1st Edition
Literature and the War on Terror Nation, Democracy and Liberalisation
This book examines cultural imaginations post 9/11. It explores the idea of a religious community and its multifaceted representations in literature and popular culture. The essays in the volume focus on the role of literature, film, music, television shows and other cultural forms in opening up spaces for complex reflections on identities and cultures, and how they enable us to rethink the ‘trauma of familiarity’, post-traumatic heterotopias, religious extremism and the idea of the ‘neighbour’ in post-9/11 literary and cultural imagination. The volume also probes the intersections of religion, popular media, televised simulacrum and digital martyrdom in the wake of 9/11. It also probes the simulation of new- age media images with reference to the creation and dissemination of ‘martyrs’, the languages of grief, religionisation of terrorism, islamophobia, religious stereotypes and the reading of comics in writing the terror.
An essential read, the book reclaims and reinterprets the alternative to a Eurocentric/Americentric understanding of cultural and geopolitical structures of global designs. It will be of great interest to researchers of literature and cultural studies, media studies, politics, film studies and South Asian studies.
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Surveying the Frontiers of Home, Democracy and Belonging in the Literature of War on Terror
Sk Sagir Ali
Part I: Cartographies of Otherness and Strategic Outsiderism in Post 9/11 fictions
1) “An Extravagant and Wheeling Stranger”–Encountering the Muslim as the Neighbour
Shinjini Basu
2) Rewriting the American Narrative of Muslim Men: Ayad Akhtar’s Depiction of Race, Gender, and Masculinity
Nalini Iyer
3) “There is no Israel for Me”: Je Suis Charlie, the Ends of the French Republic, and the Laicistic Contours of Islamophobic Dystopia in Michel Houellebecq’s Submission.
Swayamdipta Das
4) Sinhala Budhist Nationalism and Shrinking Space for Muslims in Sri Lanka: The Post Tamil Elam War and 9/11 Situation
Rajeesh CS
5) The Making of Xenophobia: Migrating from Hatred to Grief in the Novels of Mohsin Hamid
Debamitra Kar
6) Pax Americana! : American Exceptionalism and Salman Rushdie’s Language of State Shayeari Dutta
Part II: Reconfiguring the Contours of Home, Belonging, and the Rights of Conditional Citizenship in Post 9/11 Novels
7) Imagining Citizenship, Democracy and Belonging in Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other
Dangerous Pursuits and Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies
Sk Sagir Ali
8) Globalization, Islamic Machine, and “Critical Localism” in the Aftermath of 9/11
Mosarrap Hossain Khan
9) War, Terror and Migration: Hamid’s Exit West as a Cosmopolitan Novel
Faisal Nazir
Part III: Popular Imagination and the Ideological Representational Apparatus of Western Media and Culture in Post 9/11 Climate
10) Tribute in Light: Memory (Re)Placed
Pinaki De
11) The Radical Sadness of Late-Night Television: The Comedy Talk Show in the Shadow of 9/11
Sudipto Sanyal and Somnath Basu
12) 9/11 and the Supervillain Crisis: A Study of the ‘Terrorist Villain’ and Terrorism in select MCU films
Rohan Hassan
13) Post 9/11 Digital Martyrdom – Digital Ephemera of Ireland and Digital Protest Movement of Bangladesh
Kusumita Datta
Part IV: Locating “Other” Lives and the Unmappable Registers of Precarity in 9/11 Novels
14) Possible Lives, Impossible Times:The Tragic Queer Diasporic Muslim in Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla’s The Exiles
Anil Pradhan
15) You are My Creator, but I am Your Master” : A Reading of Frankenstein in Baghdad as a Postcolonial Pharmakon
Avijit Basak
16) The Trauma of Familiarity: A Very Brief Overview of British-Muslim Writings in the Post 9/11 UK
Pinaki Roy
Index
Biography
Sk Sagir Ali is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Midnapore College (Autonomous), West Bengal, India. His published works include the edited book Religion in South Asian Anglophone Literature: Traversing Resistance Margins and Extremism, Literature and Theory: Contemporary Signposts and Critical Surveys and the monograph Culture, Community and Difference in Select Contemporary British Muslim Fictions (forthcoming).
