Equipped with sophisticated technologies, backed by endless data, and seemingly justified by theories of the state, security presents a formidable edifice. Any critical assault on the conceptual architecture of securitization—to say nothing of its actual mechanisms—needs to be waged across several disciplinary fronts. This contention is fundamental to American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability, which argues for the centrality of humanities fields, especially literary criticism, cultural history, and political theory, for understanding the affective force of anxiety and fear in diminishing democratic life. As part of this interdisciplinary effort, I am pleased to have as interlocutors Setha Low and Mark Maguire, whose work in anthropology provides an ethnographic dimension to this endeavor. I am equally pleased that their assessment of American Insecurity highlights the distinctiveness of its contributions to the critique of security. (Confidentially, if crossing disciplinary borders can occasion a bit of trepidation, I am relieved to find out that my book passes muster with practitioners of the social sciences.)

Given the differences in terms of evidence and approach, it is not surprising that the emphases of a literary scholar and two anthropologists might not always align. A subtle instance of this variance might be witnessed in Low and Macguire’s observation that American Insecurity “brings” its insights and “perspective to American history and literature.” There is, of course, nothing wrong with this statement, but I might have inverted it. That is, I would describe the aim of the book as employing American literature, especially the archives of print culture, as a critical tool for interrogating both the everyday practices and the philosophical givens of security discourse. What seems a quibble is really about methodology. Literature is not simply a body of texts that needs to be explained; instead, literature, broadly construed to include everything from novels to Jefferson’s notes to his plantation overseer to articles in the first Black newspaper in the United States, is also that which explains and denaturalizes otherwise ossified formations of state and culture.

This difference in emphasis, I think, accounts for Low and Maguire’s dissatisfaction with the way that the book concludes. While citing the “masterful cultural history” in the book’s final section, they also see a “loss of precision” in the “Epilogue to American Insecurity [which] opens questions and challenges rather than offering conclusions.” Exactly so! Instead of consolidating action items, one goal of humanities critique is to extend interrogation and, above all, to remain skeptical of its own conclusions. The Epilogue to American Insecurity exists as a provocation to continue the work of critique, which the structures of security sorely need. It may be hardly curious, then, that their review here of American Insecurity concludes by circling back to the topics discussed in their book, Trapped, just as earlier they state that researchers and scholars often find it “easy to overlook research that illustrates your argument,” especially when that research is “from another discipline such as anthropology.” This disciplinary signpost, like the varying stress on openness versus conclusions, reminds us that academic discipline is not wholly unrelated to the policing of borders.