This talk argues that “state allegory” has become a dominant narrative form for the critical representation of American empire and U.S. foreign policy. Allegory is of course a familiar method for representing international relations, but it flourished in the decade after September 11, 2001 as a way of interrogating the strange conditions of public knowledge and citizenship in the War on Terror.


Timothy Melley is Professor of English and Director of the Humanities Center at Miami University. He is the author of many essays and two books, Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Cornell 2000), and The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State (Cornell 2012). His work has been covered by The Nation, The L.A. Times, Scientific American, The Village Voice, Le Figaro, The Wall Street Journal, the BBC, Canadian Public Television, and NPR, and his fiction has been featured on “This American Life.”