I

To begin with the words of Lewis Gannett, the American beard is tied into “the mysterious tides of our history.”Footnote ¹ The New World was discovered and conquered by bearded men.Footnote ² The first Pilgrims and Puritans to arrive on the shores of the New World were also heavily bearded. In the middle decades of nineteenth century, a time that has been called “the bushiest boom in facial hair history,”Footnote ³ the rise in popularity of the beard occurred as the United States saw the early elaborations of industrialization. During this period Abraham Lincoln became the first American President to wear facial hair,Footnote ⁴ his “whiskers” now considered to be Lincoln's attempt to appear more modern – that is to say, civilized, refined, and cultured.Footnote ⁵ Lincoln's facial hair, “the most famous beard in the history of the world,” is very much tied into the ideas that have characterized the beard from the very beginning of American history: whiteness, masculinity, and hegemony.Footnote ⁶

As we settle into the teenage years of the twenty-first century, globalization has reshaped the arenas in which local, national, and transnational masculinities are performed. Raewyn Connell's conceptualization of “hegemonic masculinity” was the first to recognize the existence of various, often competing, male groups representing diverse ideas of what it means to be masculine.Footnote ⁷ Connell's approach to analysing the social construction of masculinity made three radical contributions: first, the concept of a plurality of masculinities subverted any argument of a normative masculine essence; second, the suggestion that these masculinities are set within a hierarchical model underlined the role of power in the interactions between these groups of men; and third, the fact that this hierarchy of masculinities is shaped and maintained by societal discourse confirmed the complex nature of the social construction of masculinity. The central idea, therefore, was that the hegemonic category of masculinity, in this context the white American male, should not be considered inherently stable, but as a role in society that exists as a fluid historical construction open to challenge.Footnote ⁸ Raewyn Connell's more recent work has championed the need to move toward the “global dimension” in the study of men and masculinities to see how the historical processes that have produced the “global society” have been, from the very beginning, gendered.Footnote ⁹ This global society creates new arenas that go beyond individual countries or regions in which gender identity politics, or, more specifically, global masculinity politics, control the performance of men.Footnote ¹⁰ As Connell and Messerschmidt state, “At the least, we must understand that regional and local constructions of hegemonic masculinity are shaped by the articulation of these gender systems with global processes.”Footnote ¹¹ Hamilton Carroll, in his research on whiteness and masculinist privilege, identifies the tensions that the traditional hegemonic American male must now face – that is, “domestic multiculturalism and identity politics, on the one hand, and the globalization of labour and economics on the other.” Carroll argues that this situation has produced a contemporary “dialectics of crisis,” with the once naturalized hegemonic position of the white American male now destabilized by the shift toward the prominence of global networks.Footnote ¹² While globalization counts for the most direct challenge to American masculinity in the contemporary era, this challenge is experienced and negotiated on the national level and, as such, the contemporary American novel has now reframed its narratives within globalized and globalizing networks that go beyond the borders of the nation itself.

What is striking about the works of American fiction that surfaced first following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 is how their narratives of an American masculinity suffering Carroll's “dialectics of crisis” used the beard as a loaded signifier of the Other.Footnote ¹³ Simple hairs on a man's face emerged as easy markers of difference, most probably as they insured the hegemonic white male, with his clean-shaven facade that characterized American authenticity throughout the twentieth century, retained his privilege of invisibility.Footnote ¹⁴ As we shall see, more recent novels, such as Moshin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2010) and Amy Waldman's The Submission (2011), appear more attuned to the fact that the everyday performance of contemporary American masculinity now takes place in what Richard Gray calls “interstitial space”; that is to say, the place “where such oppositions are contested: a site where a discourse founded on either/or distinctions is interrogated and even subverted.”Footnote ¹⁵ But first, beginning with a selection of initial works of post-9/11 American fiction, namely John Updike's Terrorist (2006) and Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2007), by underscoring the engagement with the beard in these narratives it becomes clear how the initial introspections on the condition of post-9/11 masculinity seized upon the beard as a site for suspicion and paranoia, a place for falsehoods as well as fear, in an attempt to write the new Other of contemporary American society.

II

In times of crisis the United States returns to myths of its difference. This is a bold statement, but one that plays out if we analyse key works of post-9/11 fiction. The great failure of the contemporary American novel, in its attempt to process and reflect upon 9/11 and its aftermath, has been the representation of the Other. To use the words of Michael Rothberg, literature that appeared in the wake of 9/11 displayed “a failure of imagination,”Footnote ¹⁶ something which can most certainly be extended to masculinity and the Other. While Rothberg supports Richard Gray's view that this social and political failure can be linked to the “emotional entanglements”Footnote ¹⁷ of a crisis and subsequent trauma that continues to be “domesticated,”Footnote ¹⁸ there is a widespread formal failure very much located in the reductive engagement with the symbol of the beard. Citing the more immediate meditations that appeared in the years following the 2001 atrocity, such as Ken Kalfus's A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2006), Jay McInerney's The Good Life (2006), John Updike's Terrorist (2006), and Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2007), Gray and Rothberg, but particularly Rothberg, highlight how these novels fail to grasp the discourses that are shaping larger narratives surrounding American identity on a rapidly changing global scale, preferring instead to operate, as per the American literary tradition, within the relative safety of the domestic and the familiar.Footnote ¹⁹ Even Jonathan Franzen's Freedom (2010), a further-reaching tome on the impact of globalized and globalizing discourses on American everyman Walter Berglund, is in its essence a traditional nineteenth-century American novel anchored around Berglund's domestic crisis. There is a certain degree of logic in these literary reactions; perhaps we are expecting too much from our novelists, our urban spectators, our cultural meditators, to write this Other that, frankly, they can't possibly know. As will become apparent, the approach of contemporary American authors has been to fall into well-worn frameworks of seeing (a masculinity) crisis as opposition, endeavouring to set binary oppositions within traditional American mythic narratives that hopefully reach some sort of resolution.Footnote ²⁰ Perhaps this reductive dualistic approach is a (sub)conscious reaction to reaffirm their whiteness, rather than an attempt to understand the motives of the Other. What is truly striking is how these novelists go about representing the contemporary Other. It is telling that they return to a familiar trope used throughout American literary history to present Otherness: the beard.

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the beard returned to the American consciousness when hegemonic white American masculinity once again defined itself in terms of opposition: them and us, Westerners and Muslims, the beardless and the bearded. The beard was truly fixed as a symbol of the evil Other with the heavily bearded Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden's beard was burned into the American psyche with David Levine's provocatively beard-centric interpretation of the new enemy that appeared in Tony Judt's New York Review of Books article “America and the War.”Footnote ²¹ Levine's drawing allows a view of only the bottom half of bin Laden's body, as he sits seemingly in reflective prayer, and it is his unruly beard that dominates the image. The gender overtones resonate: with thick lips protruding at the top of the image, and a mound of unruly pubic hair curling out of control, this implied visual relation of the beard of the Other to female genitalia is entirely emasculating. The Other, therefore, is simultaneously dehumanized and hypersexualized. As Jasbir K. Puar writes in Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times,

As Puar incisively argues, America's “masculinities of patriotism” do not set out to “excavat[e] the queer terrorist,” rather “queerness is always already installed in the project of naming the terrorist; the terrorist does not appear as such with the concurrent entrance of perversion, deviance.”Footnote ²³ Puar draws on a range of cultural artefacts that attempted to queer the threat of the terrorist in the wake of 9/11, with images of bin Laden being penetrated by the Empire State Building or bin Laden in drag, or websites that glorified weapons that sodomized bin Laden to death.Footnote ²⁴

The narrative of queering the Other emerges as a literary strategy in post-9/11 fiction. John Updike's Terrorist (2006) offers a frustratingly reductive characterization of Muslims in America.Footnote ²⁵ Updike appears to be able only to present an opaque Otherness through the most obvious and reductive element: questioning the protagonist's sexuality and emphasizing the Otherness in his mentor's beard. And it's not just the fact of the continued questioning of the young American Muslim Ahmed Ashmawy Mulloy's sexuality, but it is his lack of all-American hegemonic hyper-heterosexuality, the masculinity affirming performance in a contemporary late capitalist society shaped by instant gratification and the commercialization of the performance of sex and sexuality. There are questionable elements in the writing of the character Updike created to represent the young Muslim in contemporary America. When we meet Ahmed at the start of the book he is already spewing anti-American thoughts and it is clear that he is heavily influenced by his bearded imam Shaikh Rashid. But what about Ahmed before then? How does he reach this point? Updike does attempt to explore the inner thoughts of Ahmed through free indirect style, but these often trail off with Updike either being too ornate and falling into cliché, or giving Ahmed both an inner voice and a speaking voice that are nothing more than a complete caricature of how a Muslim might think and speak. Ahmed's anti-Americanness is almost parody: he doesn't have a cellphone, he doesn't go to movies, and he's not interested in any everyday American media. He is just a rigid block (character) of American angst.

Ahmed's Otherness – in the eyes of the writer and the other characters in this fictionalized contemporary America – is anchored around his sexuality. This is one more example of what Puar identifies as “manifold trajectories of racialization and un-nationalization of sexual others.”Footnote ²⁶ Puar explains her usage of the term “racialization” thus: “I deploy ‘racialization’ as a figure for specific formations and processes that are not necessarily or only tied to what has been historically theorized as ‘race’.”Footnote ²⁷ The point is that there is a transition in how queer subjects are related to nation-states. Queer politics are now folded into the biopolitical management of the American nation, with the incorporation of certain queer subjects contingent upon certain instances of the benevolence of privileged white groups, while certain Others – in this case “queerly racialized ‘terrorist populations’” – are considered a target for “segregration, disposal, or death.”Footnote ²⁸ Puar cites Leti Volpp, who suggested that September 11 led to the creation and consolidation of a new identity category that grouped together all people who appeared Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim, with this consolidation reflecting a racialization wherein members of this group are identified as terrorists and are disidentified as American citizens.Footnote ²⁹ Puar takes this a step further to note, “this disidentification is a process of sexualization as well as of a racialization of religion.”Footnote ³⁰ What turns into something of a running joke for the reader is the repeated questioning of Ahmed's sexuality throughout the book. One of his schoolmates, an African American kid called Tylenol who is jealous of Ahmed spending time with his girlfriend Joryleen, spits out these slurs on two separate occasions, first insulting Ahmed by stating, “My type has no use for your type, that's the truth, you dumb fuck. You weird queer. You faggot.”Footnote ³¹ He returns to this in another altercation when he spouts, “A flying fuck is when you do it to yourself, like all you Arabs do. You all faggots, man.”Footnote ³² Moreover, Ahmed's high-school guidance counsellor, Jack Levy, makes a point of asking Ahmed's mother, “Does he have a girlfriend?”Footnote ³³ before getting straight to the point: “It doesn't seem quite right. He's a good-looking kid. Could he be gay?”Footnote ³⁴ Even on one occasion when he wonders about the sexual past of Ahmed's mother Teresa, Levy comes to the outlandish conclusion that “to them she'd be a mother who fucks. Maybe what's why her own kid is queer, if he is.”Footnote ³⁵ Even Ahmed's own mother asks him, “Don't boys your age usually have girlfriends?”Footnote ³⁶ As Puar reflects, then, “the terrorist figure is not merely racialized and sexualized; the body must appear improperly racialized (outside the norms of multiculturalism) and perversely sexualized in order to materialize as the terrorist in the first place.”Footnote ³⁷ Updike writes a reductive Other that follows the wider discourse of marking difference in terms of religion and sexuality with the ultimate aim of reaffirming the authenticity of hegemonic whiteness.

As well as following the post-9/11 narrative of queering the Other, Updike also uses the beard to present an opaque Otherness to the reader. When we first meet Ahmed's imam Shaikh Rashid, he is presented with only “half a face, the lower half hidden by a trimmed beard flecked with gray.”Footnote ³⁸ When Rashid uses the analogy of the cockroach to speak powerfully about the need to give mercy to Americans, of course it is “within the beard” that “his violent lips twitched.”Footnote ³⁹ As he continues to spit out his vitriol, Updike makes sure that the beard is in that image: “a delicate hand tugged lightly at his beard. ‘You want to destroy them. They are vexing you with their uncleanliness … They have no feelings. They are manifestations of Satan, and God will destroy them without mercy on the final day of Reckoning’.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Later, when the imam again gets angry and displays his impatience, Updike returns to the beard with a clumsy simile to attempt to add weight to this display of fury: “‘Habib and Maurice,’ the imam clarifies, with an impatience that bites off his words as precisely as his beard is trimmed.”Footnote ⁴¹ Updike again returns to the power of the beard when Ahmed meets Shaikh Rashid for a final time but Rashid is unexpectedly clean-shaven. His mentor, now also wearing a Western-type suit, no longer holds the aura that affected Ahmed in the earlier stages of the novel. Without the beard there is “revealed something disagreeable about his violet lips, a sulky masculine set to them that had lurked unemphasized when they moved so rapidly, so seductively, in a recess of facial hair.”Footnote ⁴² Put simply “without his beard … he appeared disconcertingly ordinary – slight of frame, a bit tremulous in manner, a bit withered, and no longer young.”Footnote ⁴³ For Updike the beard remains the holder of some dark power, but it is too opaque and unmoving.

Likewise in Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2007), the beard is a makeshift symbol, something that the author can insert to give his imagining of the Other a superficial gravitas, but something that ultimately masks the true face of these characters and tells us little about their inner thoughts. Like many writers tackling the aftereffects of 9/11, DeLillo turns to the domestic to try to make sense of how the American people continue to process this cultural trauma.Footnote ⁴⁴ Some critics, such as Richard Gray, displayed their frustration with DeLillo taking this approach, and the fact that DeLillo didn't write the great American “counternarrative” that DeLillo himself called for in the days following 9/11 in his essay “In the Ruins of the Future.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Rather, with Falling Man, DeLillo takes one of the most profound and powerful images from the atrocity – the figure of the upside-down man falling from the North Tower of the World Trade Center – and writes a clinically sound, carefully constructed narrative but one that is cold, hard, and opaque. There is a noticeable staticness, a lack of enquiry. As Gray states, Falling Man “adds next to nothing to our understanding of the trauma at the heart of the action. In fact, it evades the trauma, it suppresses its urgency and disguises its difference by inserting it in a series of familiar tropes.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The familiar trope that DeLillo employs in the sections on the terrorist Others is the beard.

Part of the frustration of DeLillo's effort with Falling Man is the little space that DeLillo gives to the 9/11 terrorists in the novel. In an attempt to emphasize difference in such a restricted space, DeLillo relies on the hairs on the face of the terrorists. The attempt to work through the hatred that this group of radical Islamists based in Hamburg have for America starts with the beard: “They were all growing beards. One of them even told his father to grow a beard. Men came to the flat on Marienstrasse, some to visit, others to live, men in and out all the time, growing beards.”Footnote ⁴⁷ For DeLillo's terrorists the beard is their identity and their source of masculine power. When Hammad and the group go to attack a man on the Reeperbahn, Hammad makes the first move and hits the man three or four times until he goes down, even though Hammad “wasn't sure what this was all about, the guy paying an Albanian whore for sex or the guy not growing a beard. He had no beard, Hammad noticed, just before he hit him.”Footnote ⁴⁸ For DeLillo the beard gives these men structure, it gives them purpose, it defines them:

Again this is too clean cut, too obviously “them” and “us.” Surely there is more to these men, more to their inner struggles, more to their efforts of making sense of their place in the world than a few hairs on their face can solve? Michael Kimmel offers some insight into the pressures that lead Muslim men to grow beards, pressures which they share with Western men:

Falling Man, just like Updike's Terrorist, presents these men as fixed types and so fails to go to the necessary depths of character to show that these men are also grappling with the same issues related to their masculine identities as their hegemonic male counterparts. This is the idea of a “shared pain” that Changez, Moshin Hamid's protagonist in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, perceptively offers:

Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist is one work of contemporary fiction that has interrogated the complex matters of masculinity and identity in a changing American landscape that is struggling with shifting borders. The inclusion of The Reluctant Fundamentalist in a discussion of the power of the beard in representations of masculinity in American literature is telling in itself of the changing nature of what we might consider “US fiction” or “American fiction,” and, therefore, by extension is indicative of the new globalized and globalizing arena in which the American male must now perform. New approaches in American literary criticism propose the idea of “global fictions,”Footnote ⁵² the borderless American novel,Footnote ⁵³ the “remapping” of the American novel within global contexts,Footnote ⁵⁴ or the idea that the American novel in the twenty-first century should now be considered as a “geopolitical novel.”Footnote ⁵⁵ This notion of the geopolitical reframing of American writing, proposed and examined in Caren Irr's Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U. S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century, sets a precedent in permitting the inclusion of what might once have been considered “non-American” writers – if we are classing writers by nationality – in the discussion. As Irr now sees it, the twenty-first-century American novel is “grappling with the pragmatics of global mobility and inequality and is learning to speak in a new voice, one that opens the door to a different kind of engagement with the world beyond the borders of the United States.”Footnote ⁵⁶ It is worth stating that making this point is not merely an attempt to justify the inclusion in this article of a writer who, some might argue, is not “American.” Hamid, a Pakistani-born, Princeton- and Harvard-educated British citizen, is an apt illustration of the how we must no longer consider literature something restricted by physical borders; rather literature, in particular “American” literature, is now being shaped by global citizens writing global issues within the intercultural spaces that are now fundamental to America's own understanding of its identity as a nation. This is why the above statement by Hamid's narrator Changez, a Pakistani-born, Princeton-educated, New York citizen, is so poignant and one of the key passages in post-9/11 fiction. Changez is attuned to the impact of the nuances of geopolitics on the performance of masculinity and is therefore an ideal beginning for a discussion on the issues that have underpinned representations of masculinity in contemporary works of literature. The key concerns linked to American masculinity on the global stage – such as the self and the Other, hegemony, and the performance of masculinity in transnational networks – are crystallized in this passage.

The understanding of the inner workings of each group, in this case Muslim men, is surely crucial in gaining a fuller picture of the dynamics that underpin the performance of their masculine identities. Demetrakis Z. Demetriou, in his 2001 article “Connell's Concept of Hegemonic Masculinity: A Critique,” returns to the origin of the term “hegemony” in Antonio Gramsci's study of class hegemony to suggest the importance of studying what he terms “internal hegemony” – that is to say, “hegemony over subordinated masculinities”Footnote ⁵⁷  – and so fully interrogating the inner dynamics within each group that influence the performance of masculinity in relation to other groups of men. Demetriou identifies this as the necessary “dialectical pragmatism” of the interaction between different groups of men. In other words, nonhegemonic masculinities exist in tension with the hegemonic group, but both hegemonic and subordinate groups appropriate elements of the other group that ultimately benefit them.Footnote ⁵⁸ As Connell and Messerschmidt add in light of Demetriou's reconceptualization, “our understanding of hegemonic masculinity needs to incorporate a more holistic understanding of gender hierarchy, recognizing the agency of subordinate groups as much as the power of dominant groups and the mutual conditioning of gender dynamics and social dynamics.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Approaching the study of the discourses of power through this framework of understanding the social organization of masculinity presents a fuller picture of the necessary range and depth in the negotiation, configuration, and reconfiguration of male behaviour in contemporary American society.

The successes in contemporary literature that broach this dynamic of American masculinity to offer a more nuanced exploration of the shared pain and identity crisis declared in the Changez quotation above give due care and attention to the greater symbolic significance of the beard. One novel, evidently, is Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist. In its inventive form of a dramatic monologue, with the narrator, the transnational subject Hamid Changez, addressing an American in a café in Lahore, the novel silences the American media machine and gives voice exclusively to the Other. This approach forces the reader to face their fears and fantasies of Otherness, both of which are located in the beard. Hamid's Changez slips between easy categorization: of Pakistani origin, he was shaped by the American educational system and the transnational globalized and globalizing business world of New York City. Moreover, as Richard Gray notes, “Changez still seems oddly in love with the culture of America, constantly referring to or invoking it. Even while he rages against it.”Footnote ⁶⁰ He is therefore a global citizen sensitive to the symbolic nature of his masculinity-forming performances in the gaze of the American male to whom he is speaking.

The success of the novel lies in its attempt to locate masculine identity within “interstitial spaces,” which Gray sees as the new arena for contemporary narratives. Formally Hamid's narrative itself is an interstitial space; meaning, identity, and masculinity are formed within the space between Changez and the American, between the speaker and the listener, between the author and reader. What is so unique about The Reluctant Fundamentalist is that as a dramatic monologue it is a novella that goes beyond that trauma of the event and encourages an “active readership” with the “reader as judge.”Footnote ⁶¹ To take this a step further, the reader is not only forced to judge the reliability of the narrator and the events unfolding on the page, but also encouraged to judge his or her own beliefs of the power of the bearded Other.

In an American literature now being shaped by narratives operating within the geopolitical arena, The Reluctant Fundamentalist opens with the clued-in Changez underlining and attacking the notion of the American male's fear of the Other encapsulated in the beard head-on: “Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America.”Footnote ⁶² Changez is acutely aware that the period following 9/11 is a time in which Americanness is in flux. If we consider Americanness an alias of traditional white masculinity, the hegemonic category of masculinity that has dominated American ideology since the very birth of the nation, Changez returns to the beard throughout the novel, prodding the American as to why he cannot take his eyes off the man with “the beard far longer than mine,” questioning why this bearded man “attract[s] your wary gaze.”Footnote ⁶³ Changez plays upon the American male's fear of the beard: “Perhaps you misconstrue the significance of my beard, which, I should in any case make clear, I had not yet kept when I arrived in New York.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Changez tells of his time in New York, at one point revealing that “moving to New York felt – so unexpectedly – like coming home.”Footnote ⁶⁵ His Otherness is blurred into everyday American ways, reflected in being able to wear his “starched white kurta of delicately worked cotton over a pair of jeans.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, however, Changez is very much aware of the changed effect of wearing a beard. Following a trip back to visit his family in Pakistan, he returns with a two-week beard to New York and experiences the reactions of his coworkers and the everyday people in the street. His workmate Wainwright, another Other from Jamaica, warns him that he needs to be careful and his beard is not making him “Mister Popular.” Wainwright is well aware that “this whole corporate collegiality veneer only goes so deep.”Footnote ⁶⁷ The beard, once a symbol of American authenticity, is now a threat to the American citizen. Changez talks of “the verbal abuse,” how overnight he becomes “a subject of whispers and stares.”Footnote ⁶⁸ The decision to wear the beard is not a consciously aggressive decision; it is not intended as a confirmation of difference. Rather it is Changez's reaction against the racialization and demasculinization that has characterized the experience of “a man of [his] complexion” in post-9/11 America.Footnote ⁶⁹ Changez is aware that he is fighting “gendered scripts that frame Muslim men as suspicious.”Footnote ⁷⁰ It is when Changez is dismissed from the company that he realizes

Changez is mindful of the power of the beard: “It is remarkable, given its physical insignificance – it is only a hairstyle, after all – the impact a beard worn by a man of my complexion has on your fellow countrymen.”Footnote ⁷² He underlines the importance of performance that emphasizes difference and the complexities that underpin the return to the safety of common American ideologies in post-9/11 America that attempt to reassert American male hegemonic control and authority.

Michael Rothberg asserts that what we need from post-9/11 American fiction, and what we continue to need from American fiction as we move into an era in which masculinities are formed within global frameworks, are “cognitive maps that imagine how US citizenship looks and feels beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, both for Americans and for others.”Footnote ⁷³ And this is what Hamid's novel achieves with an unreliable narrator, his use of hyperbole, and the playing with (gender-)political rhetoric. As Changez playfully concludes, “it is the gist that matters; I am, after all, telling you a history, and in history, as I suspect you – an American – will agree, it is the thrust of one's narrative that counts, not the accuracy of one's details.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Hamid, in his political and playful way, is successful in the destabilizing of the expectations of the reader with a text that challenges the myths that America returned to following 9/11 through a critical investigation of the reality of the deterritorialization of masculine identity in global networks. Hamid has Changez reflect on the realities that now face the Other, the global citizen in a post-9/11 world: “I lacked a stable core. I was not certain where I belonged – in New York, in Lahore, in both, in neither.”Footnote ⁷⁵

There is one text that goes even further in its engagement with the beard to fully flesh out this shared crisis that now defines the experience of the transnational subject in contemporary America: Amy Waldman's The Submission. The Submission centres on a memorial that is to be built for the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The jury, made up of experts, citizens, and family members of the victims, choose a design named “The Garden.” When they open the envelope to see the name of the chosen designer they see the name Mohammad Khan, a Muslim. Mohammed Khan, or “Mo,” as he is known to everyone (although as the right-leaning reporter Alyssa Spier retorts, “Mo didn't have the ring – theological, historical, hysterical – of Mohammed”Footnote ⁷⁶ ), is the son of Indian immigrants, raised in Virginia, and now living in New York City. We are first introduced to Mo as a “type” through a background check by the jury on his (Muslim) “identity,” which informs us that although his family are from a Muslim background, Khan is secular, having “barely been to a mosque in his life,”Footnote ⁷⁷ and, as Mo reflects, he considered himself “if not an atheist himself, certainly agnostic, which perhaps made him not a Muslim at all.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Mo is a true global citizen but with American roots. As Paul Rubin, the chairman of the award committee for the memorial who requests the background report concludes, Mo “seemed all-American, even in his ambitions.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Waldman goes beyond other writers who have come before her in searching for a greater depth in the Other in her intimate, immediate sense of the tensions that typified the performance and analysis of this contemporary crisis following 9/11. And it is Waldman's shrewd engagement with the beard, as well as her protagonist's awareness of the sensibilities and sensitivities surrounding the beard in the public and private performances of his masculinity, that underlines the continuing importance of the beard in the literary exploration of the incongruities in the ideas of identity, masculinity, and individuality in a globalized and globalizing American society.

Waldman follows the great tradition of the engagement with facial hair in American literature by (re)affirming how the fears and fantasies of the white American male are instantly projected onto the beard. In the first meeting with the Other that the jury have chosen, the chairman of the award committee Paul Rubin arrives to meet Mo in an Upper East Side bistro. Upon entering, however, he fails to see Mo, spotting only

Rubin's first words to Mo reveal his insecurities: “‘You look different,’ he began. ‘From your picture’.”Footnote ⁸¹ Waldman's engagement with the nuances that define the symbolic significance of the beard and masculinity are evident with Paul noticing Mo's bearded “beauty”: “Even in the restaurant's dimness, even through the glasses, Khan's eyes were – and Paul had never said this, even thought this, about a man – beautiful. Beautiful in the way marbles had been to him as a child. Beautiful in the way that women must fall hard for.”Footnote ⁸² With this first encounter, therefore, Waldman manages to incorporate the issues that have characterized the engagement of American writers with the beard throughout the American literary tradition, while also reflecting the shift in the twenty-first-century significance of the beard not simply as a symbol of difference but also as a site of doubt and uncertainty for the transnational individual in American society in his appointed role as the Other.

The great strength of the character of Mo is his awareness of the incongruities in his public and private identities as the bearded Other. Waldman plays on these frictions as the Mo and Mohammed Khan identities develop. Following the announcement of his design being the chosen one for the Ground Zero memorial, Mo suddenly finds himself being “analyzed, judged, and invented” by strangers. He sees himself as a “new product being rolled out to market,”Footnote ⁸³ recognizing his “objectification”Footnote ⁸⁴ as a “architect-terrorist”Footnote ⁸⁵ in the public eye, a “prop in a propaganda war.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Rising above this, however, he remains true to his beliefs, stating earlier in the narrative, “I don't traffic in labels.”Footnote ⁸⁷ What sets Waldman's narrative apart from other novels attempting to enter the minds of those considered the Other is the care and duty she gives to the self-reflective nature of Mo. Granted, within the parameters of a highly conceptual novel such as The Submission, which tackles a sensitive and complex issue such as post-9/11 America, Mo is a device for Waldman's critical investigation. But Waldman writes a character with enough self-awareness and a power to reflect upon the fractured nature of his identity, which ultimately proves highly successful in allowing him, and therefore the reader, to consider the complexities of being “a global citizen.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Mo's response to this growing public persona, one which is very much at odds with how he truly sees himself, is to try to “put psychological distance between himself and the Mohammed Khan who was written and talked about, as if that were another man altogether.”Footnote ⁸⁹ And Waldman delves further into Mo's performance of his masculinity, one that can be read alongside Demetriou's idea of men from all sections of society engaging in instances of “dialectical pragmatism” to their greater benefit, through her protagonist's struggle with the symbolic significance of his facial hair.

At various points Mo ponders his inability to assert his individuality as a global male in New York. Walking home one night with his lawyer and lover Laila, he reflects upon the fixed nature of the hierarchical framework in which he moves and the insecurities that underpin his masculinity. He compares himself to Laila, who “seemed free in a way he wasn't, in a way that made his efforts to assert his individuality – to compose an identity – seem strenuous, even ridiculous by comparison.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Mo's only idea to grasp a sense of his masculinity upon returning to New York following a short time in Kabul was to grow a beard, “merely to assert his right to wear a beard, to play with the assumptions about his religiosity it might create.”Footnote ⁹¹ “Religiosity” is the key word here. This is not a case of Mo wanting people to wonder whether he is Muslim or not. Rather Mo wants to play with, or, perhaps more accurately, he wants to undermine, religion as it is a central component in the act of racialization that he and other American citizens have become victims of. With his beard he wants to underline the everyday distorted physiognomic judgments that now shape the subjecthood of certain American men.

But again it is Laila who forces Mo himself to face up to his own manipulation of the beard and his conscious act of “dialectical pragmatism” that are at the heart of his performance of his masculinity. Mo refuses to do the Muslim American Co-ordinating Council (MACC) advertising campaign in response to the uproar following the release of his name as the winner of the memorial competition. He feels he will be the exploited face of something that he does not want to be involved in. Laila, however, forces Mo to face up to the fact that he is willing to let others influence his everyday actions. Knowing that Mo must have had a fully grown beard when he submitted the memorial design, Laila asks Mo if he submitted a photo with a bushy beard. When he replies “no,” Mo realizes that he is also the one exploiting the symbolic power of the beard for his own benefit: “she had nailed his effort to be a ‘safe’ Muslim when it would help him; to be courageous or provocative only when he thought he could afford to, even if he sometimes misjudged.”Footnote ⁹² Laila's insightful analysis puts the beard at the heart of Mo's struggles as a proud American Muslim living in a global city. Her final comment is cutting: “Next you'll shave for them.”Footnote ⁹³

As Waldman's narrative reaches its crux, she turns to one of the key sites for self-reflections on masculinity in American fiction: the barbershop. The barbershop is an iconic public space in American society. It is also a highly charged stage on which the fears and fantasies that underpin the white American male's sense of position in society in relation to race are played out, from Herman Melville's Benito Cereno (1855) to more recent examples such as Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis (2003). The barbershop is such an ideal stage for these issues related to the performance of masculinities due to the literal and figurative closeness between these masculine types – barber and client, white man and black man, perceived superior and servant.Footnote ⁹⁴ Mo, in preparation for his appearance at the public hearing for the selection of “The Garden” as the winner of the memorial competition, decides to go and get groomed for the occasion two days before the big event. In the barbershop, as mythic as it is actual, “tiny and nondescript … an old-school place, an unbrilliantined patch of Manhattan,”Footnote ⁹⁵ Mo asks the barber to “cut it short … neat.”Footnote ⁹⁶ But sitting there, seeing the barber trim the hair he had grown during his Afghanistan trip, “Mo registered every clip as a concession.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Despite his mother's advice to go for a conservative look, Mo argues with himself that he should not “tailor himself to prejudice.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Of course this is exactly what Mo is doing on many levels. The interesting point in this scene is that Mo rejects the barber's offer to shave his beard. This rejection of the public sheering is tellingly symbolic of the struggles that Waldman conveys in the text. It is on the morning of the hearing, however, that Mo stands in front of his bathroom mirror and begins the argument with himself again regarding his beard: “Doing this was practical. No, it was cowardly. It would grow back. It wouldn't be the same. He was in control; he was caving. To do this was smart; no, shameful. ‘Next you'll shave for them.’ Laila's words echoed.”Footnote ⁹⁹ As before, Mo strives to lift himself above the labels that having a beard or not having a beard put on men like him. He is acutely aware of the identity politics that now define the global citizens that inhabit contemporary New York. Moreover, Mo is aware of the centrality of the beard in the performance of masculinity in the public sphere for all American men:

In the contemporary era, it is the Muslim American, a transnational subject, a global citizen in the global city of New York which sits at the heart of the United States, that is now forced to question an activity that men partake in every day, and in turn question how this will impact upon the masculine image that he projects. When Mo finishes shaving he recognizes that he now could be viewed differently, as he looks “younger, wan, weak,” even “boyish,” concluding the fact that “he was humbling himself, maybe only to rob others of the chance to do so.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Again Waldman riffs on the fact that Mo is aware that by shaving or not shaving he cannot win – the beard holds such symbolic weight, at times superficially it must be said, in our everyday readings of the models of masculinity performed by men.

Mo's final reflection secures the paradox of how loaded the beard is symbolically in society, and yet the ultimate futility of concerning oneself with this attempt to project a certain image of masculinity. When, in the courtroom, Mo makes the error of stating that it was man – rather than God – who wrote the Quran, Scott Reiss, a lawyer obsessed with Mo's PR profile, blasts Mo not only for outing himself as a “godless blasphemer,” but, “even worse,” for being “a beardless one.”Footnote ¹⁰² Mo's response ultimately underscores the situation in which the global (American) citizen now finds himself:

The difference with The Submission, therefore, in relation to the initial literary reactions to the changing American landscape following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, is that Waldman recognizes that the beard can no longer be a strict signifier of Otherness; rather it is a site for the playing out of the “shared pain” faced by all men in post-9/11 American society. Mo's control of his masculine image through the beard is outside his grasp; whether he wears it or not he is caught up in performance of identity beyond his intent and beyond his control. To shave is to capitulate; not to shave is to be misunderstood. And Mo is not even sure that he subscribes to the systems of meaning of masculinity from either side. The power of The Submission lies in the fact that it both identifies and underscores the contradictions and complexities that now characterize this “new” contemporary crisis of American masculinity, and that it is experienced by men from all sections of society who are now operating within these interstitial spaces. And, of course, this “crisis” is presented and probed using one of the enduring devices pertaining to the representation of masculinity in the American literary tradition: the beard. As we have seen, the beard is no longer a representation of Otherness; this is a reductive, unhelpful, and, dare we say it, backwards approach by novelists who may see themselves as not merely reflecting on contemporary issues but actively investigating them through their novels. The beard, rather, is emasculating and sexualizing, playful and political. In the current historical moment of pogomania, perhaps upcoming works of American fiction might continue the turn away from the beard as a symbol of absolute Otherness to use it as a tool to write narratives that show how all categories of masculinity, including hegemonic whiteness, must be recognized as something shaped dialectically in relation to the everyday production of race, gender, and sexuality.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ As American literature continues to move beyond the physical borders of the “nation” to see American masculinity as something now performed within global networks, the beard must be recognized as a central trope in conversations on the shared issues that shape the performance of masculinity on the global stage.