ABSTRACT
What happened to ‘us’ after 9/11? The postmodern position is that our identities are constantly under revision and may shift as required by a range of social, political and historical circumstances. As discussed in the previous chapter, 9/11 is proposed to have been a moment when many of these circumstances shifted, which suggests that if there were a collective Western understanding of how to ‘be’ before the attacks on the Twin Towers, there are now ways to ‘be’ as defi ned by the event, some of which will be in evidence in children’s books about 9/11. It may be that 9/11 makes it newly possible to explore how new identities are being produced for these altered times. But any analysis of changes in identity after 9/11 must fi rst clarify what is meant by identity as it is defi ned here, in this case by situating identity politics within the philosophical premises of postmodernism and postcolonial theories. Together, the positions of postmodernism and the perspectives of postcolonial critique offer explanations of the myth-making and politics of the fi rst two collective identities, ethnicity and national identity-the categories that are analyzed throughout the rest of this book.
