This chapter is a brief synoptic essay on American violence. The chapter begins in the post-9/11 era of the “War on Terror” and reflects on the broader history of American violence in dialogue with Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream and the biopolitical linkages of American violence to settler colonialism, slavery, lynching, and violent patterns of masculinity. The chapter poses questions to provoke dialogue among curriculum scholars and teachers on ways to pursue curriculum inquiry that complicates commonsense, institutionalized knowledges associated with the effects of disciplinary power.
