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In early September 2001, M. T. Anderson had a partially completed young adult novel on his hard drive. The story was set in a fairly dis- tant future-with technological advances allowing the installation of sophisticated Internet capabilities directly into the human body-but the setting was eminently recognizable. American teenagers tracked trends in entertainment and fashion, fell in and out of love, and alter- nately displayed apathy toward and alienation from the local and global politics that shaped their world. The novel's opening line captures the tenor of its economically privileged but selfishly provincial char- acters: "We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck" (3). In the period between that early draft and the novel's October 2002 publication, the World Trade Center collapsed. The after-effects of September 11 became Feed's backdrop, making the teenagers inhabiting Anderson's setting-the United States in its "final days" (297)-a means to focalize the trauma of the 9/11 moment.
Four years later, Anderson published The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party. In 2006, the War on Terror raged and homeland security policies were in full effect. In many minds, the United States now figured as perpetrator rather than prey.1 For Anderson, this prompted a shift in setting and genre: instead of writing a dystopian novel set in the future, he wrote a historical novel set in the American past. Octavian Nothing features an African boy who lives with his mother amid a community of academicians in Revolutionary Boston. Unbeknownst to him, Octavian-who has been told that he is an African prince-is both a slave and the subject of a scientific experiment to determine the intellectual capacity of Homo afri. As the nation's founding documents are penned, Octavian discovers first-hand the contradictions of a battle cry for "liberty and property." Ostensibly a novel about the American Revolution, Octavian Nothing and its desecrated protagonist document the trauma induced by the War on Terror.
Together, Feed and Octavian Nothing alternately anticipate and mourn the state of US affairs today, articulating a politically progres- sive nostalgia in the process. Even as they recognize that the national past-the United States at both its birth and its late twentieth-century apex-was far from...