The naming of the American ‘homeland’ was supposedly a re-articulation of the tellurian closure, ‘in which the earth’s surface is perfectly divided among compartmentalised peoples, mapped by geopolitical ‘lines in the sand’.’ (link, p. 99)
Certainly, commentators were quick to seize on Al-Qaeda’s exposure of ‘the permeability of … national borders eroded by the forces of globalization’ (link, p. 86), reading the discursive emphasis the Bush administration subsequently placed on the notion of the ‘homeland’ as a linguistic manifestation of their preoccupation with containment.
In practice, however, the ‘homeland’ discourse has proven to possess a latent ambivalence, conveying the intended sense of ‘unity, security, and stability’ while implying extant and proliferating ‘forms of radical insecurity’ (ibid, p. 90). Indeed, a cursory reading of this ‘American homeland’ reveals the discourse as riddled with contradictions, and both Kaplan and Pease recognise it as laden with echoes of the uncanny.
