerability into heroic agency” in TV coverage that celebrated “the capture of Dzhokar Tsarnaev as if a national sports team had won a major championship” (32). He mentions “cell phone videos [that] capture the crowd chanting ‘USA! USA!’” and “citizens” participating “in the search for suspects by posting suggestions, guesses, and suspicions—witch-hunt style—on social media platforms such as Reddit and Twitter” (33). To Voelz, these actions indicate “a struggle for stasis by way of active retribution,” a struggle in which “people” convert “the uncertainty of threat into their own empowerment” (33). In his study, Voelz seeks to “detect, isolate, and reject”...