American Multiculturalism after 9/11 is a rich and engaging collection of essays that show the events of 11 September 2001 to have highlighted – rather than brought about – the need to shift debates about multiculturalism from the narrowly national to the wider global scene. This is in spite of the fact that 9/11 led to the resurgence of nationalist sentiment not just in the US but across Europe as well. The comparative perspective offered by this collection provides a necessary corrective to these problematic trends. Its opening section also provides a very valuable sense of historical depth – particularly apparent in Ed Jonker's excellent essay offering “a genealogy of multiculturalism” – often missing from post-9/11 discussion.

The essays variously affirm and question the idea that 9/11 represented a “violent rupture” (Kroes 68) in cultural and historical terms. This diversity of opinion is a real strength of the collection, the mid-section of which extends into wide-ranging discussions of post-9/11 photography, film, poetry, fiction, and school history textbooks. Perhaps most striking among these is Rob Kroes's discussion of the widely suppressed image of the “falling man” – which arguably struck an unwelcome note of vulnerability that challenged the dominant discourse of “heroic sacrifice” discussed in Michan Andrew Connor's piece – as well as John-Paul Colgan's analysis of John Updike's rather surprising insights into the Islamist critique of America's “godless democracy.” These nuanced accounts should be seen as a valuable resource for future reflection on post-9/11 aesthetic production in the US.

What can at times seem to be a rather overcautious collection in terms of offering any real conclusions about post-9/11 multiculturalism is offset by some rather unconvincing and even problematic formulations: Phillip E. Wegner's otherwise interesting account of United 93 is framed by an apparently approving assessment of Ward Churchill's controversial and quite frankly offensive characterization of the victims of the attacks on New York – all complicit, according to Churchill, in America's exploitative “global financial empire” – as “little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers” (Churchill quoted in Wegner 83). The necessary task of challenging exceptionalist accounts of American innocence – which became even more urgent in a post-9/11 atmosphere often intolerant of any kind of dissent – is only weakened by this example. Similarly, Wegner's claim that the Bush administration's attitude to “Muslim fundamentalism” should be seen as a form of Nietzschean ressentiment – “a destructive envy aimed at those imagined to possess a secret key to happiness” (82) via their religious convictions – seems less than helpful in the context of a nation in which religious faith is hardly alien territory. America's religious character is a point on which the book is elsewhere very incisive.

On a very different note, Patrick Hyder Patterson's fascinating comparison of American and European traditions of multiculturalism yields some rather odd conclusions. His sense that the non-assimilationist model of European multiculturalism might be somehow “gentler” than America's “melting pot” solution to cultural difference belies the fact that, as he acknowledges, “American Muslims are by most accounts far less troubled by the conditions of life in the West than their fellow believers in Europe” (158–59). The road to “Americanization” may often prove inconsiderate to – and even intolerant of – minority cultures but the state's “hands-off” approach to religion has undoubtedly enabled a greater degree of religious pluralism than that which operates in Western European nations, which have generally shown much less willingness to accept immigrant groups as part of the national community. Indeed, in spite of the apparent threat posed to American multiculturalism by the events of 9/11, it remains the case that African Americans bear the heaviest cost of US racial hierarchies, painfully highlighting the relative success enjoyed by new immigrant groups. This fact is acknowledged by an important contribution by Johanna C. Kardux, whose essay charts the ways in which debates about memorials for slavery in both the US and the Netherlands intersected with the issues thrown up by 9/11.

The transatlantic perspective that this collection offers – largely from the point of view of the Netherlands – leads to some original discussions, even if the emphasis sometimes overplays the extent to which debates in small European nations affect US discourse. Jaap Verheul's suggestion that “‘Dutchism’ could be added to more familiar essentialist concepts such as Orientalism and Occidentalism” (202) is a case in point. That said, the suggestion that American identity is formed in contradistinction to Europe is an important one for deconstructing monolithic understandings of “the West.” This is a distinctive and thought-provoking collection that makes a significant contribution to debates about US cultural politics after 9/11.