The Sleeper Agent in Post-9/11 Media

This book examines the figure of the sleeper agent as part of post-9/11 political, journalistic and fictional discourse. There is a tendency to discuss the terroristic threat after 9/11 as either a faraway enemy to be hunted down by military force or, on the other hand, as a ubiquitous, intangible threat that required constant alertness at home. The missing link between these two is the sleeper agent – the foreign enemy hiding among US citizens. By analyzing popular television shows, several US comic books, and a broad variety of Hollywood films that depict sleeper agents direct or allegorically, this book explores how a shift in perspective—from terrorist to sleeper agent—brings new insights into our understanding of post-9/11 representations of terrorism. The book’s interdisciplinary focus between media studies, cultural studies, and American studies, suggests that it will find an audience in a variety of fields, including historical research, narratology, popular culture, as well asmedia and terrorism studies.
 Vanessa Ossa is Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Applied Science in Cologne, Germany. She is a former member of the Collaborative Research Center 923 “Threatened Order—Societies under Stress,” in Tübingen and co-editor of, “Threat Communication and the US Order after 9/11: Medial Reflections.” Her research focuses on narrative representations of post-9/11 terrorism and transmedial narratology, with a particular interest in films, fictional television, comic books, video games, and related participatory practices.