Nation, Genre, and the Poetics of Pax Americana: Atwood’s Ustopian Fictions

Abstract

As part of a project that compares unified world systems with the cultural development of nation-states through the taxonomy of pax periods, this paper focuses on Margaret Atwood’s speculative dystopian Maddaddam trilogy (2003-2013). These novels are widely read and studied because they offer a credible global barometer of the (post)national response to the destruction wrought by Pax Americana’s global liberal order. While Pax Americana is never mentioned in the novels, their setting in a dystopian near-future discloses the retreat of the national order in the face of biotechnologically engineered genocide facilitated, even encouraged, by global capitalism. In other words, the trilogy imagines the inevitable outcome of Pax Americana: a world system that brings about the destruction of first, social orders; second, the natural world; and finally, genocide. However, it is a peaceful world: while there are hints of a recent military conflict arising from global pandemic and environmental destruction generated by outofcontrol pollution and global warming, peace has broken out. Focusing on Oryx and Crake (2003), the first novel in the trilogy, this paper argues that even in peace tensions and values that defined the modernity that took shape in Pax Americana persist. One of those tensions concerns the very nature of peace in Pax Americana: is the peace that has broken out merely the absence of armed conflict, or are there other reasons? Ghosting Atwood’s dystopian future is a plea for a moral vigilance that ironically signals the potential of a cultural ethics that registers both a Pax Americana aversion to war and argues for a Pax Americana consolidation of a historically ‘new’ nation-state centered liberal capitalism. Pax Americana, the novel seems to say, creates both the conditions for its destruction and the interplay of novelistic, cultural, and political discourses for a new world system.