Literature and the War on Terror: Nation, Democracy and Liberalisation [1 ed.] 1032424834, 9781032424835

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Surveying the Frontiers of Home, Democracy and Belonging in the Literature of War on Terror
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
2 Rewriting the American Narrative of Muslim Men: Ayad Akhtar's Depiction of Race, Gender, and Masculinity
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
4 Sinhala Buddhist Nationalism and Shrinking Space for Muslims in Sri Lanka: The Post-Tamil Elam War and Post-9/11 Situation
5 The Making of Xenophobia: Migrating from Hatred to Grief in the Novels of Mohsin Hamid
6 Pax Americana!: American Exceptionalism and Salman Rushdie's Language of State
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
8 Globalization, Islamic Machine, and "Critical Localism" in the Aftermath of 9/11
9 War, Terror and Migration: Hamid's Exit West as a Cosmopolitan Novel
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
11 The Radical Sadness of Late-Night Television: The Comedy Talk Show in the Shadow of 9/11
12 9/11 and the Supervillain Crisis: A Study of the 'Terrorist Villain' and Terrorism in Select MCU Films
13 Post-9/11 Digital Martyrdom – Digital Ephemera of Ireland and Digital Protest Movement of Bangladesh
PART IV: Locating "Other" Lives and the Unmappable Registers of Precarity in Post-9/11 Novels
14 Possible Lives, Impossible Times: The Tragic Queer Diasporic Muslim in Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla’s The Exiles
15 "You are my creator, but I am your master": A Reading of Frankenstein in Baghdad as a Postcolonial Pharmakon
16 The Trauma of Familiarity: A Very Brief Overview of British Muslim Writings in the Post-9/11 U.K.
Index

Citation preview

LITERATURE AND THE WAR ON TERROR

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. 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).

LITERATURE AND THE WAR ON TERROR Nation, Democracy and Liberalisation

Edited by Sk Sagir Ali

Cover image: © Lisa-Blue / Getty Images First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Sk Sagir Ali; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Sk Sagir Ali to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-34854-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-42483-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-36299-9 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003362999 Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

CONTENTS

Contributors ix Acknowledgements xiii Introduction: Surveying the Frontiers of Home, Democracy and Belonging in the Literature of War on Terror Sk Sagir Ali

1

PART I

Cartographies of Otherness and Strategic Outsiderism in Post-9/11 Fictions

17

1 “An extravagant and wheeling stranger” – Encountering the Muslim as the Neighbour 19 Shinjini Basu 2 Rewriting the American Narrative of Muslim Men: Ayad Akhtar’s Depictions of Race, Gender, and Masculinity 32 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 46 Swayamdipta Das

vi Contents

4 Sinhala Buddhist Nationalism and Shrinking Space for Muslims in Sri Lanka: The Post-Tamil Elam War and Post9/11 Situation 59 Rajeesh C. Sarngadharan 5 The Making of Xenophobia: Migrating from Hatred to Grief in the Novels of Mohsin Hamid 68 Debamitra Kar 6 Pax Americana!: American Exceptionalism and Salman Rushdie’s Language of State 77 Shayeari Dutta PART II

Reconfiguring the Contours of Home, Belonging, and the Rights of Conditional Citizenship in Post-9/11 Novels 91 7 Imagining Citizenship, Democracy and Belonging in Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits and Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies 93 Sk Sagir Ali 8 Globalisation, Islamic Machine, and “Critical Localism” in the Aftermath of 9/11 104 Mosarrap Hossain Khan 9 War, Terror and Migration: Hamid’s Exit West as a Cosmopolitan Novel 114 Faisal Nazir PART III

Popular Imagination and the Ideological Representational Apparatus of Western Media and Culture in Post-9/11 Climate

131

10 Tribute in Light: Memory (Re)placed 133 Pinaki De 11 The Radical Sadness of Late-Night Television: The Comedy Talk Show in the Shadow of 9/11 138 Sudipto Sanyal and Somnath Basu

Contents  vii

12 9/11 and the Supervillain Crisis: A Study of the ‘Terrorist Villain’ and Terrorism in Select MCU Films 153 Rohan Hassan 13 Post-9/11 Digital Martyrdom – Digital Ephemera of Ireland and Digital Protest Movement of Bangladesh 173 Kusumita Datta PART IV

Locating “Other” Lives and the Unmappable Registers of Precarity in Post-9/11 Novels

183

14 Possible Lives, Impossible Times: The Tragic Queer Diasporic Muslim in Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla’s The Exiles 185 Anil Pradhan 15 “You Are My Creator, But I Am Your Master”: A Reading of Frankenstein in Baghdad as a Postcolonial Pharmakon 198 Avijit Basak 16 The Trauma of Familiarity: A Very Brief Overview of British Muslim Writings in the Post-9/11 U.K. 212 Pinaki Roy Index 223

CONTRIBUTORS

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). Avijit Basak  is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Maharaja

Manindra Chandra College, under the University of Calcutta, India. He is presently pursuing a PhD from Presidency University on Holocaust literature. His essays have been published from Burdwan University Press, Routledge and Baibhashik, amongst others. Shinjini Basu is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Sir Gurudas

Mahavidyalaya, Kolkata. She did her PhD from the Centre for English Studies (CES), JNU on the relation between crime and colonial modernity. Her areas of interest are literary theories and colonial and postcolonial studies. She has published articles in national and international journals as well as book chapters on translation, postcolonial novel, colonial and postcolonial politics, contemporary theories and culture studies. Somnath Basu  is an Assistant Professor of English at Ramananda College,

Bishnupur (India). He is in the final stages of completion of a doctoral thesis on early modern religious pamphlets and the public sphere. His research interests include early modern literature and culture, crime fiction, textual criticism and the history of the book.

x Contributors

Rajeesh C. Sarngadharan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political

Science, Kristu Jayanti College, Bengaluru, India. He earned a PhD from the Centre for South Asian Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University on the thesis titled ‘Civil-Military Relations in Bangladesh (1971–2012): Continuity and Change’. He has published several research papers with regard to South Asian political system, migration and refugee issues, civil-military relations, gender and labour issues, etc. His research interests include Indian politics and political system, South Asian diplomacy, peace and conflict perspectives in International Relations, ethnic issues, etc. Swayamdipta Das  is currently working as a  Lecturer in the Department of

English at Narasinha Dutt College (University of Calcutta). He received his MA in English from Presidency University, Kolkata. He has published articles and book chapters from various international journals and publishers which include international critical anthologies like Religion in South Asian Anglophone Literature (2021) and Literature and Theory: Contemporary Signposts and Critical Surveys (2022). Kusumita Datta,  Assistant Professor of English, Behala College under the University of Calcutta, is working on her PhD thesis entitled “Ephemera in Literatures and Literary Works of Ireland and Bangladesh: A People’s Metanarrative of Martyrdom” for which she received the Charles Wallace India Trust Research Grant and the Indian Council of Social Science Research Grant for Data Collection Abroad. Her 2022 publications include “The PostIndependence Rehabilitation Displacement: The Birangona Case in Bangladesh” in Understanding Women’s Experiences of Displacement: Literature, Culture and Society in South Asia, Suranjana Choudhury & Nabanita Sengupta’s (eds.) (2021) and “Actants in the ‘Object Donor List’: New Materialities of Martyr Ephemera Archives in the Liberation War Museum of Bangladesh” in Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry, 8(1), 60–84. Pinaki De  is a graphic designer-illustrator who works regularly for renowned

publishers across the globe. He is the winner of the Publishing Next Prize in 2017 and 2019. His book cover for “Kalkatta” by Kunal Basu won the prestigious Oxford Bookstore prize awarded at Jaipur Literature Festival 2017. His layout designs of Satyajit Ray’s books based on the archival manuscripts are important contributions that help to preserve his legacy. A Charles Wallace Trust Fellow, his PhD is in comics theory. He is one of the editors of the prestigious comics anthology “Longform”, published by HarperCollins in 2018 and Penguin in 2022. He is also the Indian comics advisor of Mangasia, the biggest ever exhibition on Asian Comics curated by Paul Gravett for the Barbican, London. His book-length comics on Partition is due next year. He juggles his creative work with a day job as Associate Professor of English at Raja Peary Mohan College, West Bengal.

Contributors  xi

Shayeari Dutta  holds a PhD from the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. In her dissertation, she explored the public intellectual roles played by the authors V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie in their negotiation with issues of caste, class, nationalism, cosmopolitanism and migrancy. She is currently working as an Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Surendranath College, University of Calcutta. Her interest areas include Diasporic Studies, Cultural Studies, World Literature and Politics, with particular focus on Indo-Caribbean diasporic literature and indenture histories of the Caribbean. She has presented papers at national and international conferences. Rohan Hassan is an Assistant Professor of English at Aliah University, Kolkata, India. His PhD thesis was on the late fiction of American novelist Cormac McCarthy. His research interests include contemporary American novel, graphic narratives, climate fiction and post-human studies. He has published in a number of national and international journals, including Europe Now from Columbia University. He is currently working on a project on Ecoprecarity and Disaster Studies. Debamitra Kar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English in Women’s

College, Calcutta, India. She has been awarded a PhD for her work on ‘Conflict Zone Literature’ by the Department of English, University of Calcutta. She has presented papers at both national and international seminars and has published articles in scholarly journals. Her area of interest includes Conflict Management, Trauma Studies, New Historicism and Performance Theory. Mosarrap Hossain Khan is Assistant Professor of English at Jindal Global Law School, O. P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana, India. He completed his doctorate at the Department of English, New York University, USA. His areas of research include South Asian Literature and Culture, Postcolonial Theory, Religion and  Secularism, Theories of Everyday Life, Muslim Life in West Bengal and Bengali Partition Literature. His research articles and reviews have appeared in various books and in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. He is currently working on a translation of Bengali writer Sankha Ghosh’s three partition novellas and an edited book on Muslim life in West Bengal. He has presented his research at the MLA Conference, Princeton University, Harvard University, Presidency University, Kolkata and other institutions. He is a founding-­editor at Café Dissensus. Nalini Iyer is Professor of English at Seattle University. She teaches postcolonial

studies including South Asian and African writing, and courses on postcolonial and transnational feminisms. Her publications include Other Tongues: Rethinking the Language Debates in India (2009), Roots and Reflections: South Asians in the Pacific Northwest (2013) and Revisiting India’s Partition: New Essays in Memory, Culture,

xii Contributors

and Politics (2016). She is currently co-editing with Pallavi Rastogi Teaching South Asian Anglophone Diasporic Literature (forthcoming MLA 2023). She is the Chief Editor of South Asian Review. Faisal Nazir is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English, University of Karachi, where he teaches courses in Literary Theory and Criticism, Postcolonial Literature and Criticism, and World Literature. His first book, Orientalism Post 9/11: Pakistani Anglophone Fiction in an Age of Terror, was published in 2020. He has also contributed a chapter in Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing (2018). He writes mostly about Pakistani Anglophone writing, but his research interests include literature, culture and religion, literature and politics, and literature and ethics. Anil Pradhan  is a PhD candidate and UGC-NET Senior Research Fellow at

the Department of English – Centre of Advanced Study (UGC-CAS), Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. He received his MPhil and MA in English from Jadavpur University and his BA in English from Presidency University, Kolkata. His areas of interest include queer studies, literature and films (with focus on the Indian queer diaspora), and Indian queer literature in English. His research articles have been published in several national and international peer-reviewed journals and webzines. His first book of poems titled Flitting Oddments (2020) has been published by Writers Workshop, Kolkata. Pinaki Roy is Professor of English at Raiganj University (Raiganj, West Bengal, India), where he also officiates as the Dean of Students’ Welfare and the Director of the Course in Film Studies. A former student of Visva-Bharati (1997–2002) and the University of North Bengal (2002–06) and presently a DLitt researcher in war writings (and with a PhD in Postcoloniality of Detective Stories), he has travelled widely to present papers at conferences and seminars, and has published on various literary and historical issues in different international- and national-­ level journals and anthologies. He also campaigns against plastic pollution and is a P.E.T.A. (India) activist since 2004. Sudipto Sanyal is a writer in Kolkata with a PhD in American Culture Studies

from Bowling Green State University, USA. He is on the advisory board of Rhizomes, The Projector and Palgrave Studies in Screen Industries and Performance. In the popular press, he has published in, among others, The Economist, PopMatters, Mekong Review and The Hindu. He hosts a midnight show called Songs of Comfort for Hypochondriacs and Panicking Lovers on Radio Quarantine Kolkata.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Grateful to Almighty Allah for giving me the opportunity to edit this book. The concept of this book partially arises from the International Conference titled “9/11 and the Beginning of the End of Liberal Democracy: Fictional Perspectives” organised by the Department of English, Jadavpur University. I am greatly indebted to Professor Rafat Ali. I am very grateful to Dr Mursed Alam, Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Gour College, University of Gour Banga for reviewing the Introduction of the book and providing me with invaluable advice, support and encouragement. I sincerely thank my learned brother Swayamdipta Das, Lecturer at the Department of English, Narasinha Dutt College, Howrah for critically highlighting the different areas in the book and helping me a lot in developing this volume.

INTRODUCTION Surveying the Frontiers of Home, Democracy and Belonging in the Literature of War on Terror Sk Sagir Ali

The aim of this book is to understand the myriad ways in which the events of 9/11 led to a certain polarisation in geopolitical self-fashioning and the Creolisation of a reactionary ideological register against Islam and the resurgent tide of religion and religious performative in the public sphere. The “war on terror” was an alibi of western modernity to appropriate and otherise the radical elements of a differential realm of being and belonging—something that didn’t subscribe to the post-Enlightenment project of late modernity and its parochial contours of individual identity, progress and idea or civilisation. The events of the 9/11 helped create a historical epoch that would justify events prior to and post the World Trade Centre bombings to create a discursive historical temporal field that would consequently question the markers of religious, and by extension, Islamic revivalism and create a cultural logic that sees Islam being reduced to a mere “culture” rather than a deep religious performative engagement. The book would attempt to understand and highlight the ways in which the geopolitical and cultural logic of this ideological war on terror enunciates in the literary and aesthetic field, while trying to underscore how Islam as a religion and the very connotations of a religious revivalism in the post-secular age might be placed to locate the limitations of the western project of late modernity. Indeed, when U.S. leaders announced the “war against terrorism” they emphasized that it would have to extend throughout the world and continue for an indefinite period, perhaps decades or even generations. A war to create and maintain social order can have no end. It must involve the continuous, uninterrupted exercise of power and violence. (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri 2004:14)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003362999-1

2  Sk Sagir Ali

Terrorism is the biggest threat involving the working registers of the ­postmodern laissez-faire democracy in the world in the post-9/11 geopolitical climate. While imagining the horrors of a new world order that invokes the dominant discourses of the “war on terror” while perpetuating the facade of liberal democratic ­subsystems in the form of western norms, authority, neglect, violation and stereotype, the need for a radical political and cultural alternative must no longer tread the hackneyed ideological paths laid by postcolonial monolithists and anti-colonial ultranationalists. After the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the so-called “clash of civilizations” thesis as advocated by Huntington to align the narrative of world politics with Eurocentric conceptions of democracy and secularism sheds lights on the diverse understanding of the history of civilisations in the age of globalisation (Huntington 1993: 22–49). As Noam Chomsky points out, Huntington’s discourse is coterminous with US geopolitical determinism and its desire to reify its spatio-political domination over Afghanistan and the Middle East in terms of a civilising zeal. The cataclysmic events of 11 September, a watershed phenomenon that not only challenged the preconceived notion of the triumph of liberal democracy but also shook the very foundations of western temporal and relational negotiations in foregrounding the mutual exclusivity in a problematic constitutive of the possible discontents of liberalisation (Chomsky 2014: 37–39). The End of History and the Last Man by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama is a document where one recoils into despair and cynicism for not receiving any sign from history and its developments (Fukuyama 1992). On the other hand, French phenomenologist Emmanual Levinas in his essay “The Trace of the Other” opposed the idea of sign to the idea of “trace” and illustrated the same as a disturbance that splits the referent logic of sign or “being in the world” in Heidegger. According to Levinas, “trace” is nudity of other’s face or the inadvertent trails left by a criminal which essentially has no business in the meaning making global world. The happening of 9/11 as a “trace of the other” of liberal democracy brings down the meaning making triumph of liberalism with a profound misunderstanding of Levinas conception of the face and the role vision plays in his work (Levinas 1986: 345–359). In this scheme of things, the event of 9/11 provides fecund grounds to absolve the collective self of the responsive responsibility to gesture towards the radical “face of the other” and thereby indulge in an elaborate performative that merely reduces the “other” to the familiar grounds of the ipseity of the “self ”. This “global symbolic event” to Jean Baudrillard not only has global repercussions but questioned the very process of globalisation (Baudrillard 2002: 3). It has changed the landscape, mindscape and capitalscape of the US and the whole world. The whole world shook in fear of the globalised terrorism or “Ladenism” (Ilaiah 2007: 23–26), and it has destroyed the confidence of capitalism itself. The immediate responses to the event were diverse in nature: several critics argued the role of religious fundamentalism, some viewed it as a return march or opposite reaction to the growing capitalism, the growing injustice and inequality, and also, as the fall of the greatest form of ideological hegemony (Baudrillard 2002: 11–12).

Introduction  3

Some critics even went to the extreme of describing the disaster as the “­u ltimate work of art” (Žižek 2002: 16), or even as the fantasies of Hollywood-cum-real (Baudrillard 2002; Virilio 2002; Žižek 2002). The work of fantasy remains implicated in generating the simulation of an ideological landscape premised upon the monstrosity of the “other”. What is also important here is the understanding of modern power through the concepts of bare life, sovereignty and the global nexus of power that is operational in the Empire (Negri and Hardt 2000). Giorgio Agamben continues to conceive of modern power through the figure of a sovereign. Sovereign power is usually territorially bound (i.e. a nation or a state usually has sovereign), but power under late capitalism functions through a deterritorialised, international flow which cannot be bound by the territorialising grasp of a sovereign (Agamben 1995). Power, imagined thus, is not synonymous with the visible registers of sovereign hegemony- it rather becomes an affective realm that can never be grasped within a top-down conceptual register. This is the precise point that Judith Butler makes in Who Sings the Nation-state? Language, Politics, Belonging, when she says, that Agamben’s model cannot account for power in the Guantanamo Bay (detention camp is outside the territory of the United States), which is why, the theory of sovereignty cannot explain the form of power at work there (Butler and Chakravorty 2007). Moreover, the “War on Terror” was not only a question to the measured menace and ostensible risks, rather the Iraq invasion, the destruction of Falluja, the Abu Ghraib abuses, the Guantanamo prison camp construe the practice of further acts of terrorism with the “obscene enjoyment” (Žižek 1989: 90–91) of fascism.

Formation of the Risk-Societies and the Sliding Signifiers of the Precarious Self Through the mobilisation of fear alongside the unsettling display of formidable sovereign power in envisaging the pleasures and risk with the uncanny elements of the crony capitalist economy, Western liberal democracies with the end of the Cold War and biopolitical power adhere to the uncanniness of the “war of terror”. Assessing what it might mean to the politics of precautionary risk to its circulation value and the articulations of risk and “risk consciousness” (Beck 1992: 34) under the rise of liberal traumatised subject within the context of the “War on Terror”, Jean Baudrillard aptly contends regarding the September 11, 2001: “The fact that we have dreamed of this event, that everyone without exception has dreamt of it – because no one can avoid dreaming of the destruction of any power that has become hegemonic to this degree – is unacceptable to the Western moral conscience” (Baudrillard 2002:5). What Baudrillard professes is the unconscious sincerity—the flurry of dreams and the important insights into the unconscious consciousness of risk and the “War on Terror”. And the shift to Risk Society from the Industrial one with the political and industrial narratives, Ulrich Beck harbours on the fallacy of the historical past in paving the way for the “European global domestic policy” and “ecological enlightenment”

4  Sk Sagir Ali

(Beck 1999: 69–70). The “War on Terror” with its ontological anxiety, as Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen finds, palpably present in the Western consciousness in the 1990s and the lack of clear revelation from al-Qaeda on the purpose behind the attack on the Twin Towers construes the framework of globalisation that influences the Western framings of post-Cold War world order and the Western anxieties. Here Rasmussen’s version of justification is worth quoting: This way of constructing 9/11 shows the reflexive nature of security policy in the late modern age. The new reflexivity manifested itself in the conclusion that even the U.S. had become a vulnerable ‘risk society.’ […] Terrorism is regarded as an inherent risk in modern sociability because it is constructed as the negative consequence of the globalization process. The very process by which the West is believed to be transcending the modes of conflict and production of the 20th Century thus entails the creation of new threats and new modes of conflict. (Rasmussen 2002: 327) Rasmussen’s framework of the declared and undeclared and the known and unknown which forms the crux of globalisation with imperialist consciousness makes a sense of breach between the knowledge of “structural risks” and the apprehension of these risks about the subject at risk. As Baudrillard and Rasmussen establish a sense of foreboding risk before 9/11 under the global political order of variable power relations, the “globalization” process emerged out of the innumerable phenomenon linked with the end of the Cold War finds a bodily tension in the proclamations of Western leaders as President Bush after the 9/11 attacks announced that the “barbarians had declared war” (Rasmussen 2002: 333) only to create “us” and “them” with the gloomy side of globalisation and cultural convictions of superiority. Phenomenologically, the shifting realms of “us” and “them” attracts the ­essence of the popular refrain—“Why do they hate us so much?” And this is explicitly showcased by Mohsin Hamid in The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) with the disorientation between the fantasy and the substantiality of globalisation under the rubric of terror/fear. With Changez we can palpably feel the racialisation and segregation, as the narrator in the text recapitulates his life and times in New York, It was a testament to the open-mindedness and – that overused word – c­ osmopolitan nature of New York in those days that I felt completely comfortable on the subway in this attire [“a starched white kurta of delicately worked cotton over a pair of jeans”]. Indeed, no one seemed to take much notice of me at all. (Hamid 2007: 55) Hamid also begins his narrative: “I was a New Yorker with a city at my feet. How soon that would change!” (51) to suggest the shifting frames of paranoia

Introduction  5

and identity in post-9/11 America with the fetishised harnessing of strange and visceral emotions. Here, the repercussions of global politics of fear as a repressed unconscious risk proffers the calculus of anxiety/risk—reinvigorating the sign of imperialism, as Ahmed argues that Bush “turns the act of terror into an act of war, which would seek to eliminate the source of fear and transform the world into a place whereby the mobility of some capital and some bodies becomes the sign of freedom and civilisation” (Ahmed 2004: 73). The affective and shared phenomenological inclination to the joy of killing the aliens with the pleasures of risk, or what Žižek has succinctly put as the “unknown knowns” (Žižek 2006: 52), becomes a strange imperative. Drawing on Žižek’s foregrounding of anti-Semitism, it can be argued that fundamentalist activities in proximity to Islam has been “invested with our unconscious desire” and this particularities transport us “to escape a certain deadlock of desire” with the threatening of all substantive bonds of liberal democratic essence, what he finds as the “pathological stain” of democracy, that fail to deliver its belonging and subscription to a nation-state unprejudiced. (Žižek’s 1989: 48). The desire-machine works in tandem with the spectres of modernity—it embodies a duality and irresolvable aporia at the heart of the project of the western nation-state. In his State of the Union address in the aftermath of 9/11, President George W. Bush said, “Freedom is at risk and America and our allies must not, and will not, allow it” (“Text of President Bush” Washington Post 2002). Here the rhetorical explanation of the narrative between the people’s freedom and the terrorists’ hatred of it finds a structural alterity in his other address to an anti-terrorism summit of Central and Eastern European leaders held in November 2001. Bush categorically exhorts the dangers inherent by proclaiming that “given the means, our enemies would be a threat to every nation and, eventually, to civilization itself ” (“Transcript” Washington Post 2001). Bush’s narrative about Islam and the Western civilisation stands as a totem of the “pleasures of risk” (Lacan 2006: 52) in the Lacanian “jouissance” with the unconscious fantasies under the structures of desire of the “post-political biopolitics” (Žižek Violence 2009: 34) as the central concern of politics. Žižek has expounded the crisis of liberalism at the end of the Cold War in the same way Francis Fukuyama laments the passing of ideology, identity and recognition in the age of post-politics, The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination and idealism, will be replaced by an economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-history period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. (Fukuyama 1989: 17–18)

6  Sk Sagir Ali

The official rhetoric and disastrous provocations of state leaders weaponise the stakes of the War on Terror by validating the ceaseless war narrative of civilisation and the civilised. Mohsin Hamid in “Discontent and Its Civilizations,” unsettles Samuel P. Huntington’s pre-9/11 postulation that civilisations adhered by religion and ethnicity rather than political ideology of nation-states, will define the essence of global politics in the 21st century. These notions of civilisations “are illusions, but these illusions are pervasive, dangerous, and powerful. They contribute to globalisation’s brutality. They allow us, for example to say that we believe in global free markets and, in the same breath, to discount as impossible the global free movement of labor” (Hamid 2015: 8). Representationally conflated with Huntington as what they (both Bush and Huntington) uphold the values of Western civilisation, the disavowal of cultural realm under civilised/ uncivilised construction of civilisational taboo that enforces the hate of the other smouldering as a cultural legacy of late-modern Europe testifies to a shift in the orientation of the assimilative forces of secular modernity.

States of Exception and the Un-Doing of the Democratic Nation-State The Western liberal democracy with its prophecy of secular democracy draws a battle-line of structural correspondence of power domination in enunciating the impossibility of social democracy with the rise of illiberal, racist and xenophobic discourses. The frameworks of authoritarian populisms with a right-wing and racialist identity politics become the global dominant mode led by the USA and its allies. The new “politics of fear” in Europe opens up spaces to transcend the authoritarian regimes and states of exception hand in hand with the processes of exclusionary politics towards the direction of post-liberal de-democratisation. As Ruth Wodak argues, we observe a normalization of nationalistic, xenophobic, racist and anti-­ Semitic rhetoric, which primarily works with ‘fear’: fear of change, of globalization, of loss of welfare, of climate change, of changing gender roles; in principle, almost anything can be constructed as a threat to ‘Us’, an imagined homogenous people inside a well-protected territory. (Wodak 2010: X) Wodak argues how nationalistic, xenophobic, and racist European populist right-wing political rhetoric works in normalising the public fear of threats to the construct of “us”. The social construction in designing the policies of the War on Terror is deeply enmeshed in newly racial profiling and detention of Muslim men after the 2001 attacks, the use of the Guantanamo Bay prison to house Muslim men, the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, the domestic surveillance programme Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), and

Introduction  7

countless other practices and programmes. Within the underpinnings of visibility and surveillance, the US used drones as a means of surveillance in the 1990s and as a weaponised material into the War on Terror immediately after the 9/11 attacks (Sabbagh 2019). In the name of freedom, democracy, enlightenment and war on terror, the military campaign was launched into Iraq and Afghanistan with a minimal theoretical proposition for democracy appearing to have a strong empirical support. The essentialism of constructed discourses of “democracy” and “sharīʿa’” registers the genealogies of violence in an attempt to erode the spaces of democracy with plausible deniability. The consideration of natural incompatibility of Islam within the larger framework of freedoms of Western democracy fosters authoritarian nationalism and a paradigmatic shift in addressing the normative questions of modernity from an intercultural perspective where the ideas of religious and secular separations are derived exclusively from the Western perspectives. The trajectory of “multiple modernities”, habitus and belief systems become the major concern for neopopulist, nationalist nation-state in propagating Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and social anxiety with stranger animosity, hate speeches, violence and the politics of fear in the public sphere. While the military expedition in Iraq and Afghanistan was an extension of the crude monolingual logic of late modernity, the upholding of the same in the name of democracy and freedom evokes the uncanny at the heart of the cosmopolitan empathy machine wherein events of absolute violence are co-opted within a framework that suits the public opinion sphere back home. The spatial and temporal boundaries between Islam and the West emanate within the discursive axioms of aggressive nationalism and religious ideologies in the existing cartographies of violence. This illustrates how the use of violence in the Arendtian sense can never be legitimate as it stands in direct opposition to power. The latter is structured as the human ability to function in concert and be in survival as long as the group keeps together. Arendt moreover argues, “power needs no justification, being inherent in the very existence of political communities; what it does need is legitimacy” (Arendt 1970: 52). Coming together, violence and power, Arendt contends that power can never grow out of the barrel of the gun: “where violence is no longer backed and restrained by power […] the means, of destruction, now determine the end – with the consequence that the end will be the destruction of all power” (Arendt 1970: 54). Consequently, power and violence are binary axioms, and while violence can pull down power, it can never produce it. Moreover, as a double-act and a rooted phenomenon embedded in history, violence and the fiendish nexus of counter-violence can easily be applied to the context of 9/11. Osama bin Laden draws his inspiration for attacking the Twin Towers in New York City by watching on television the towers of Lebanon burn during the Siege of Beirut in 1982, and the act of violence perpetrated by Israel, as mentioned in one of his speeches in 2004 (bin Laden 2004). The 1998 Cato report shaped a beginning cycle of violence between the US and bin Laden in the 1990s

8  Sk Sagir Ali

(Eland 1998) and the twin tower attacks can be seen as part of a violent cycle. Therefore, the workings of violence, do not nullify each other, rather, “they simply accumulate, added on to previous acts, creating the violent debris of history” (Young 2010: 3) Drenched in history, violence cannot be condensed into an exclusive monolithic measure, “for its form is already dialectical, split between subject and object in a world cut in two” (Young 2010: 4). To Robert Young, the interpolation of violence is neither a material phenomenon, nor a spiritual one. It does not erupt from just anywhere, nor from nowhere, and though often senseless in a colloquial sense, it is rarely without any kind of meaning, because it emerges as a response to a situation that has already been given meaning. It’s for this reason that it is rare that one meaning or another cannot be produced from it, or that meaning cannot be attached to it metaphorically, as in the phrase ‘epistemic violence’. (2010: 2) Consequently, juxtaposing of numerous temporal frameworks in one moment in time with politico-historical dominant referent of epistemic topography unsettle the pathologies of dominant extremism and contemporary violence. As a corollary, the hermeneutics of global interconnectedness of power, violence and democracy oscillate between close-ups caught in the registering of localised warfare and the planetary gaze that frames these mayhem of violence. Fukuyama in 1989 argued about “the total exhaustion of viable alternatives to Western liberal- ism” (1) and further maintained that “the class issue has actually been successfully resolved in the West” (8) in the later years 9/11 wars which features the resurgence of class politics with the mammoth political and economic crises in global North (Fukuyama 1989). In The Global 1989, a collection of essays by some scholars of repute like Fukuyama and Rorty in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall find a sense of disorientation into the triumphalist narrative of the victory of liberal democracy. Liberal democracy does not get a foothold of the symbiotic relationship in the global South though it appears victorious in several Eastern European countries. In The Global 1989 volume, Richard Saull asserts that “1989 is not the historical root of contemporary world politics tout court, at least not when viewed from the vantage point of the global South” (181, emphasis in original). Though 1989 emerges as a territorial threshold of European structural discourse, the contemporary era is a dynamic one since it unfurls the fissures between the recent past and the immediate future which shapes its immediate horizons. And these horizons are constantly in motion as we can find our immediate past through its roots in the present with reference to the 9/11 warfare after the 2008 global financial crisis. With the emergence of the right-wing regimes across the globe, what Alla Ivanchikova opines, “we might be less eager to accept the triumphalist narrative of the 1989” (Ivanchikova 2019: 104).

Introduction  9

Home, Belonging and Compulsory Patriotism Following the War on Terror Following the events of September 2001, the notion of home and the affect of being-at-home registers the formative production of unapologetic homogenous belonging, and this evokes a new structure of adherence of compulsory patriotism where allegiance is not only demanded but also watched at. This compulsion of being communitarian destabilises and alters the sociopolitical landscape of the strata of citizenship across the globe especially in US and Europe. The dilemma of secure belonging undermines the viability of “homes” and problematises the hitherto unsettled conceptualisation of the homeland and the spatial realm of the home. Drawing on the echoes of cultural surveillance and the non-Muslim fear of Muslims that serve as background of extremist versions of national-political policies and the barring from modernity by virtue of being subscribed to Islam, every Muslim are now overburdened with the inherent proposition of guilt and the essence of “other within”. As Mamdani holds that post-9/11 “all Muslims were now under obligation to prove their credentials by joining in a war against ‘bad Muslims’” (Mamdani 2004: 15) and Muslims are showcased as culturally pre-modern and “inclined to terror” (18). Saturated with multiple insecurities that manifest themselves, the moulds of heterogeneous topographies of democracy provide a framework of the (im)possibilities of a liveable life with the intersections of the dynamics of symbolic and structural violence of the power of nation-state. While the discursive trope of structural violence exacerbates the ontological Muslim precariousness, the stronghold of liberal democracy dominated by the Global War on Terror with reference to post-9/11 mediates the porosity of human life with differential exposure to violence. Drawing on Lefebvrian notion of spatiality, we can understand how capitalist social space is produced by the interplay of symbolic, structural, and direct violence in homogenising the spatial moulds of a “good life” to the abstract domination of capital (Lefebvre 1991, 2009). The process of precarisation that is affectively engraved onto the subjective lives of people inhabiting these spaces foregrounds and co-produces the undercurrent Lefebvrian concern of political promise of difference which inhabits within the contradictions of abstract space, as well as Jacques Rancière’s (1999, 2001) conceptualisation of dissension politics which ruptures the violent and spatial homogenising structure of social life by enabling the section recognisable earlier excluded in the hierarchical space. To Rancière, “politics exists through the fact of a magnitude that escapes ordinary measurement, this part of those who have no part that is nothing and everything” (Rancière 1999: 15). The modalities of precarisation demonstrate the dangers of constructing the myopic visions of home within the presumed nationalist allegiances where the affect subjects are enmeshed in the emergence of cultural encounters under the assertion of nationalisms around them. This negotiation of consciousness in the post-9/11 sociopolitical landscape with the disavowal of

10  Sk Sagir Ali

subjectivity what Grewal finds as “transnational connectivities”. She aptly puts that: 9/11 does not mark a break, but a fulfilment of some of the directions taken by neoliberal American nationalism, in particular the articulation of a consumer nationalism, the link between geopolitics and biopolitics, and the changing and uneven gendered, racial and multicultural subjects produced within transnational connectivities. (Grewal 2005: 197) The strange encounter after 9/11 with the radical Other within “violent geographies” (Gregory and Pred 2006) and the moral panic around Muslims and migrants in US and Europe configured the ontologies of Anthropocenic Western Modernity. Moral panic and anxiety which trigger the monstrification of Muslims and migrants—the post-9/11 enemy within produces a semiotic terrain grounded on the concept of Povinelli’s notion of geontopower which describes “a set of discourse, affects, and tactics used in late liberalism to maintain or shape the coming relationship of the distinction between Life and Nonlife” (Povinelli 2016: 17). The cartographies of “home” in post-9/11 USA and Europe absolute the shifting boundaries with stranger fetishism, as Sara Ahmed argues that “‘cutting off’ of figures from the social and material relations which overdetermine their existence, and the consequent perception that such figures have a ‘life of their own’. Stranger fetishism is a fetishism of figures: it invests the figure of the stranger with a life of its own insofar as it cuts “the stranger’ off from the histories of its determination” (Ahmed 2000: 5). The uneasy quest for a sense of self and belonging comes together with an alternative ontology of the traditional renderings of home in foregrounding the anxiety of “cosmopolitan stranger” (Rumford 2013: 17)—the figure of Muslim and immigrant monster in the Global Age. Central to the semiotic construction of supposed difference, the experience of belongingness, the connotations of home, belonging, democracy and patriotism demonstrate the renderings of ambivalent sense of spatial oppositions marked by national allegiance, subjectivity and the framing of “we” and “they”. The changing contours of culture and representations in the United States and in Europe after 9/11, contends Judith Butler, revel our “fundamental dependency on anonymous others […]. No security measure will foreclose this dependency; no violent act of sovereignty will rid the world of this fact”. Butler goes further by saying that, even though “there are ways of distributing vulnerability, differential forms of allocation that make some populations more subject to arbitrary violence than others” (Butler 2004: xii), to date ample measures, political and public consciousness are not executed to the reality so that the process of violence and counter-violence shove us to the strange vulnerability of fear and anxiety. This book is divided into four sections. “Part I: Cartographies of Otherness and Strategic Outsiderism in Post-9/11 Fictions” contains six important essays. The first one, “‘An extravagant and wheeling stranger’ – Encountering the Muslim as the Neighbour” by Shinjini Basu delves deep into the changing

Introduction  11

contours of the Neighbour in post-9/11 representation of Muslims taking into account Martin Amis’ The Second Plane (2007), a collection of essays and short stories, Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2011), a fiction and Sand Opera (2015), a collection of poems by Philip Metres. Nalini Iyer in her essay, “Rewriting the American Narrative of Muslim Men: Ayad Akhtar’s depiction of Race, Gender, and Masculinity” investigates Akhtar’s depiction of Muslim American masculinity and examines the intersections of race, immigration law, and familial relationships as they shape this identity, whereas Swayamdipta Das attempts to understand the thematic parallels that occur between the identity politics that creolised in the form of “Je suis Charlie” protests in France in 2015 and the particular politico-ontological contours of Islamophobic dystopia as depicted in Michel Houellebecq’s novel, Submission. The fourth essay titled, “Sinhala Buddhist Nationalism and Shrinking Space for Muslims in Sri Lanka: The PostTamil Elam War and Post-9/11 Situation” by Rajeesh CS examines the intensity of present Sinhala Muslim rivalry with its historical roots that is formation of ethnic identity and the emergence of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism and Muslim identity in the late 19th century and the early phase of the conflict that culminated in the 1915 anti-Muslim riots that were brutally suppressed by the British. It explores the level of anti-Muslim sentiment and violence and new phase of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism and Muslim identity in post-Tamil Elam war and 9/11 attacks. “The Making of Xenophobia: Migrating from Hatred to Grief in the Novels of Mohsin Hamid” by Debamitra Kar showcases how Xenophobia should no longer be seen as a separate political issue but examined from a holistic perspective that should take into account the question of moral rectitude in human interaction and behaviour. The last essay of the first section, “Pax Americana!: American Exceptionalism and Salman Rushdie’s Language of State” by Shayeari Dutta traces the specific “language of state” in Rushdie’s non-­ fictional works and his “American novels” pertaining to the ideological linkages between attacks on a lone artist and attacks on the most powerful nation of the neoliberal global order. This also problematises Rushdie’s rationalising of America’s War on Terror and by extension the imagined temporal limits with a focus on the historicity of the “Good Fight” rhetoric predicated on a sanctified notion of UK-US’s “special friendship” during World War II and post-9/11. “Part II: Reconfiguring the Contours of Home, Belonging, and the Rights of Conditional Citizenship in Post-9/11 Novels” also houses some thought-­proving essays. Sk Sagir Ali explores the conflicted place in US society through the multifaceted framings of citizenship and shifting temporalities of Laila Lalami and Ayad Akhtar’s minutiae of democracy, human rights and belonging with a yearning for home and homeliness. Whereas the next essay, “Globalization, Islamic Machine, and ‘Critical Localism’ in the Aftermath of 9/11” by Mosarrap Hossain Khan argues how the theories of globalisation that predicted declining sovereignty of the nation-state is reversed in the wake of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center in America. This paper makes an attempt to theorise counter-globalisation movements within the framework of local and nationalist

12  Sk Sagir Ali

aspirations. Faisal Nazir’s essay, “War, Terror and Migration: Hamid’s Exit West as a Cosmopolitan Novel”, critiques Hamid’s novel for largely ignoring a third kind of experience—of refugees within the nation—which is also a genuinely lived experience of a large number of people displaced by war and terror, and also analyses how postcolonial literature has made a shift from the elite to the poor, from the migrant to the exile, from settler to asylum seeker, in its narrative focus. The book’s third section, “Part III: Popular Imagination and the Ideological Representational Apparatus of Western Media and Culture in Post-9/11 Climate” begins with Pinaki De’s essay, “Tribute in Light: Memory (Re)Placed”, that seeks to read the iconic “Tribute in Light” installation through the critique of “Les Lieux de mémoire” (translated as “site of memory”), a key term introduced by the French historian, Pierre Nora. It shows how places of memory are intimately tied to the way the consciousness of a nation is manipulated and moulded through consensus which helps to create an imagined unity when none such exists in lived reality. Sudipto Sanyal and Somnath Basu in their essay, “The Radical Sadness of Late-Night Television: The Comedy Talk Show in the Shadow of 9/11”, examine the dynamics of liberal democracy and the contradictions that underlie the way in which late-night comedy talk shows (with a so-called “liberal” bias) aired in the U.S. attempt to come to terms with the way in which Muslims are perceived by U.S. Americans in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the conflict in West Asia, and ultimately, the rise of the Islamic State and Donald Trump. Rohan Hassan attempts to trace the shifting trajectory of superhero comics vis-à-vis 9/11 and explores how this pop-cultural phenomenon have been instrumental in reassessing the socio-cultural impact of such an event both at a local as well a global level. Along with such a study, this paper also attempts to understand the changing implications of the notion of the “superhuman” as explored within the post9/11 narrative corpuses of the aforementioned comics. Kusumita Datta focuses on delineating not only the boundaries of an act of martyrdom but also traces its percolation to the masses. Furthermore, representational modes of the digital will enable an understanding of martyrdom at the level of the grassroots in the wake of the 9/11 War on Terror through ritualistic martyrdom, simulated martyrdom, cyber martyrdom, world martyrdoms, cultural martyrdom, gendered martyrdom and solidarity martyrdom. “Part IV: Locating ‘Other’ Lives and the Unmappable Registers of Precarity in 9/11 Novels” deals with three significant essays. “Possible Lives, Impossible Times: The Tragic Queer Diasporic Muslim in Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla’s The Exiles” by Anil Pradhan analyses and problematises the intersections of the religious, the racial, the sexual, and the transnational in order to explicate Dhalla’s literary politics of the possible lives and/but the impossible times that narrativise the negotiations by/of a queer diasporic Muslim man in post-9/11 America. Taking cues from trauma theory, deconstruction, Levinasian and post-Levinasian ethics, and Deleuzian idea of fragmented body, Avijit Basak portrays how Frankenstein in Baghdad is not only an anti-oedipal text, but it raises serious issues of ethics,

Introduction  13

bonhomie, and post-humanist idea of democracy, while being a trenchant critique of unjust colonialist aggression, war, and destruction of a society where the seemingly innocuous act of storytelling is a powerful act of transgression and subversion. The last essay, “The Trauma of Familiarity: A Very Brief Overview of British Muslim Writings in the Post-9/11 U.K.” by Pinaki Roy, unfurls the select works by Tariq Ali, Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali, Mohsin Hamid, Zahid Hussain, Kamila Shamsie, and Tahmina Anam in order to identify different aspects of alienation as felt by these British Muslim authors in their adopted/own country in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks. The collection as a whole attempts to gesture towards the alterity of transcultural space beyond the relational identity, imagined Orientalism and Occidentalism which reaches its peak in 9/11 and subscribes to reclaim and reinterprets the alternative to a Eurocentric/American-centric understanding of cultural and geopolitical structures of global designs. Central to the invariably frames of ontological East and peremptory West, the excruciating spatial practices of “cultural racism” (Modood 2007: 9) abandon the progressive elements within liberal traditions of the West by waging teleological aspect of war on terrorism and counterterrorist violence. Liberal democracies through the frames of space, violence, and political topographies of abhorrent Communism or Islamism foreground the vicissitudes of biopolitical regimes of governmentality (Butler 2004) in understanding the pervasive fallacy of interpolating people with an entrenchment of increased risk, radical militarisation of everyday life. The looming disaster, thus, connotes the documentation of human suffering in the conflict zones of victimhood through the unstable relations of neoliberal exploitation and the exclusion of people across the globe. As Arendt concludes, “the practice of violence, like all action changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world” (Arendt 1970: 80).

References Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. Ahmed, Sara. Strange Encounters. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2000. ———. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004. Arendt, Hannah. On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc, 1970. Baudrillard, Jean. The Spirit of Terrorism. Translated by Chris Turner. New York: Verso, 2002. Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London; Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1992. ———. World Risk Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999. bin Laden, O. Full transcript of bin Ladin’s speech, 2004. www.aljazeera.com/arch ive/2004/11/200849163336457223.html Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York and London: Verso, 2004. Butler, Judith, and Spivak, G. Chakravorty. Who Sings the Nation-State? New York: Seagull, 2007.

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Chomsky, Noam. Democracy and Power. The Delhi Lectures. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2014. Eland, Ivan. Does U.S. Intervention Overseas Breed Terrorism? Washington, DC: CATO Institute, 1998. Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History?” The National Interest, 16 (Summer): 1–18, 1989. ———. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: The Free Press, 1992. Grewal, Inderpal. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2005. Gregory, Derek, and Pred, Allan. Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2006. Hamid, Mohsin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. London: Penguin, 2007. Hardt, Michael, and Negri, Antonio. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin, 2004. Huntington, Samuel P. “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs, 72, no. 3: 22–49, Summer 1993. ———. “My Foreign Correspondence,” in Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore. New York and London: Riverhead, 2015. Ilaiah, Kancha. Buffalo Nationalism: A Critique of Spiritual Fascism. Kolkata: Samya, 2007. Ivanchikova, Alla. Imagining Afghanistan: Global Fiction and Film of the 9/11 Wars. Purdue University Press: West Lafayette, Indiana, 2019. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Blackwell: Oxford, 1991. ———. State, Space, World: Selected Essays. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press. 2009. Levinas, Emmanuel. “The Trace of the Other.” Translated by Alphonso Lingis. In Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy, edited by Mark C. Taylor, 345–359. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Mamdani, Mahmood. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror. New York: Pantheon, 2004. Modood, Tariq. Multiculturalism. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Negri, Antonio and Hardt, Michael. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Povinelli, Elizabeth. Geontologies. A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016. Rancière, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. ———. “Ten Theses on Politics”, Theory & Event, 5, no. 3: 1–33, 2001. Rasmussen, Mikkel Vedby. “‘A Parallel Globalization of Terror’: 9–11, Security and Globalization,” Cooperation and Conflict, 37, no. 3: 323–349, 2002. Rumford, Chris. The Globalization of Strangeness. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Sabbagh, Dan. “Killer Drones: How Many Are There and Who Do They Target?,” Guardian, November 18, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/nov/18/ killer-drones-how-many-uav-predator-reaper “Text of President Bush’s 2002 State of the Union Address,” Washington Post, January 29, 2002, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/onpolitics/transcripts/sou012902. htm “Transcript: Bush Addresses Warsaw Conference,” Washington Post, November 6, 2001, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/ transcripts/ bush_text110601.html

Introduction  15

Virilio, Paul. Ground Zero. Trans. Chris Turner. London and New York: Verso, 2002. Wodak, Ruth. The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean. London: Sage, 2010. Young, Robert. The Violent State. Naked Punch Supplement, 2010. https://issuu. comnaked_punch_review/docs/supplementyoung Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso, 1989. ———. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso, 2002. ———. How to Read Lacan. London: Granta Books, 2006. ———. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books, 2009.

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

After the Oklahoma Bombings of 1995, the electronic media in the USA went into a competitive frenzy to find out ‘Middle-Eastern’ connections to it – a thinly veiled attempt to look for Muslim perpetrators. When one ‘John Doe’ emerged as the prime suspect, it was a tell-tale sign that the suspect was a White American; a Muslim man would never be referred by this common name for the American Everyman. When the John Doe turned out to be Timothy McVeigh, a White American right-wing survivalist, ‘the old line from the Pogo cartoon strip came to mind: “We have met the enemy –and he is us”’, Jonathan Alter, a columnist for the Newsweek wrote sarcastically (Alter 1995: https://www.­newsweek. com/jumping-conclusions-181456). He continued, Who can deny that it would have been emotionally easier if foreigners had done it? Had ‘They’ been responsible, as so many suspected, the grief and anger could have been channeled against a fixed enemy, uniting the country as only an external threat can do. We might have ended up in war, but what a cathartic war it would have been! Or so it felt, in brief spasms of outrage, to more Americans than would care to admit it. And if we couldn’t identify a country to bomb, at least we could have the ­comfort of ­k nowing that the depravity of the crime - its subhuman quality –was the  product of another culture unfathomably different from our own. (Ibid.) America finally did have its ‘cathartic war’ after 2001; but, ‘they’ were no longer located only outside, ‘they’ were also inside, living side by side yet marked by a new strangeness. In fact, ‘they’ were always inside-out. Even after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre by a group of Muslim men, all Muslims in

DOI: 10.4324/9781003362999-3

20  Shinjini Basu

the US turned into automatic suspects. As the title of the opinion piece would suggest, Alter’s main problem is not with the us/them binary per se; his outrage stems from a liberal expectation of judicious deployment of the binary and tolerance shown towards ‘them’. However, as Slavoj Žižek puts it, “This ‘tolerant’ attitude fails to perceive how contemporary power no longer primarily relies on censorship, but on unconstrained permissiveness….” (Žižek2005:134). It hardly challenges the founding assumptions that have made tolerance the only possible mode of political engagement with the other without destabilising, without even addressing the existing relations of production of the other. One wonders at the possibility of disrupting the unlimited permissiveness of the rhetoric of tolerance by locating limits – boundaries that can give one an arcane glimpse into the self-other dyad in Western metaphysics. The neighbour is such a liminal category, dangerously proximal yet inscrutable. Encountering the neighbour can be a stratagem of civic cohabitation, but it can also lead one to an ethical enquiry into the nature of subjectivity and collectivity. An ‘encounter’ would entail both being-opposed-to and being-face-to-facewith (Chakraborty 2002:101) an other. According to Emmanuel Levinas, “the encounter with the Other is my responsibility for him. That is the responsibility for my neighbour” (Levinas 1998:103). For Levinas, this claim has its obvious biblical roots. But the neighbour offers an ethical paradox which too can be traced back to the foundations of Judeo-Christian communitarian living and its shared doctrinal links with Islam. An open letter titled ‘A Common Word Between Us and You’ published in 2007, signed by a large number of Muslim scholars, theologians, writers and public personalities and addressed mainly to their Christian counterparts invokes those common links – “love of the One God, and love of the neighbour” (https://www.acommonword.com/the-acw-document/). The title of the letter itself draws from a verse of The Holy Quran addressing ‘the People of the Scripture’ – Say: O People of the Scripture! Come to a common word between us and you: that we shall worship none but God, and that we shall ascribe no partner unto Him, and that none of us shall take others for lords beside God. And if they turn away, then say: Bear witness that we are they who have surrendered (unto Him) (AAL ‘IMRAN 3:64). (Ibid.) The letter puts the words of Prophet Muhammad “None of you has faith until you love for your neighbour what you love for yourself ” and those of The Bible, “This is the first and greatest commandment./And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’/On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets”. (Matthew 22:38–40) and “You shall love your neighbour as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:31) side by side. It also refers to the injunction of Leviticus in the Old Testament. This letter itself, a laudable attempt at inter-faith peace and brotherhood as it may be, exhibits the ethical contradiction of a doctrinal idea of the neighbour – a

Encountering the Muslim as the Neighbour  21

universal ethical claim that draws legitimacy from its intra-communal appeal to ‘the People of the Scriptures’. However, from the Old Testament injunction of Leviticus 19:18, “Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbour as yourself ” to the Parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:30 the neighbour moves from being a strictly intra-communal category to a more universal one (‘Introduction’, The Neighbor 2005:6). Thus, the ethics of the neighbour is not only a common Jewish, Christian and Muslim theological legacy but is also a point of radical departure. What becomes clear is that the neighbour as a coordinate of ethical life posits a ‘beyond’ to the pleasure principle, “an impenetrable, enigmatic presence…” (ibid.: 4) that is at the limits of our physical and subjective life. In The Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Kant says that the love of one’s neighbour is a ‘moral feeling’ that lies “at the basis of morality as subjective condition(s) of receptiveness to the concept of duty, not as objective condition(s) of morality” (Guyer 2016:230). It is not the duty of a human being to acquire love for one’s neighbour, since as a moral feeling it is antecedent to the concept of duty. Every human being has it, and by virtue of having it, they can be put under obligation. The command to love your neighbour then is a command to moral obligation not bound by specific teleological end. Emmanuel Levinas looks at it in terms of an infinite call for justice from the other to the self – “The Face of the Other is perhaps the beginning of philosophy” (Levinas: ibid.). The vision of the Face sets forth an intersubjective exchange between the self and the other. For Levinas, love for one’s neighbour is a “love in which the ethical aspect dominates the passionate aspect; love without concupiscence” (ibid.). He calls it taking upon oneself “the fate of the other” and responding accordingly. However, he also mentions that the relationship with the Face is not based on symmetry; the exchange cannot be one of reciprocation – …I do not live in a world in which there is but one single ‘first comer’; there is always a third party in the world: he or she is also my other, my fellow. Hence, it is important for me to know which of the two takes precedence. Is the one not the persecutor of the other? Must not human beings, who are incomparable, compared? (Ibid.:104) Herein the question of equity gets tied to justice – “Thus justice, here, takes precedence over the taking upon oneself of the fate of the other” (ibid.). In other words, for Levinas, justice precedes intersubjectivity. Placing justice outside the domain of intersubjectivity creates an epistemological crisis since by default it turns justice into a uniquely ethical concern, located outside the domain of politics. Politics has to be necessarily intersubjective as it involves a covenant between the rulers and the ruled and also among people. When does the neighbour open up the possibility for a dialogue, and by extension for a political response and when do they occupy a realm of r­adical ­alterity  – become a ‘third party’, a stranger who can only induce an ethical

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response? The problem of looking at the neighbour purely as an ethical concern is that it divorces ethics entirely from politics, whereas much of the history of the 20th and 21st centuries demands a relook at the unbridgeable distance between the two. The Twin Tower attacks on 9/11, 2001 and the politics after that is one such instance. Western liberal democracies are stuck in the impasse between absolute freedom and absolute security in which the covenant of citizenship can be suspended indefinitely in the name of ‘national security’, while at the same time absolute notions of liberty can be used to discriminate against a section of population for not being free enough. The two wars following 9/11 and their ripple effect across large sections of Asia and Africa have rendered a vast population stateless, and thus effectively outside any such covenant. Does that mean that their existence is now outside the political? Is their claim on the resources of the world now incontrovertibly ethical? Or does it open up the possibility of not an alternative politics but a politics of alterity? Carl Schmitt’s concept of political theology tries to bring the ethical and the political within the same frame. Kenneth Reinhard points out a basic contradiction therein. In The Concept of the Political (1932), Schmitt writes: “the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy” (Reinhard 2005:11). However, in his book Political Theology (1922), Schmitt had already defined the political on the basis of sovereign power exercised not in terms of law but exception which basically suspends the conceptual certainties of either ‘friend’ or ‘enemy’. According to Reinhard, “the polis requires the ever present ‘real possibility’ of war for the concepts of ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’ to retain their validity and the exceptional decision to go to war constitutes the purest manifestation of the political as such” (ibid.: 14–15). Reinhard observes that a political system dependent on the mirroring relationship of the friend and the enemy to overcome its inherent contradictions faces a crisis in the post-Cold War unipolar world with the disappearance of an identifiable political enemy. It leads to what he calls a ‘global psychosis’ (ibid.: 17). Ironically, Carl Schmitt’s formulation of the political enemy seems more applicable to a world devoid of the stability of the friend/enemy distinction since in this schema “the political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly…. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger…in a specifically intense way, existentially something different and alien…” (Schmitt quoted by Reinhard: ibid.). An enemy that is not locatable even in terms of non-identification but coterminous with strangeness opens and, in a sense, co-opts the inherent uncertainty of the binary. Lying somewhere in-between the figure of the neighbour embodies that uncertainty. Following the directive in Matthew 5: 43–44 “… thou shalt love your neighbor and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you”, Schmitt draws a line between personal and public enemy leading to a disturbing assertion that the Christian state can have Islam as its enemy, but still love or hate the Muslim as its neighbour (ibid.); the ­second instance would be a personal interaction, while the first would be a political one.

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Martin Amis’ The Second Plane (2008) – a collection of fictional and non-fictional prose named after its first and much publicised essay which was published in The Guardian immediately after the 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre– shows that once categorised broadly as the ‘stranger’ and the ‘alien’, it is really a slippery slope between the personal and the public enemy. The book is framed by the massive affective weight of the second plane that hit the Twin Towers – “I have never seen a generically familiar object so transformed by affect” – Amis observes – “That second plane looked eagerly alive, and galvanized with malice, and wholly alien” (Amis 2008: 3). The affective association of the event is firmly placed in alien-ness, and the symbolic worlds occupied by the attackers and the attacked are defined in clear oppositional terms – all targets of the attacks were symbols of American life – “its indigenous mobility and zest, and of the galaxy of glittering destinations”, whereas the plane itself “was in frenzy…. The bringers of Tuesday’s terror were morally ‘barbaric’…but they brought a demented sophistication to their work” (ibid.: 6). In the absence of the political certainty of the friend/enemy binary (considering the long and deep business roots that the Bin Laden family had in the US and the even deeper business and strategic interest that the Bush administration had in Saudi Arabia, the country that Osama Bin Laden originated from, kept close links with, yet the country that remained magically unscathed in the aftermath of the attacks), its affective certainty becomes inviolable. Many of the later pieces in the collection try to recreate that world of affect by expanding their textual frames to dissolve boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, document and dystopia, the public and the personal. In ‘Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind’, Amis reiterates Carl Schmitt’s distinction between political Islam as the enemy and Islam as a religion practised by fellow human beings – “We can begin by saying, not only that we respect Muhammad, but that no serious person could fail to respect Muhammad – a unique and luminous historical being…. Naturally we respect Muhammad. But we do not respect Muhammad Atta” (ibid.: 50). The thrust on Muhammad not as a prophet but as a ‘historical figure’ is an attempt to locate ‘us’ in a secular world, a world semantically painted in stark contrast to the one occupied by Muhammad Atta, defined by what he calls ‘Islamism’ – “So, to repeat, we respect Islam – the donor of countless benefits to mankind, and the possessor of a thrilling history. But Islamism? No, we can hardly be asked to respect a creedal wave that calls for our own elimination” (ibid.). As the presumed civilisational conflict gets laid down in incrementally Huntingtonian terminology, the tenuous Schmittian schema becomes difficult to sustain. In the course of the same piece, Amis cites a personal experience – when he flew from Montevideo to New York with his six-year-old daughter, she was put through intense security check. Amis quips, “I wanted to say something like, ‘Even Islamists have not started to blow up their own families on aeroplanes. So please desist until they do. Oh yeah: and stick, for now, to young men who look like they are from the Middle East’” (ibid.: 76). The distinction made between Islam and Islamism was a rhetorical smokescreen to camouflage what essentially is an ad hominem argument. His well-honed

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satirical skill helps obfuscate the boundary between the alien ‘Islamist’ and the familiar fellow citizen, leaving no room for the ethical uncertainty surrounding one’s interaction with the neighbour. He does accept that such obfuscation may have unwarranted ramifications, such as the brutal killing of Jean Charles de Menenez by the London police, inaccurately inferring his links with the London terror attacks of 2005 only from the colour of his skin (supposedly resembling young men from Middle East) and a backpack (like the one his ‘slight little blonde’ daughter was carrying).1 Still, it is a necessary obfuscation as he sets out to define ‘terror’ as the realm of ‘the Unknown Known’. The term is a slight modification of Donald Rumsfeld’s circuitous taxonomy of terrorist threat; he divided it into three varieties – ‘known known’, ‘known unknown’ and ‘unknown unknown’ (ibid.: 52). Amis uses the modified term against the dystopian set-up of an unwritten novella. The narrator of this unwritten novella Ayed belongs to an outfit called ‘Prism’ which has three wings – Sectors One, Two and Three. But Ayed and his colleagues who are avid readers of the Western press name Sector One ‘The Known Known’. It concerns with the daily logistics of bombs, mines and other explosive devices. Sector Two that involves long-term planning is ‘The Known Unknown’. Sector Three is ‘The Unknown Unknown’, dealing with conceptual breakthroughs to achieve paradigmatic shifts. ‘The Unknown Known’ according to Amis is ‘paradise, scriptural inerrancy, God. The unknown known is religious belief ’ (ibid.: 90). ‘The Unknown Known’ is a realm of pure affect, extrapolated from and emptied off the materiality of empirical existence. All religions operate within this realm, but for Amis, ‘Millennial Islamism’ – ‘an ideology superimposed upon a religion – illusion upon illusion’ (91) – is its ultimate embodiment. And terrorism is seen as the crystallisation of this ontological separation in which even political exchange takes place to purely affective end. On the one end of it is the obscurantist and austere worldview of Sayyid Qutb, a historical figure, arguably the progenitor of Islamism; on the other end is the phantasmagoric world of Ayed, the fictional protagonist of an unwritten novella. The figure of Ayed, a suicide bomber enjoying a life of sexual excess while it lasts, collapses the two opposing poles of desire –gratification and annihilation – into one another and in doing so signals an entropy of meaning. In that entropy, it is impossible to see the Face of the Other which could demand an ethical response. The Face, impenetrable yet emblematic of a monstrous strangeness, gets a name in ‘The Last Days of Muhammad Atta’, a fictional account not just of the last few days but the last few hours of the life of the principal perpetrator of 9/11 attacks. Amis tries to look at the face of the suicide-mass murderer – “The detestation, the detestation of everything, was being sculpted on it, from within” (ibid.: 97). Atta is presented as the paradigmatic terrorist – severe, unfunny, a psychopath loaded with religious fundamentalism but driven by a need for violence that is pathological and for that same reason, unreasonable. The relation between religion and terrorism is explored by Terry Eagleton too, but he recognises religion as inherently double-edged – “Terror begins as a religious idea, as

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indeed much terrorism still is today; and religion is all about deeply ambivalent powers which both enrapture and annihilate” (Eagleton 2005: 2). Rather than seeing terror as alien to rationality, he sees it as the underside of it – political society is founded on consent, but that consent is generated through violence – Terror as a force seeking to destroy peaceable men and women for its own ideological ends has to be countered, if necessary by violence. Yet terror is not…simply an alien power seeking to invade the city. If it were, it would be far easier to deal with. With the alien you know where you are, namely elsewhere. It is the otherness at the core of the self which is most troubling. (ibid.: 13) It is the threat of disorder that simmers under the thin crust of order. The business of life can be carried out in spite of these inner contradictions so long as death remains the Absolute Other to it and the limits of the self are defined by the possibility of its extinction. But, for the suicide-mass murderer, annihilation itself becomes an affirmation of the self, it is an act of self-determination. By being politically motivated, the act of suicide ceases to remain what Kant terms a ‘purely ethical’ act (ibid.: 93). But it is not a purely political act either as its effect spills over its political intentionality (Devji 2005: 11). By turning death into the ultimate signifier of life, the suicide-mass murderer becomes the terminal point where both politics and ethics lose their meaning. “What is there in the Face”, asks Levinas (1998: 104). “The Face is definitely not a plastic form like a portrait”; the relation to the Face can be a “relation to the absolutely weak… to what is absolutely exposed” and isolated. Death is the instance of supreme isolation – “…there is, consequently, in the Face of the Other always the death of the Other and thus, in some way, an incitement to murder…to completely neglect the other – and at the same time…the Face is also the ‘Thou shalt not kill”’ (ibid.). The obligation not to let the other die alone, “is like a calling out to me” (ibid.). The Face continuously posits this ethical choice. However, Amis repeatedly invokes the face of the suicide-mass murderer because he believes that by dissolving the coordinates of collective life it absolves the world of any obligation to that ethical choice. Martin Amis envisions a world living permanently under the shadow of the second plane; there can neither be an ethics nor politics of the neighbour in this world because there is no neighbour to begin with – the Face of the Other is an abyss from where the call never reaches ‘us’. However, does the shadow of the second plane cause the breakdown of the carefully crafted rules of liberal ­cohabitation or does it merely expose the paradoxes that already exist? Amy Waldman’s novel The Submission (2012) is set two years after the Twin Tower attacks as a committee sits to deliberate upon the design of the 9/11 memorial. All the submissions are anonymous. The design that gets selected by an overwhelming majority of the jury is named The Garden and the architect turns out to be one Mohammad Khan, an Indian-American Muslim man. This revelation unleashes not just a PR nightmare for the memorial board but also puts

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the individual jurors and their professed ‘liberal’ values to critical testing. The novel is obviously premised upon the procedure of selecting the design for the actual National September 11 Memorial and Museum located at the World Trade Centre site. It was selected through an open and international contest. The jury board in the novel is modelled on the selection jury of the actual competition which included architects, public artists, art critics, art historians, representative of the New York mayor’s office and one member from among the victims’ families. John Gillis points out that until the late 1960s, public memory work was “the preserve of elite males, the designated carriers of progress….” (Gillis 1994: 24). Workers, racial minorities, immigrants and women gained access to national memories in America much later and at a slower pace. As opposed to that, there have been more communitarian and participatory memory practices such as rituals, performances, quilts and parades. The line between the two gets blurred in America in Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, a recurring point of reference in the novel. Lin was part of the original jury board of the 9/11 Memorial, but in the novel, she also serves as a real-life prototype for the fictional Mohammad Khan. Lin being a Chinese American designing for Vietnam Veterans created similar public furor as Khan, but only in Khan’s case its worse; his religion seems to assign a more direct culpability on him. The culpability of Khan and by extension of Muslims in general does not come across as an aberration of liberal norms, rather exposes the fragility of those norms in a situation of what Žižek terms “being overwhelmed by Other(ness)” (Žižek ibid.: 138). Death is the absolute exposition to the ‘Other’. As an event, death can never belong to the self; it’s the death of the other that one constantly responds to; the community re-establishes itself in the death of a member: “Community is revealed in the death of others; hence it is always revealed to others”, says Jean Luc Nancy (1991: 15). In the context of a collective trauma, this gives rise to a community of affect created by shared victimhood. Access to membership to the community depends on participation in the affective performance of mourning, which is why Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial with its wall of names marks a turning point in the history of public memory in the US, says John Gillis, “a decisive departure from the anonymity of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and a growing acknowledgement that everyone now deserves equal recognition at all times in wholly accessible places” (Gillis 1994: 13). In The Submission, Asma Anwar demands that equality of recognition for her husband Inam, an irregular Bangladeshi immigrant, who worked as a janitor and was killed in the attack. Asma thinks that if her husband’s name finds a place among the names of the victims, then he may finally find a space to belong. Inam who could not enter the covenant of citizenship when alive can yet exert the ethical obligation that the community of the dead demands from the political community of the living, an obligation that is non-reciprocal and as a result, absolute. However, this ethical exchange is premised upon a stable symbolic order which sustains a realm of familiarity and by doing so consolidates an Absolute Other

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beyond our world, “if the functioning of the big Other is suspended, the friendly neighbor coincides with the monstrous Thing…” (Žižek 2005: 144).The Garden is the site where the regulated symbolic exchange breaks down as new cultural codes get written into them. As long as The Garden was anonymous, it could serve as an expression of universal grief, at least for Claire Burwell, the widow of Caldon Burwell, “The Garden… will be a place where we – where the widows, their children, anyone – can stumble on joy…” (Waldman 2012: 6). The moment it is assigned with the name of Mohammad Khan, it seems to disrupt the affective purity of mourning with hidden ciphers – “A Lovely Garden – and an Islamic one?” (ibid.: 147) says a headline in the Times art section. Through this article, Claire is informed that the elements in Khan’s garden that she loved the most – the geometry, the walls, the four quadrants, the water, even the pavilion – paralleled gardens that had been built across the Islamic world for ages. Soon The Garden gets associated with the Quranic paradise which turns into the martyrs’ paradise. The terrorists who carried out the attacks supposedly did that to get to paradise, as a Fox news anchor thunders: “Their remains are in that ground, too. He’s made a tomb, a graveyard, for them, not for the victims”. “He’s trying to encourage new martyrs…”, says another (ibid.: 149). Khan with his practised cynicism, his fierce individualism and a sense of innate artistic superiority would cut quite an Ayn Randesque figure; his profession as an architect makes the allusion to the protagonist of Rand’s The Fountainhead (1943) inevitable. And yet, Howard Roark is as unique a name as Mohammad Khan is generic – “Mohammad Khan: the John Smith of the Muslim world”, says a tabloid journalist (ibid.: 119). He could blend in the cosmopolitan New York neighbourhood seamlessly till The Garden turns him into a monstrous figure, a public enemy in the Schmittian sense. The border between the two is so porous that Derrida locates a “possibility of semantic slippage and inversion” (Derrida 1997: 89) in Schmitt’s political theology itself; the trace of the neighbour can be materialised in the enemy. Those traces are present in the excess of meaning that Khan encrypts in his design; an excess which cannot be explained either by the secular modern history of public gardening in the west or by the theological sacred garden. Rather, it is part of his personal epiphany – visiting Bagh-e-Babar at the culmination of a journey through wartorn Afghanistan. The ultimate semantic inversion takes place when Khan, after being forced to withdraw his design for the memorial, employs it to build a personal garden of an Arab tycoon and fills the wall of the names with verses from The Quran, but still withholds the meaning of those verses from William, Claire’s son and, by default, from Claire. Such subversion is still possible in situations where the friend/enemy binary is sustained through the perpetual deferral of sovereign action. However, in a state of exception that binary dissolves, taking with it the basis of identifiable violence and unleashing in its place an ‘unheard-of ’, ‘unidentifiable violence’ (Derrida ibid.: 83). Sand Opera (2015) is a collection of poems by Philip Metres embodying a meta-narrative frame in which readers are placed behind the mirrored glass

28  Shinjini Basu

of an interrogation room to witness the Standard Operating Procedure used by the US Department of Defense during Desert Storm. Sand Opera was released shortly after the publication of selected portions and the executive summary of the Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program, the US Senate Intelligence Committee’s Report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, bringing to light the reality of torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. However, some of the sections of the collection, such as ‘Abu Ghraib Arias’, were published earlier. In this section (originally published in 2011), Metres composes blues poems from the perspective of American military personnel and opera pieces in the choric voice of the detainees, a strategic inversion of cultural hierarchy. In a piece titled ‘In the Palace of the End’ written in 2004 and included in The Second Plane, Martin Amis gives a nightmarish vision of an Iraqi torture chamber disguised as an Information Wing with labyrinthine passage ways, rooms within rooms filled with the stifled voices of prisoners: “…the induction into the Interrogation Wing is far worse than any death” and after months of prolonged torture “the suspect’s head would give a lolling nod…After more torture preludial to death, 99 per cent of those who enter the Interrogation Wing are eventually hanged…” (Amis ibid.: 32–33). In reality, Amis’ chamber of horrors turns out to be far more horrifying than he could imagine, but instead of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, it ends up being located in American prison camps. While Amis conjures up his dystopia from racial stereotypes and media heresies, Metres draws his material from the Standard Operating Procedure manual for Camp Echo at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, testimonies of Abu Ghraib prisoners and those of US soldiers. He also incorporates prison drawings and the testimony of Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah, held and tortured in secret US prisons. A lot of his material contains redacted portions as zones of silence located at the border of language, yet still within language. At those borders emerges the suffering bare body, stripped off all paraphernalia of living, yet clinging on to life, the figure of the Agambenesque Homo Sacer. The prisoners remain incorporeal, nameless voices, whereas the names of their torturers are there in the titles of their blues. This semantic inequity signifies the systemic inequity that exists not just within prison walls but also outside – in cultural representations. Žižek in Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002), a text written on the first anniversary of 9/11, says that it is no longer enough just to enumerate examples of today’s Homo Sacers, turning them into objects of bio-politics. Instead, one needs to locate gestures of refusal to participate in the global order played out between the ­r ightful citizen and the Homo Sacer. Žižek mentions the organised refusal of Israeli reservists to serve in the Occupied Palestine as a political action which is also a pure ethical act through which “what the refuseniks accomplished is the passage from Homo Sacer to ‘neighbour’: they treat the Palestinians not as ‘equal full citizens’ but as ‘neighbours’ in the strict Judeo-Christian sense” (Žižek 2002: 116). One must recognise the problem of such an assertion, and in terms of realpolitik, such a

Encountering the Muslim as the Neighbour  29

claim can serve as legitimation of turning Palestinians into second-class citizens in their own land. However, Žižek is trying to show the limitation of the c­ oncept of the citizen as a purely juristic term while exploring the possibility of new forms of political intervention that can combine the political and the ethical. Sand Opera, even amid the horror of Abu Ghraib, does not fail to recognise such moments of refusal. They may be transient, ephemeral, but potent enough to break the omnipresence of exceptional violence. In ‘The Blues of Ken Davis’, Davis, a prison guard present in some of the most infamous Abu Ghraib photos, remembers calling home after a night of prolonged torture inflicted upon the prisoners. Davis says that he “can’t take it any more” because no matter how loudly you play the music, the voices of the detainees cannot be drowned (Metres 2016:http://behindthelinespoetry.blogspot.com/2016/02/sand-­operalenten-journey-day-12 blues.html). The voices, locked, crushed, yet refusing to be buried inside the four walls of prison breaks out of the contained and calibrated mould of the Homo Sacer or the Accursed Man. They turn bare life into political utterance. In his blog ‘Behind the Lines: Poetry, War and Peacemaking’, Metres attaches a note with this poem where he quotes Ken Davis – “A lot of soldiers, when we come back, are lost. It’s especially true for a unit accused of abuse, when you hear lies about what happened, and people deny what you saw.  And now we live with ghosts and demons that will haunt us for the rest of our lives” (ibid.). Davis comes across as a refusenik that declines to bury the ghosts of his victims – ghosts that have become his lifelong neighbours. His response to their call might be ethical, but Metres’ decision to turn his testimony into a testament against erasure of state violence is intensely political. Philiip Metres also tries a different kind of refusal: a refusal to semanticise the opposition between the torturer and the tortured. He does not try to counterbalance the two perspectives; rather, he acknowledges the impossibility of such semantic equivalence in a situation where the modicum of normalcy has been withdrawn, rendering the notion of equivalence invalid. He makes extensive use of redactions, erasures and stricken out phrases, evident in ‘The Blues of Ken Davis’. In an interview with Arab American poet Fady Joudah, Metres says that he decided not to write directly about the Abu Ghraib photos because he “realized very quickly that writing about the photos would simply reinstantiate the position of (the) Iraqi as objectivized victim, a representation ultimately no more human than the Iraqi as a Saddam-following scimitar-wielding maniac” (Metres 2015: https://lareviewof books.org/article/borders-tongue/). The text refuses to surrender to the lure of objectifying lacerated bodies for voyeuristic consumption. Instead of tortured bodies, the unheard cries of the detainees are interspersed with the ballads of the American soldiers. The juxtaposition is grotesque; it is meant to be. The music cannot sublimate the violence; it is not meant to, “no matter how much/ music you play … you can still hear the screams” (Metres

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2011: 218). The cries and the blues, and the ‘neighbouring’ voices in the soundscape are interruptions within the symbolic order. Even when the symbolic tries to override its in-built limits, it cannot quite overwrite them. In fact, the final poem in the book is a constellation of quotation marks and framed brackets; the frame emptied of everything except limits, and at those limits, the threatening monstrosity of the neighbour gives in to their innate vulnerability.

Note 1 In an interview given in the same year this essay was published, Amis asked the interviewer rhetorically, “There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order’. What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan.” In the face of outrage Amis offered a clarification, “I was not ‘advocating’ anything. I was conversationally describing an urge – an urge that soon wore off.” (https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/oct/13/highereducation.islam)

Works Cited Alter, Jonathan. ‘Jumping to Conclusions’. April 30, 1995, https://www.newsweek.com/ jumping-conclusions-181456. Date of Access: 10.1.2021 Amis, Martin. The Second Plane: September 11: 2001-2008. London: Jonathan Cape, 2008. Chakraborty, Dipesh. Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002. Derrida, Jacques. Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. New York: Verso, 1997. Devji, Faisal. Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy. Morality. Modernity. London: Hurst & Company. 2005. Eagleton, Terry. Holy Terror. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Gillis, John. Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1994. Guyer, Paul. Virtues of Freedom: Selected Essays on Kant. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. https://www.acommonword.com/the-acw-document/. Date of Access: 10.1.2021. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/oct/13/highereducation.islam. Date of Access 10.1.2021. Levinas, Emmanuel. Entre Nous: Thinking of the Other. Trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Metres. Philip. Abu Ghraib Arias. Denver, CO: Flying Guillotine, 2011. Metres, Philip. “At the Borders of Our Tongues”. Interview with FadyJoudah, The Los Angeles Review of Books, February 23, 2015. https://lareviewof books.org/article/­ borders-tongue/. Date of Access 10.1.2021. Metres, Philip. ‘Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 12: “The Blues of Ken Davis”(Living With Ghosts and Demons)’, February 21, 2016. http://behindthelinespoetry.blogspot.com/2016/02/sand-opera-lenten-journey-day-12-blues.html. Date of Access 9.1.2021. Metres, Philip. ‘Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 2’, February 11, 2016. http://­ behindthelinespoetry.blogspot.com/2016/02/day-two-sand-opera-lenten-journey. html. Date of Access 9.1.2021.

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Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community. Trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland and Simona Sawhney. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Reinhard, Kenneth. “Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor”, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries into Political Theology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005, pp 11–75. Waldman, Amy. The Submission. London: Windmill Books, 2012. Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. London: Verso, 2002. Žižek, Slavoj. “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence”, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries into Political Theology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005, pp 134–190.

2 REWRITING THE AMERICAN NARRATIVE OF MUSLIM MEN Ayad Akhtar’s Depiction of Race, Gender, and Masculinity Nalini Iyer

Ayad Akhtar’s play Disgraced, which won the Pulitzer prize in 2013, is also ­controversial because of its portrayal of a Muslim American lawyer whose carefully curated life as an assimilated immigrant falls apart after 9/11. As a playwright Akhtar garnered criticism for his portrayal of Muslims, Islam, domestic violence, and interracial relationships. In his recent novel Homeland Elegies (2020), Akhtar writes a semi-autobiographical, episodic narrative that blends fact and fiction, to explore the impact of 9/11 on his protagonist, a playwright also named Ayad Akhtar. This mixed genre novel that spans fiction, memoir, and essay examines the difficulties of being a Muslim writer in post-9/11 Trumpian America. Whereas many white American novelists have explored the impact of 9/11 in cultural and civilizational terms, Akhtar’s play Disgraced and his novel Homeland Elegies examine the psychological impact of the events on Muslim men. This essay will explore Akhtar’s preoccupation with Muslim masculinity in an Islamophobic country and examine the intersections of race, immigration, and familial relationships as they shape this identity. In the nearly 20 years after the attacks on the Twin towers, America remains deeply Islamophobic with anti-Muslim sentiment normalized in the rhetoric of the Trump administration. In Disgraced, Akhtar captures that normalizing of Islamophobia when he sets the critical scene at a dinner party hosted by Amir, a secular and assimilated Muslim lawyer, and his wife Emily an artist who studies Islamic art and culture. Their guests are Isaac, Emily’s Jewish art dealer and Jory, Isaac’s wife and Amir’s African American colleague. This scene critically explores liberal America’s problems and contradictions with race, gender, and religion. Following the explosive dinner party, an enraged Amir who has discovered his wife’s infidelity, hits her. In almost all the productions of this play in different American cities, there have been post-play discussions, and the audience members have expressed shock and outrage at the scene of domestic violence and DOI: 10.4324/9781003362999-4

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argued that it reinforces the stereotype of Muslim men as violent and ­abusive of women.1 Theater audiences miss Akhtar’s focus on Muslim men and the psychic damage caused by heteropatriarchy, Islamophobia, and racial politics, which is central to the development of the main character, Amir Kapoor. In his autofictional work, Homeland Elegies, Akhtar engages precisely this problem – what does it mean to be a Muslim man and a Muslim writer2 in post- 9/11 America. Whereas Akhtar is preoccupied with Muslim masculinity, his depictions of Muslim women in both Disgraced and Homeland Elegies are problematic. Before we delve into Homeland Elegies and Disgraced, it is necessary to unpack the political impact of 9/11 and how it reframed race and gender in the United States for Muslims.

Post-9/11 America The attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, was a pivotal moment in American history and the first attack on American soil after Pearl Harbor. Muneer Ahmad writing within a year of the 9/11 attacks in Social Text notes that after the attacks there “has been an unrelenting, multivalent assault on the bodies, psyches, and rights of Arab, Muslim, and South Asian immigrants” (101). Since then, not only have the wars been expanded from Afghanistan to Iraq and Syria but mainstream American politics and culture have normalized a rhetoric of the clash of civilizations and the need to protect America from its Muslim enemies. This rhetoric of the global War on Terror that America embarked on carries with it a sense of moral and Christian righteousness that harks back to the Crusades. Consequently, there has been increasing anti-Muslim violence,3 xenophobia, and draconian immigration measures such as NSEERS (National Security Entry Exit Registration System)4 and no-fly lists enacted particularly against Muslims culminating in the virulent rhetoric of the Trump administration and its infamous 2017 Muslim travel ban. Erika Lee in America for Americans notes that “Trump’s xenophobia was both extreme and normal” (293) as he drew upon a long history of anti-Muslim sentiment in the West. Lee recognizes Islamophobia as the xenophobia that has shaped American politics since the early days. She defines Islamophobia as “an irrational hate and fear of Islam and of Muslims.” She writes, American Islamophobia is not only about religious intolerance; it is also a form of racism that ascribes certain characteristics, tendencies, and beliefs to all Muslims and Muslim-appearing people. As a result, Islamophobia has led to hate-based violence, discriminatory government policies and the de-Americanization of Arab and Muslim Americans in the United States. (294–295) Craig Considine notes that American racialization of Muslims arises from Orientalism and Islamophobia. He writes,

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These constructions of Orientalism and Islamophobia (incivility, inferiority, and incompatibility) are key tools of contemporary racism in the United States… American Muslims appear to be caught in a ‘clash of racializations’ between exclusionary notions of American national identity and racialized ‘Muslimness,’ both of which operate to expose Muslims to racist activity while concomitantly excluding them from the protection of the state. (164–165)5 This focus on post-9/11 America should not overlook the long history of Muslims in the United States. As Edward E. Curtis IV notes in Muslims in America: A Short History, Islam came to America with the Spanish explorers and with slaves who were transported from West Africa, and the rapid growth in the Muslim population came after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. South Asian Muslims came to the US as early as the first decades of the 20th century; however, most of the early South Asian migrants in the Pacific Coast were either Muslim or Sikh but were referred to as “Hindoos” in American popular discourse. Vivek Bald in Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America has described the arrival of Bengali Muslim merchants in the early 20th century who mingled with and married within Black communities in cities like New York, Baltimore, New Orleans among others. Thus the history of Muslim ­presence in the Americas begins as early as the late 1500s but the growth of the Muslim population in the United States coincided with the changes in immigration law in 1965. Post 9/11 Islamophobia has marginalized Black Muslim history and created tensions between Arab and South Asian Muslims and Black communities because of both anti-Black racism and Islamophobia in the United States, which has resulted in erasing the solidarities between different racial groups who identify as Muslim. Islamophobic discourse is not just racial but also gendered.6 Muslim men and those mistaken for Muslims (Sikhs for example) were often attacked for their p­ erceived masculine physical characteristics such as beards and turbans. Americans perceive all Muslim women to be hijabi and perpetuate discrimination against them in everyday life. Both Muslim men and women are assumed to be of a particular phenotype and in general Americans assume that all Muslims are Arab although American Muslims are a heterogeneous group. According to the Pew Research Center, Muslims number 3.45 million and make up 1.1% of the total U.S. population. (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/03/ new-estimates-show-u-s-muslim-population-continues-to-grow/). American Muslims also identify as white, black, Asian, Latin American, or mixed race. In popular culture and media, Muslim men are often portrayed as aggressive, alien, and potential terrorists while women are presented as docile, oppressed by religion, and lacking autonomy. Popular culture and media perpetuate the idea of Muslims as dangerous yet exotic others.7 Television shows such as Homeland or NCIS which emphasize American national security and courageous military investigators often depict Muslim men in mosques praying and plotting, thus

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portraying them as being in exclusively male and religious settings while Muslim women are associated with mostly domestic spaces. Nearly 20 years after the events of 9/11, there are only a few Muslim voices in popular culture. With such gendered racialization in American society, Muslims struggle with their identity within their ethnic and religious communities and with their place within larger American society. What does it mean to be a Muslim writer and to confront Islamophobia in one’s writing? In Islamophobia and the Novel, Peter Morey argues that the market for novels shapes how Muslim experiences are framed and that there is a demand and expectation for authenticity and for the novel to serve an anthropological function. Morey notes that “At the present time, it seems as if almost all attempts to render Muslim experience in a realist mode are fated to be co-opted to explain (or refute) the framing fascination with why Muslims are recalcitrant/unmodern/ not ‘like us’” (9). While Morey is writing about the novel as a genre, it is this same issue of authenticity and the need for audiences to see their version of Muslims reflected on stage and page with which Akhtar grapples. I argue that Ayad Akhtar chooses the mixed genre narrative in Homeland Elegies to challenge audience desire for ethnographic readings of literary works by minority writers. In viewing performances of Akhtar’s plays, his audience seeks to understand the Muslim other framed in popular discourse as alien, misogynist, and terrorist. Audiences seek Akhtar’s work to explain Muslims to white and non-Muslim America. Americans are interested in information about how Muslims live, feel, think and do not engage the literary works as creative works with an aesthetic purpose and a critique of American values. Americans want the plays to reflect back to them what they imagine Muslim America is and Homeland Elegies is Akhtar’s riposte to that expectation as he lays bare the soul of his autobiographical protagonist and examines the psychic damage caused by racialized ­capitalism in post-9/11 America. Akhtar’s challenges with his role as a Muslim writer exploded with the production of Disgraced and the controversies surrounding it.

The Depiction of the Racialization of Muslims in Disgraced In Disgraced, Akhtar foregrounds the question of the representation of Muslims in the West when in the opening scene, Amir, a South Asian Muslim lawyer, is posing for his wife Emily’s portrait of him done in the manner of Velasquez’s famed portrait of Juan de Pareja. Emily paints Amir because he had experienced racism from a waiter the night before. The reactions of Emily and Amir to the incident are distinctly different – Amir dismisses the whole as a common experience for him, but Emily is outraged. Her response is liberal white feminist and imbued with a class snobbery. She, as an educated white woman is offended by the waiter and feels responsible to somehow use her art to seek redress. As she tells Amir, “A man, a waiter, looking at you” (7); her offense is on account of both the gender and the class of the gaze that was directed at Amir that simultaneously saw and erased his presence. Amir is more troubled by Emily’s desire

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to paint him after seeing the Velasquez painting of an African slave and does not see Emily’s complex logic in reinterpreting Velasquez in the contemporary American context. He humorously and edgily tells her that she should call up her Black Spanish boyfriend and ask him to pose for her. To Amir, given the history of the Velasquez portrait, a Black Spanish man is a more appropriate model than a South Asian Muslim. In this exchange, he suggests that Emily’s reaction is disproportionate to the situation and that her notions of representation blur different histories of imperialism. At the same time, his derisive response also carries within it shades of anti-Black racism.8 As a South Asian, Amir seeks to pass as the model minority in his upper-crust Manhattan society, and Emily’s painting is a stark reminder that he will never fully assimilate into white American society. For Emily and her liberal ilk, Amir will always be the oppressed other closer to the Black experience than to white and Amir, like many South Asians, carries within him colonial racial hierarchies and rejects affiliation with Blacks. Amir’s anti-Black stance is further emphasized in his argument with Jory who has been made partner over him at the firm and when he screams at her: “You think you’re the nigger here? I’m the nigger!! Me!!” (72). Amir’s violently racist tirade at Jory reveals his anti-Blackness starkly. The casual domestic scene which opens the play speaks to fraught racial relations exacerbated by post-9/11 US culture, and signals what is to come later in the play as race, representation, class, and gender take center-stage in the argument between Amir, Emily, Jory, and Isaac. The scene speaks to the tensions between representation and cultural appropriation – white liberal America wants to speak for the oppressed other without recognizing its complicity in the problem and the oppressed Muslim man does not want to be identified solely by his racialized religious identity. In an interview with Madani Younis, the artistic director at the Bush Theater in London where the play was produced in 2013, Akhtar notes that the play is about representation from the opening scene with Emily gazing at Amir to the closing scene where Amir contemplates the painting and reflects on it. Akhtar remarks, “I do believe personally that the Muslim world has got to fully account for the image the West has of it and move on. To the extent that we continue to try to define ourselves by saying ‘We are not what you say about us’, we’re still allowing someone else to have the dominant voice in the discourse” (Disgraced 96). When Amir’s nephew enters the scene, the play examines further the issue of American Muslims and Islamophobia. The nephew, named Husein, wants to be called Abe Jensen and with the name change wishes to avoid surveillance due to his Muslim identity. Amir mocks him and when Abe asks Amir to help his Imam beat an accusation of aiding Hamas because he collects dues at his mosque, Amir hesitates. He claims that as a corporate lawyer, he does not have the expertise but Abe/Husein wants his Imam to have a Muslim lawyer to help him navigate the situation. For Abe/Husein, legal representation by a Muslim lawyer is key to challenging Islamophobic surveillance and accusations against the Imam. In this exchange, we see that both Amir and Abe/Husein have difficulties in their daily life as Muslim men. They struggle with stereotyping and surveillance.

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While young Husein wants to both erase his Muslim identity and embrace it, Amir wants to hide his Muslim identity and not risk his job in a Jewish law firm. We learn in the course of the play that Amir had changed his last name to Kapoor to pass as Hindu with his Jewish law firm and that he had been evasive about his parents’ place of birth. (They had been born in British India just before Partition and their national identity is now Pakistani.) One of the most controversial moments in the play occurs when Amir is arguing with his friends Isaac and Jory during the dinner party at his home. Isaac asks, “Did you feel pride on September Eleventh?” and Amir hesitantly responds, “If I’m honest, yes” (62). This moment exploded for Ayad Akhtar (the protagonist of Homeland Elegies and the writer) particularly in 2015 after Donald Trump on the campaign trail said Muslims in New York rejoiced after 9/11. Akhtar (the protagonist of the novel) writes that when he was inundated by phone calls to appear on talk shows, what people really wanted to know was how autobiographical had Disgraced been. Akhtar writes, “When they ask if the play is autobiographical, what people are really asking me about is my politics” (24). Akhtar the protagonist of Homeland Elegies writes that this controversial dialogue came from a real-life remark from his mother. His mother who had witnessed the horrors of Partition as a child in Lahore and then lost the man she truly loved (her husband’s best friend) in the bombing of a clinic in Afghanistan, sees her Muslim identity as always under attack. She tells her son that “Our blood is cheap. They run around telling everyone else about human rights. But not for them. Look how they treat their own blacks” (50). In the heated discussion with her son, she says, “They deserve what they got. And what they’re going to get” (50), and it is these last words that the author uses to shape Amir’s comment on 9/11. Disgraced shows how Partition and 9/11 shape Amir’s Muslim identity. He tries hard to mask his identity by changing his last name, educating himself and embracing the cultural lifestyle of Manhattan’s elite. His expensive shirts, the decor in his apartment, his drinking, his eating of pork, and his debates on the Quran, all speak about his attempts to distance himself from America’s assumptions about Muslims. His nephew emulates him in the beginning of the play by embracing white American culture and attire and changing his name,9 but as the play progresses and he experiences domestic surveillance and the fallout from his Imam’s trial, he embraces a militant Islamic identity. Mediating the representation and interpretation of Islam is Emily, Amir’s wife, who has studied Islamic art and culture and draws from them in her paintings. Emily constantly explains Islam to Amir – she is the quintessentially orientalist scholar for whom the East is a career, to borrow Benjamin Disraeli’s famous quote. However, Emily not only does scholarly/artistic work with Islam, she also marries a westernized Muslim man – one who is Westernized enough to not be alien but Muslim enough to be exotic for her. Disgraced reworks Shakespeare’s Othello in contemporary times as Lopamudra Basu has demonstrated. Basu notes that despite Othello’s underplaying of his race and religion, he remains unassimilable in Venetian society. Akhtar in his conversation with Madani Younis notes that “what Amir does is

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an act of political violence, that is to say a colored male subject who is ­acting out on a white female love object through violence, and in a way rife with political valences” (92) has a literary history through Shakespeare, Naipaul, and Faulkner. In reworking the interracial marriage of Othello what Akhtar pursues is also a Fanonian reading of such relationships within a colonial context. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon writes that for a colonized Black man “I wish to be acknowledged not as black but as white…who but a white woman can do this for me?” He goes on to say “I marry white culture, white beauty, white whiteness” (45). Whereas Fanon writes of black men and black women and their pursuit of white lovers/partners, Akhtar’s play suggests that Emily’s pursuit of an interracial marriage is also her means of claiming an authentic knowledge of Islam and to underscore her artistic credentials. She gains fame as a painter because her art embraces Islamic tradition. As Isaac, her art dealer notes, her early work in landscapes is unremarkable but “What she’s doing with the Islamic tradition has taken her to another level. A young Western painter drawing on Islamic representation? Not ironically? But in service? It’s an unusual and remarkable statement” (47). Although Amir likes her earlier work, his opinion does not matter. For Isaac, Emily Hughes-Kapoor will be “A name to be contended with” (48). The irony here is, of course, that Muslims and their culture are palatable and marketable in the West when mediated by white artists, scholars, and art dealers. What a Muslim might think of art is immaterial and there is only a niche market for Muslim art. Amir can be a model (as in the opening of the play) or a name that lends authenticity to Emily’s work. Islam only exists as an artistic representation in liberal, elite Manhattan, which shrinks from the material conditions of Muslim lives such as those of Imam Fareed and his followers. Disgraced also focuses on racialization of Muslims only through male ­characters – Amir and Husein/Abe. As noted above, Amir begins as an assimilationist and as the play evolves breaks apart from the stresses of that approach which inevitably leads to a failure of recognition by white society as anything but the exotic other. Husein too seeks assimilation and follows his uncle in changing his name, but the experiences with surveillance, false accusations of terrorism, and classism of Manhattan society abandons assimilation and seeks community through his mosque and the teachings of a radical cleric. There are no Muslim women in this play and they remain off stage in a kind of theatrical purdah or exclusion. Amir refers to his mother and her anti-Semitism in his childhood and blames her for his violence toward a Jewish female classmate. While Amir claims that he intelligently outgrew his anti-Semitism, his response to Isaac and to the senior law partners in his firm suggests otherwise – he has simply become sophisticated about hiding his anti-Semitism and his ideologies reveal themselves as he gets drunk and emotional during the course of the dinner party. Amir and Husein also discuss Amir’s sister and how her upbringing gave her fewer choices than Amir. She never became an American citizen and was taken to Pakistan, set up in an arranged marriage and returned to the US with her husband and children and raised them in an ethnic enclave in New York. Through Husein we

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learn that Amir’s sister considers white women immodest and calls them whores who take their clothes off. Thus the two Muslim women we hear of indirectly through the stories told by Amir and Husein are portrayed misogynistically and blamed for the problems of bigotry exhibited by Muslim men. Ayad Akhtar, the playwright, scripts Disgraced to depict Muslim masculinity as not just beleaguered by external forces of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism but to also propose that gender relations within the Muslim family make Muslim men the public face of Islam and reinforce anti-Semitism.10

Homeland Elegies and Muslim American Masculinity Homeland Elegies as autofiction blurs the boundaries between autobiography, memoir, and fiction. Consisting of eight chapters divided into three sections, the book examines family politics, Muslim masculinity, the challenges of being a Muslim writer, and the protagonist’s experience of 9/11. Since its publication in late 2020, the book has garnered a lot of attention and in several reviews and interviews, and the focus seems to be in unearthing correlations between Akhtar, the playwright and author, and Akhtar the protagonist’s lives. An interview on NPR exemplifies this as the host, Dave Davies, asks Ayad Akhtar if the scenes depicting the narrator’s father, a cardiologist treating Donald Trump in the 1990s is based on fact since Akhtar’s father himself had been an eminent cardiologist. Akhtar responds: I’m not going to answer that question, Dave, and not just for legal reasons. I mean, you know, there’s so much in the book that’s drawn from fact and so much of it that’s, you know, deformed for the purposes of fiction. And, you know, there’s a purpose behind it. I wanted to find a way to write about the present, to write about the political realities that we’re dealing with, to write about the nation that we have become, the insanity that has become our lives today, and I wanted to do it in fiction. But any form of doing it in fiction felt, to me, in my hands at least, that it was going to read like satire. And the only way to work against that was to pivot into memoir and to sort of begin the process of ensnaring the reader in this game of illusion and reality, of truth and fiction. (NPR, “Fresh Air”, 14 September 2020) Embedded in this exchange between Davies and Akhtar is the problem identified by Peter Morey in his study Islamophobia and the Novel about audiences approaching texts by Muslims from an ethnographic standpoint. In 2020 with an election looming, Davies is most interested in understanding Donald Trump and what facts underpin the relationship between the now President and his Muslim American cardiologist in a fictional work. Akhtar as a writer wants to explore what literary form would best represent the political realities of the

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present from a Muslim perspective besides a default satire. For Muslims, Blacks, Mexican-Americans, the Trump Presidency has been extraordinarily chal­ lenging, and American political life from Twitter rants by a sitting President to impeachment, civil unrest, and a pandemic have seemed surreal or beyond belief. In a review in The New Yorker, Alexandra Schwartz writes, “If there is something Trumpian in the reeling in of a reality-addled public through a craftily manipulated persona, the echo is intentional.” In this autofiction as the reader tries to separate reality from fiction, the tension between what is believable and factual and what is invented keeps the narrative moving while drawing the reader into the emotional world of its protagonist, a successful playwright. The protagonist’s relationship with his immigrant father, who is the ­epitome of model minority success is complex and encompasses anger, pity, love, confusion, and resentment. His father’s arrival in the US is the result of an expansive reworking of US immigration law that occurred in 1965 and which was being steadily undermined post 9/11 and by Donald Trump himself as he enacted exclusionary policies aimed at Muslims. The reader sees Trump’s obvious hypocrisy and the father’s aspiration to be like Donald Trump. As the protagonist wonders how a Muslim doctor could bear to vote for an Islamophobic candidate, he also reveals to his reader the seductiveness of the desire to assimilate and belong in capitalist America. For the physician father, Trump represents American masculinity – wealthy entrepreneur, a lavish lifestyle, and sexual freedom. After meeting Trump, the father begins high – risk investments in real estate, travels frequently to New York for business, gambles in Atlantic city, and engages in a relationship with a prostitute recommended to him by Donald Trump who had also apparently paid the woman for her sexual services. Unlike Trump, Sikander Akhtar remains in a relationship with the woman for over 16 years and even fathers her child. Sikander’s identity as a Muslim is forged in the history of the subcontinent and the Partition, which led to the formation of Pakistan. Sikander Akhtar argues that he is not a Muslim because as he tells his son “I don’t pray; I don’t fast; I’m basically not Muslim; you’re the same; he’s [Trump] not talking about us. And anyway, I was his doctor, so we don’t have anything to worry about” (15). Sikander has internalized American notions of Muslims as fundamentalists and has the meritocratic model minority view of his connections and social status somehow protecting him from the vagaries of Trump’s Islamophobia. Sikander’s adulation of Trump is at odds with Trump’s rather transactional relationship with him as a physician who treats his cardiac arrhythmia and whom he pays with small treats such as a trinket from the hotel gift shop or the phone number of a prostitute. Sikander sees his connection to Trump as validation of his Americanness and his assimilation to its culture and full citizenship. The protagonist, however, has no such illusions about his position in American society. Although he is born in the United States and raised in Wisconsin, 9/11 makes him acutely conscious of his Muslim identity and its inherent risks to his everyday life. Ayad Akhtar, the protagonist, describes a harrowing experience in

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Scranton, PA, when his car breaks down and he is helped by local law enforcement. At first the policeman is friendly but even a decade after 9/11 the protagonist knows that his name will elicit a hostile response. The narrative describes the policeman’s inquiry of Akhtar and the origins of his name – the narrator tells him the name is of Egyptian origin and that he was born in Wisconsin of Pakistan born and raised parents who were born in undivided India. The policeman reduces the complexity of Akhtar’s heritage and focuses on Egypt which he then connects to the national identities of the 9/11 hijackers. The narrator is a marked man until his car is repaired and he spends time in a local motel fearing for his safety. The narrator does not share his father’s certainty about how Americans perceive him or his acceptance in American society. For the narrator, America is a surveillance state and he has constantly to explain himself, his religion, and his identity whenever someone white or one who represents the state questions him. As a Muslim man, the narrator will be racially profiled as a potential terrorist, someone associated with the 9/11 hijackers. The book also includes a deeply moving section in which the narrator describes being in New York on 9/11 and experiencing the grief and trauma of the attacks on the city. On that day, the trauma gives him a shared sense of belonging in America and at the same time his fears for his own safety begin. As he stands in line to give blood at a hospital, he is verbally attacked as an “Arab” and threatened with physical violence. The intervention of a Black man allows him to escape and he seeks refuge in a Salvation Army shop where the pastor offers him water and solace. From the shop, he takes a crucifix necklace and although unable to pay for it thinks of it as a temporary solution to his problem of identity. Many South Asians and Arab Americans ostentatiously proclaimed their American loyalty by proudly displaying flags on their homes, thus hoping to avoid racial violence. The narrator sees the cross as his ability to pass as Christian and to protect himself from attacks. The violent encounter at the hospital line led to the narrator urinating on himself in fear and his white attacker calls attention to that and undermines his masculinity by mocking him as a “tough guy.” (202). Thus, 9/11 marks the day when intense attacks on racial identity and masculinity begin for the protagonist. The narrator’s masculinity is shaped also by his father’s infidelities with a prostitute and his mother’s life-long love for her husband’s best friend. Once again, Akhtar explores interracial and intra-racial relationships. If Disgraced had used an interracial relationship to demonstrate the colonized subject’s sense of self, then Homeland Elegies continues that theme. For Sikander Akhtar, the relationship with a blonde prostitute whose clientele included Donald Trump was the ultimate validation of his American masculinity. The protagonist engages in a series of sexual encounters mostly with white women and his first relationship with Asha, a Pakistani American woman, is his most fulfilling. As he writes, as my darkish body ripened, my wet dreams were only white; I longed for white faces brightened by the sight of my darker one, imagined white breasts and thighs, white fingers on my thickened brown-red penis – all of

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which, of course, reveals a socialization into the politics of race touching the very core of my being. (195) He describes his sense of belonging next to a body similarly hued as his and calls it love: “it was love I was feeling, though I’m no longer clear what sort, exactly – whether it was love for what I’d never been able to accept about myself (my color), which I mistook for love of her, or whether (as I believed that morning) I’d fallen more deeply for another person than I’d known was possible” (195). The narrator’s analysis of his sexuality in a chapter aptly titled “Pox Americana” reveals that Asha also has a complex sense of her racialized sexuality and is secretly in a relationship with a white man. Both the narrator and Asha seek each other out to be socially acceptable to their families and to satisfy each other’s desire for belonging. The relationship is doomed to fail and the narrator, ironically, catches syphilis from Asha, an apt metaphor for the diseased racialized body. Akhtar, the protagonist, is candid about how his sexuality was shaped by the racial politics of America; however, his depiction of Muslim women especially his mother and Asha are not just Oedipal analyses but also deeply misogynist. The narrator is who he is it seems because the women made him so. Akhtar uncritically accepts the misogyny inherent in the oedipal narrative. The narrator’s mother had also been unfaithful (at least emotionally) in her marriage and this sense of his parents’ marriage built on lies makes the narrator skeptical of marriage as an institution and of Pakistani ideas of arranged marriage for the sake of family and community. His mother’s traumatic childhood experiences of Partition make her reject religious nationalism and so the narrator never quite has the nostalgia for Pakistan that his father embodies. His mother becomes ill with cancer and Homeland Elegies uses the diseased female body (Asha’s and his mother’s) as a metaphor for belonging. Neither the mother nor the lover validates the narrator’s masculinity, citizenship, or identity. The narrator’s father returns to Pakistan after his mother’s death and when he learns of his son’s autofiction work being completed, he notes that “Looking back… he realized he’d been playing a role so much of that time, a role he’d taken for real” (333). For him Pakistan is home. There is no such rapprochement with the mother for the narrator – she dies mourned but not necessarily forgiven. Another important female figure in his life is his professor Mary Moroni who had introduced him to Edward Said, Salman Rushdie, and to ways of reading literature through a critical race lens. When she invites the narrator to speak at her campus in 2019, the narrator experiences significant negative responses from the student community. A social media post criticizes him for being “an arrogant asshole” who writes about Muslim men beating up white women and the night before his reading, posters appear on campus depicting him as “PROUD OF 9/11” against a photograph of the Twin Towers, a similar campaign to what Rep. Ilhan Omar had been subjected to. During his campus talk, protesters arrive and one asks him about his criticism of America and remarks that he should leave if he did not like the country. The narrator writes and seems also to speak for the

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author: “I’m here because I was born and raised here. This is where I’ve lived my whole life. For better, for worse – and it’s always a bit of both – I don’t want to be anywhere else. I’ve never even thought about it. America is my home” (343). These are the final words of Homeland Elegies, and Ayad Akhtar, both author and protagonist, claims the right to dissent and in doing so embraces a democratic ideal of America. Homeland Elegies speaks to the pain of being a Muslim writer in America after 9/11. On the one hand, the fame he has garnered and the many awards may suggest that America is countering its Islamophobia by giving Muslim writers a platform. On the other hand, as Akhtar’s writing demonstrates, Muslim writers are compelled to account for their Islamic identities repeatedly. Readers perceive Muslim writing as ethnographic and in service of remedying America’s race problem. Even as Akhtar feels typecast as a Muslim writer, Homeland Elegies is his aesthetic and political engagement with that very problem. Although, more than a decade has passed since the fall of the Twin Towers, the legacy of that time and the prolonged “War on Terror” have created a complex racialization of Muslims. The narratives in mainstream culture present Muslims as eternal outsiders who are threats to American security and sovereignty. Writers like Ayad Akhtar, Fatima Farheen Mirza, H.M. Naqvi, Mohja Kahf, Laila Lalami, and Nawaz Ahmed challenge mainstream narratives and offer a more nuanced and complex exploration of Muslim lives, histories, and identities.

Notes 1 In 2016, the Seattle Repertory Theater produced the play and I participated in the post-play discussion panel. The majority of the Seattle audience was white and many were outraged by the violence against Emily. Very few of the white audience members understood the psychological violence of Islamophobia on Amir’s character. A few members of the audience who identified as Muslim were upset by Amir’s misinterpretation of the Quran and/or the stereotyping of the Muslim man as excessively violent toward women. A review in the Seattle Met dismissed the production and said the play was “‘challenging’ theater at its absolute worst. It’s a show that pretentious people brag about having seen in order to open up ‘deep’ discussions at social gatherings.” A distinctly different perspective is offered by Robin E. Field in her essay on Disgraced, where she argues that the play “challenges audiences to engage more deeply with the stereotypes and essentialized notions of identity that are invoked for Muslim men” (49). 2 In her review of Homeland Elegies, Lopamudra Basu calls the novel a kunstlerroman, or the coming of age of an artist narrative (World Lit Today). Christian Lorentzan in “Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Tao Lin: How ‘Auto’ is ‘Autofiction’” notes the similarities between autofiction and kunstlerroman and argues “autofiction there tends to be emphasis on the narrator’s or protagonist’s or authorial alter ego’s status as a writer or artist and that the book’s creation is inscribed in the book itself.” He emphasizes that the artifice in an autofictional work is in the service of creating a sense of no artifice which is the point of the whole genre. www.vulture.com/2018/05/how-auto-is-­ autofiction.html. 3 The New America Foundation documents 763 different anti-Muslim incidents in the United States between 2012 and 2018 and notes that incidents have sharply risen since 2015. https://www.newamerica.org/in-depth/anti-muslim-activity/. The FBI

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documented a rise in hate crimes against Muslims in 2015 following the political rise of Donald Trump and the numbers surpassed the attacks in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/us/politics/hate-crimes-americanmuslims-rise.html. And Pew Research documented 144 incidents of intimidation of Muslims and 93 simple or aggravated assaults against Muslims in 2016. https://www.pewresearch. org/fact-tank/2017/11/15/assaults-against-muslims-in-u-s-surpass-2001-level/. 4 The NSEERS program was started in September 2002 and required travelers from Muslim countries to register at port of entry and only certain ports were allowed for entry and exit. The program was suspended in 2011 and dismantled in 2016 by President Obama. 5 For an in-depth discussion of Muslims and racialization, see Sahar Aziz’s The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom (University of California Press, 2022). 6 I have written elsewhere about the gendered discourse of Islamophobia and how South Asian Muslim women writers have addressed the issue in their fiction. See “Digital Subaltern Counterpublics and Muslim Women’s Resistance in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire and Samira Ahmed’s Internment.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Spring 2022. 7 For a deeper discussion on the stereotyping of American Muslims, see Deepa Kumar’s Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire (Verso 2021). 8 In their curated section “Provocations: Global South Asian and Black Relationships”, Liam O’Loughlin and Pallavi Rastogi examine the complex interplay of race, xenophobia, immigrant identities within Black and South Asian relationships globally. They note that “this series of short essays interrogates the relationships between South Asian and Black communities across the Anglophone postcolonial world to highlight the friction and often-forgotten solidarities that emerged under a shared history of colonialism, migration, and segregation.” Akhtar’s Disgraced, especially Amir’s conflicts with Jory, his African-American female colleague depict both the solidarity between them as well as the hostility as they compete for limited resources in a law firm that promotes white supremacy through the actions of its Jewish founders. 9 Moustafa Bayoumi notes that Muslim men under 30 often abandoned their ethnic roots and religious identity because of shame or fear. 10 Ayad Akhtar’s play The Who and the What explores the challenges of a Muslim woman writer within the family, her religious culture, and post 9/11 America.

Works Cited Ahmad, Muneer. “Homeland Insecurities: Racial Violence the Day after September Eleventh.” Social Text, 72, 20.3 (2002): 101–115. Akhtar, Ayad. Disgraced. New York: Back Bay Books, 2013. ——— The Who & the What. New York: Back Bay Books, 2014. ——— Homeland Elegies. New York: Little Brown, 2020. Aziz, Sahar. The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022. Bald, Vivek. Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Basu, Lopamudra. “Between Performatvity and Representation: Post-9/11 Muslim Masculinity in Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced.” South Asian Racialization and Belonging after 9/11. Edited by Aparajita De. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016. 83–102. Basu, Lopamudra. Review of Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar. World Literature Today. Autumn 2020. worldliteraturetoday.org/2020/autumn/homeland-­ elegies-ayadakhtar. Accessed December 12, 2020.

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Bayoumi, Moustafa. How does it Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America. New York: Penguin, 2008. Considine, Craig. “The Racialization of Islam in the United States: Islamophobia, Hate Crimes, and ‘Flying while Brown’” Religions, 8, 165 (2017). doi:103390/rel8090165 Curtis IV, Edward E. Muslims in America: A Short History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Davies, Dave. ‘“Homeland Elegies’: Novelist Reflects on Homesickness and the Immigrant Experience.” NPR/Fresh Air. September 14, 2020. www.npr.org/2020/ 09/14/9126677645/ Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1952. Pluto Books, 1988. Field, Robin E. ‘“The Question Remains…of Your Place’: Challenging Reductive Identities in Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced”. South Asian Review, 38.1 (2017): 49–71. Iyer, Nalini. “Digital Subaltern Counterpublics and Muslim Women’s Resistance in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire and Samira Ahmed’s Internment.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 41.2 (Spring 2022): 135–154. Kumar, Deepa. Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire: 25 Years after 9/11. Verso, 2021. New York. Lee, Erika. America for Americans: A History of Exclusion in the United States. Boston, MA: Basic Books, 2019. Lorentzen, Christian. “Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Tao Lin: How ‘Auto’ Is ‘Autofiction’?” May 11, 2018. www.vulture.com/2018/05/how-auto-is-autofiction.html Morey, Peter. Islamophobia and the Novel. New York: Columbia UP, 2019. O’Loughlin, Liam and Pallavi Rastogi. “Introduction: Global Black and South Asian Relationships.” Provocations. South Asian Review, 42 (2022): 1–2. Schwartz, Alexandra. “An American Writer for an Age of Division.” The New Yorker. September 14, 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/21/ an-american-writer-for-an-age-of-division Sommerfield, Seth. “Seattle Rep’s ‘Disgraced’ has a Humanity Problem.” Seattle Met. seattleJanuary 19, 2016. https://www.seattlemet.com/arts-and-culture/2016/01/­ rep-disgraced-has-a-humanity-problem. Accessed December 8, 2020.

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

The attacks on the office premises of the Charlie Hebdo magazine by a group of self-proclaimed radical Islamists evoked a collective response from the white ­l iberal world that fringed upon a permanent state of victimhood – “Je suis Charlie” or “I am Charlie”, the clarion call that united the rest of the western world in its fight against Islamic fundamentalism. The insistence upon this collective kernel of identity was often coerced upon the national scene of France with the French Government led by the centrist François Hollande insisting that those who failed to toe the line of this particular empathetic field of collectivist imagination would be punished. Although Hollande refused to condemn the magazine’s unapologetic stance on its regressive and rather offensive portrayal of Islam in its cover pages through the years, the subsequent attack on the magazine headquarters triggered a statist response led by the President that fell in line with many of the xenophobic and anti-Islamic legal dictates and administrative coercions that were visible in French republican life leading up to the Hebdo massacre. The ban on the public display of the Burqa, the anti-separatism bill which specifically target a certain religious community in France were upheld and constitutionally justified vis-a-vis the core founding principles of the French idea of the “laïcité” which purportedly indicates a separation of the public domain of governance from the religious and theological proclivities of the nation-state. The ban on the public display of the Burqa, for instance, was legally enforced by citing the logic of the laïcité that proclaimed that public life in France should be redeemed from any visible and ostentatious signs of religion, although, there are no legal enforcements against the public celebration of Christian festivals like Christmas, which have glibly been termed as “secular” and thus beyond the immediate concerns of the laïcité machinery in France. Since the apocalyptic events of the 9/11, the French republic witnessed a state-sponsored “extended paradigm of the state of exception” specifically in regards to its Muslim population and the DOI: 10.4324/9781003362999-5

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various Islamic separatist groups in former colonies like Algiers. According to Christopher A. Lizotte, In France, laïcité has long been implicated among the values that position the territory of the French state as a place of tolerance and openness in distinction to backwards theocratic lands: historically, those were identified at the time of the French Revolution as the so-called “Catholic” countries under papal rule. Over time, though, the geographic foil of French laïcité has shifted to encompass places under Islamic control. This change over the past several decades in the French cultural consciousness has evolved alongside the rise of Islamist movements and the perceived challenge they present to the Enlightenment values that France prides itself on having brought to the world. This shift in laïcité’s status as a litmus test of civilization is a geopolitical one, marking non-compliers to its standards as not only culturally deficient, but also as potential security threats. As a result, French society struggles to reconcile its security fears through different geopolitical prescriptions for its Muslim population. (2017: 3) This particular geo-political and metonymic shift in the contours of the laïcité thus indicates a desperate urge for the sustenance of the idea of the French sovereign enlightenment “self ” as against the rise of other identitarian groups ostentatiously marking their identity into the visible domain of the public realm in France. An extended paradigm of this acute identity crisis is symptomatically expressed in the “Je suis Charlie” public protests in France following the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Although apparently touted as a secular trans-identitarian protest in favour of the freedom of speech in the French republic, the varied socio-political and ideological milieu surrounding the protestors and their specific performatives indicate that the public gesture was not all inclusive, and indeed treaded the lines of a certain geo-political xenophobia that haunted the scene of European post-enlightenment in the years following the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. French philosopher Alain Badiou speaking on the events that unfolded after the Charlie Hebdo massacre opined that the world order is currently placed at the crucial juncture (the rudimentary stage preceding the ideal communist world order) wherein crude identitarian politics premised around a self-imposed death drive is in a perpetual state of conflict with a western capitalist oligarchy that counteracts against the former by positing a counter-identitarian politics that mimics the institutional excesses of the “Communist State” in its bid to protect higher ethico-political goals at the cost of certain collateral damages. He opines, The general plot of this story is the West – homeland of the dominant, civilised capitalism – clashing with ‘Islamism’ – the reference point of bloody terrorism. Appearing against this backdrop we have, on the one

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hand, murderous armed gangs or individuals with stockpiles of their own, which they wave around in order to force everyone to honour the corpse of some deity; on the other hand, savage international military expeditions mounted in the name of human rights and democracy, which destroy entire states (Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Sudan, Congo, Mali, the Central African Republic…). (2015) The statist response to the Charlie Hebdo killings involved the construction of an identitarian binary- the idea of the good French democrat fighting for the right to free speech against the fanaticism of the Islamist radicals. “Je suis Charlie” or “I am Charlie” was not an unconditional, spontaneous reaction on the part of the undivided population of France, rather it was conditionally orchestrated, even exhorted and institutionally coerced by statist measures to toe the line and become the marker of a presumed national unity against the enemy within- the Islamists who have been the targets of the conditionally secular French laïcité ever since the Algerian independence wars during the 1960s: ‘[F]reedom of expression’! Was that the demonstration was about? No, quite the contrary: amidst its sea of tricolores it asserted that being French firstly requires that everyone have the same opinion, guided by the state. During the first days of this affair, it was practically impossible to express any opinion contrary to the one that consisted of making paeans to our freedom, to our Republic; damnation of the corruption of our identity by young Muslim proletarians and the horribly veiled girls; and virile preparations for the war on terror. We even heard the following slogan, a fine example of freedom of speech: ‘We are all police!’ (ibid.) While Slavoj Žižek counters the empathetic contours of “Je suis Charlie” or “I am Charlie” on a different critical ground stating that it would be altogether “obscene” to extend such identity kernels to include the horrific events in places like Auschwitz and Gaza,1 any ethical critique of “Je suis Charlie” must take into cognizance not merely the impossibility of pure empathetic imagination along posthumanist/critical humanist grounds, but also must make way for understanding the onto-political grounds that prepare the collective imagination for such spectacular demonstrations of public resistance in France that curiously have no place for other advocates of free speech like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange or Chelsea Manning. Not only were the “Je suis Charlie” protests conditionally affective, they also triggered a collective paranoia in the white liberal postenlightenment political landscape of France that was always, already embedded in the laïcité ethos of early 20th-century France. This state-sponsored affective field of a presumed emasculated victimhood would not only prepare the grounds for the rise of the far-right (only apparently centrist) Emmanuel Macron government

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in the 2017 national elections, it would also intricately dictate the contours of the collective literary imagination that would uphold and provide elaborate apologia for dystopic and Islamophobic literary works like Michel Houellebecq’s Submission (2015) and Boualem Sansal’s 2084 (2015) – both of which appeared in the year of the Charlie Hebdo massacre and became overnight bestsellers owing to their ability to express their anti-Islamist liberal enunciatory register. Fredric Jameson’s claim that, “[i]t seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism” (1996: xii) brings into question the inability and the finitude of the western dystopian imaginations to account for a future(s) that doesn’t reiterate the constatives of the socio-cultural logic of late western capitalism, and thereby all dystopic imaginings become an extension of the Western paranoia regarding the rise of alternate heterotopias and trans-European political subsystems that refuse to be co-opted within the hegemonic regimes of posthumanist futurity of late capitalism and western geo-political subsystems. Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission elicited unprecedented attention on its arrival in the literary scene, not merely because of its explicit and unrestrained take on the possible rise of an Islamist republic in France, but also since its publication date coincided with the Charlie Hebdo killings ( January 7, 2015). Interestingly, the cover on the Charlie Hebdo magazine for the January 7 issue contained a cartoon caricature of Michel Houellebecq claiming, “In 2015, I’ll lose my teeth ¼ In 2022, I’ll observe Ramadan”. As the cover suggests, Houellebecq’s novel is an extension of the white liberal paranoia regarding the rise of Islam in the West, and subsequently follows the Jamesonian idea of the western dystopic cultural machinery as an ideological battlefield wherein the sovereign status quo of the present “self ” (the white liberal male subject of contemplation) is endangered and must be defended against the intrusions and the excesses of the radical “other” (the Islamic alternative republic in this case) in an imaginary distant future proleptically produced and conditioned for mass consumption by the interpellative ideological structures of the western state machinery. There is a crucial interstitial space that connects the conditional dystopia of the western interpellative cultural machinery and the empathetic contours of the “Je suis Charlie” movement – both work along a politico-ontological continuum that assume a certain state of permanent victimhood for the sovereign “self ”, and project the unassimilable and radical “other” as a disruption of the linear trajectory of the enlightenment project of western geo-political modernity wherein the assumed ideals of democracy, the secularist laïcité and the human rights discourse(s) become the rallying points for normalcy and the ideal future for humankind. According to Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Winter, This communion around the slogan “Je suis Charlie”, and the self-­r ighteous defence of freedom of speech under the protection of the state, its police and army, hid a multitude of inconsistencies and contradictions. The most notable was the photo opportunity with the leaders of the “free” and not

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so free world (and the war on terror) leading (or pretending to lead) the march of solidarity, whose record with regard to freedom of speech and the press was heavily criticized as hypocritical (Sherriff, January 13, 2015). Yet, despite such discrepancies at the core of the hegemonic discourse, the overall pattern is familiar: widespread and normalized criticism of an essentialized Muslim threat for its hatred of “our” liberal freedom and tolerant societies, even as “our” countries pass – and the population at large chooses to ignore – counter-terrorism and extremism legislation that c­ urtails those very freedoms. (2017: 2) Alain Badiou’s contention that the red flag of the revolutionary communist regime of the future is incommensurate with the tricolore of French nationalism, which purportedly metamorphosed in the “Je suis” movement indicates that the latter is merely a western neo-liberal ploy to reiterate the geo-political status quo and thus infinitely defer the “Real” of the revolution.2 While media reports and the intricate web of simulated truth narratives surrounding the Charlie Hebdo shootings gesture towards the affective field of a momentous “event” – a turning point in the epistemic order of things from which there is no going back to the previous perspective or status quo. Such hermeneutic spaces thus point towards a total disruption in the socio-political order, similar in its meaning formation like that of the 9/11 insofar as it is seen as indicating a historical rupture that splits the worldviews into a neat binarized set of “prior to” and “afterwards” of the “event of the Real”.3 Such readings, similar to the western theoretical epoch surrounding the 9/11, are often misleading insofar as it fails to take into account the continual spaces and reiterative performatives that connect the “event” before and after the assumed point of disruption. The Charlie Hebdo killings or the subsequent “Je suis Charlie” narrative do not form a part of the “event of the Real” in Lacanian or Žižekean terms, rather, they subscribe to a set of ideologies, performative spaces and statist proclivities that were in motion in France for decades before the eventful happenings of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. In Houellebecq’s novel Submission, the year is 2022 and the protagonist is a white male academic libertine, François, who has no moral qualms about using his cultural and academic capital to prey upon young female students, and moreover, appears to be deeply protective about his white male privileges and the access to the high-modernist decadent masquerades that it guarantees. An obvious intertextual counterpart to François’ character is David Lurie in J.M. Coetzee’s post-apartheid novel, Disgrace. While Lurie, like François is self-fashioned in the ways of the Byronesque hero and appears to be indulgent and deeply indifferent to the ethical repercussions of his sexual exploits upon young female students of his university, the narrative trajectory of Coetzee’s text posits him in an ethical aporetic position wherein he is coerced to ultimately realize his own white male privileges and the parochial contours of his intellectual and cultural self-­ fashioning vis-a-vis a confrontation with his own daughter who reminds him of the

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need to “[t]o start at ground level. With nothing. Not with n ­ othing but. With nothing ¼ Like a dog” (2000: 205). The narratorial trajectory of Houellebecq’s novel would lead François along a very different path altogether, and far from enacting any ethical gesture towards a radical alterity, he would become the quilting point for the projection of a paranoid, emasculated white European dystopic fantasy machinery grieving over the apparent loss of privileges and agency in the onslaught of a sudden rise of the Muslim political fraternity (“Muslim Brotherhood”) to the corridors of absolute statist power. If the Cold War years provided a fecund imaginative realm to re-configure the genre of dystopic futurism to suit the anti-communist ideologues of Western Europe and the U.S., the post-9/11 climate bolstered the rise of a sub-genre which reinstates the figure of the despotic and tyrannical “other” onto the imaginative realm of a supposed conspirational Islamic brotherhood: Internationally, conservative and far-right commentators have established a genre of dystopian literature forecasting a new Dark Age in which Europe is reduced to a state of servitude by Muslim immigrants from its former colonies. Hardline anti-Muslim writers including Bat Ye’or, Oriana Fallaci, Melanie Phillips and Ayaan Hirsi Ali have contributed to this ‘Eurabia’ discourse, while softer versions locating Muslims as an unruly population in need of discipline have become firmly established in centrist policy-­making ¼ The origins of Europe’s ‘Muslim problem’ are assumed to lie within Muslims themselves and Europe’s failure to assert its own cultural supremacy rather than in the legacies of colonialism, migration and settlement. (Hussein et al., 2019: 266) Early on in the novel, François nurtures a nightmarish vision of an Islamic futurity wherein the assumed markers of the cultural and academic superiority of the West are appropriated by the petro-monarchs of the Middle East vis-a-vis their crude resources of money and material capital, Then a topic of conversation occurred to me: there had been more talk lately about a project, first proposed four or five years ago, to create a replica of the Sorbonne in Dubai (or was it Bahrain? Qatar? I always got them mixed up). Oxford had a similar plan in the works. Clearly the antiquity of our two universities had caught some petro-monarch’s eye. (Houellebecq, 2015: 21–22) Samuel P. Huntington’s idea of the “clash of civilizations” plays out in a very differential space in this elaborate dystopian fantasy of the lead character regarding the “Islamic Resurgence” in the post-Cold War geo-political climate of the late 21st century. Whereas Huntington’s clash of civilization thesis plays out an imaginary future of the 21st-century geopolity wherein the Confucian-Islamic

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alliance against the Western power bloc shall resist the Eurocentric modes of modernity and resurrect an indigenous transmodern technocratic order to counter the former , Houellebecq’s lead character imagines a futurity wherein the centres of European learning and the Enlightenment are crudely co-opted by the Islamic monarchs of the Middle East by way of their money and easy access to precarious natural resources. The clash of the civilization thesis written thus gestures towards Huntington’s suggestions that an alternative non-western world order might prove to be detrimental for the democratic political and liberal values that the West still upholds. François’ fears are imbued within a similar set of beliefs that a shifting of the power structures towards the other ideological bloc (the neo-Islamist republic) might lead to an erosion of the deeply cherished kernels of liberty and free-thinking in academic spaces, and that the rise of an alternative Islamic world order might lead to the servitude of academics and intellectuals to the capitalist Islamic monarchs who represent the antithesis of the democratic and secular ideals of the French Enlightenment. Curiously, such fears are coterminous with the incessant paranoia of François regarding the rise of non-subservient women through the ranks in academic spaces: “I’ve never really been convinced that it was a good idea for women to get the vote, study the same things as men, go into the same professions, et cetera. I mean, we’re used to it now – but was it really a good idea?” (ibid.: 31). François’ fears are an extension of the exclusivist terrains of the “Je suis Charlie” rhetoric which indicated a concealed collective affinity for the privileged white, liberal male subject (in the form of the quilting signifier “Charlie”) who fears appropriation and castration (an undoing of his claims to a priori male agency) by the unknown and radical “other” whom he could only understand and represent through monolithic stereotypes. Later in the novel, when the Muslim Brotherhood, led by Mohammed Ben Abbes, emerges as the second most voted party in the general elections, the fears and apprehensions regarding a renewed world order that might disrupt and violate the Republican “sacred” of France are further voiced by François when he perceives a changing status quo in the campus milieu: I finally felt that something might happen, that the political system I’d grown up with, which had been showing cracks for so long, might suddenly explode ¼ It may also have been the way the girls in burkas carried themselves. They moved slowly and with new confidence, walking down the very middle of the hallway, three by three, as if they were already in charge. (ibid.: 31) The sense of disenfranchisement that plagues François, and by extension the canonical corridors of Western academia, are symptomatic of a growing unease that an emerging alternative discourse, one that doesn’t hark back to the Enlightenment or the French charter of rights discourses, might slowly

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make its presence felt in academic spaces and civil societies which for long have ­nourished “the notion that [western] modernity is some kind of straightforward destiny for everybody” (Asad, “Islam, Secularism and the Modern State”). Talal Asad’s argument that the predominant ideological gaze of western secularism, which is often paraded as a sort of “disenchantment” or “a stripping away of myth, magic, and the sacred” (2008: 13), bears further implications for the ideological state apparatus of Western academia that privileges the supposed pedagogic “neutrality” of proto-Enlightenment secularistic reading lenses, even while being oblivious of its inherent Judaeo-Christian biases and its self-­a ssumed rights to mock and ridicule members of a different faith. The re-emergence of Islam through the folds of a differential pedagogic and academic order thus also suggests the gradual fading away of the cherished ideals of western secularism and its conditionally hospitable epistemic “neutrality”, leading to the onset of a syncretic knowledge register that no longer differentiates between the secular and the religious. As François notes, the distinction between the secular and the pre-modern or the theo-religious per se is fundamental to the idea of western education and its hallowed pedagogic registers, and a sudden disruption of the sacred lines that separate the two unsettles him and other members of his academic fraternity: They want every French child to have the option of a Muslim education, at every level of schooling. Now, however you look at it, a Muslim education is very different from a secular one ¼ Schools would observe Muslim dietary laws and the five daily prayers; above all, the curriculum itself would have to reflect the teachings of the Koran. (Houellebecq, 2015: 67) Defenders of the rights of Charlie Hebdo were similarly entrenched in a discursive realm that sought to protect the western secular “self ” from its violent detractors (Islamist reactionaries) who could question its supposed trans-religious neutrality and locate its inherent aporia when it purportedly claimed to situate itself beyond its Judaeo-Christian, and thus inherently Islamophobic ideological bearings. A further extension of this particular conditionally critical and secular pedagogic and ideological state apparatus became apparent during the “Je suis Charlie” events in 2015 when school children across the French republic were coerced to toe the line that supported the caricatures of Charlie Hebdo, and believed that “blasphemy, in the form of caricatures of Mohammed, was an integral element of French identity. It was their duty to blaspheme” (Todd, 2016: Introduction). Emmanuel Todd further opines: Children came home from school with a letter C written on their hands. Kids aged 7 and 8 were interviewed at the school gates and asked for their thoughts on the horror of the events and the importance of one’s freedom to draw caricatures. The government decreed that anyone who failed to

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toe the line would be punished. Any secondary school pupil who refused to observe the minute’s silence imposed by the government was seen as implicitly supporting terrorism and refusing to stand in solidarity with the national community. (Ibid.) A reclaiming of these authoritarian pedagogic structures that justify the right to conditional blasphemy as part and parcel of the French secularist belief in the laïcité evokes a nightmarish vision in François as he mourns the loss of a certain performative privilege that he and his peers had exercised for so long in the name of the rights to freedom of expression. According to Seth Armus, the novel unintentionally reveals its political unconscious and its neo-orientalist fidelity through the words of François, when he regretfully says to his Jewish lover and mistress Myriam that, “there is no Israel for me” (Houellebecq, 2015: 91).4 Myriam, an ethnic Jew who swore by the “La Marseillaise” is forced to flee France because of incessant fears and rumours doing the rounds that the rise of a Muslim republic might spell doom for the Jews in France. In this context, François’ guilt-ridden words that “there is no Israel for me” (ibid.) not only reveal the extent to which the French republic post the Second World War had been unable to defend the rights of the Jews or the women in the country but, more importantly, it reveals how and why the Israeli atrocities in the Muslim populated towns of Palestine have been overlooked by the sovereign western powers during their various justice crusades in the Middle East led by the U.N. and other such international agencies. François’ words not only gesture towards Israel as the promised land that shall protect and shelter the Islam prosecuted Jews of the world, but it also retroactively renders a cover-up for the political reality of Zionist Israel and its incessant efforts to champion a virulent form of anti-Arabism and Islamophobia as a necessary antidote to fight the cause of the Jews in the world. In other words, François conjures a neo-orientalist geo-political case scenario wherein Zionist Israel is posited as the messiah of those persecuted by Islam, thereby whitewashing both the war crimes of Israel carried out against the Arabs and Muslims in Palestine, and also, by extension, the anti-Semitism carried out in French history by the majoritarian white population throughout the different centuries. However, François, unlike Myriam, as he ruefully asserts, can have no real access to the messianic realm of Israel, and thereby must locate his redemption and survival in the new Islamic world order in terms of a radical subversion of his earlier subjective self. The title “Submission” is a loaded signifier for the complicated ways in which socio-political subjective interpellation takes place at the crucial interstitial point that connects disparate personal experiences like agential choice, jouissance as well as socio-political compulsion. As the political climate of France slowly changes to suit the ideals of Ben Abbes’ Muslim brotherhood (“all he wants is to realise de Gaulle’s dream, of France as a great Arab power”) (ibid.: 129), François feels alienated from the core principles of French republicanism, the mystical

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aura of Christianity and the decadent philosophy of Joris-Karl Huysmans who converted to Catholicism in his later years: The next morning, after I filled up my car and paid at the hotel, I went back to the Chapel of Our Lady, which now was deserted. The Virgin waited in the shadows, calm and timeless. She had sovereignty, she had power, but little by little I felt myself losing touch, I felt her moving away from me in space and across the centuries while I sat there in my pew, shrivelled and puny. (Ibid.: 139) As the Sorbonne-Paris is co-opted by the petro-monarchs of the Middle East, François is given the choice of converting to Islam if he wished to be reinstated to his earlier academic position. The ethical calculus of his decision-making, curiously, rests upon a utopian imagination of Islamic France wherein the male academics, as the progenitors of a superior future race, would be compensated for their willing disengagement from critical and intellectual masquerades by a state-sponsored programme of polygyny. Here, “submission” to the Islamic religion would thereby entail an unconditional access to the submission of women to the patri-feudal order. As Rediger, the minister in Ben Abbes’ government, explains the idea to him, “I hesitate to discuss the idea with my fellow Muslims, who might consider it sacrilegious, but for me there’s a connection between woman’s submission to man, as it’s described in Story of O, and the Islamic idea of man’s submission to God” (ibid.: 217). The reason why François finds this allusion particularly alluring is because it provides him with a counterpoint to compensate for the loss of the non-submissive Myriam, who not only fled France but also decided to assert her autonomy by choosing another partner over François in Israel. The trajectory of moral and ethical degeneration that marks François’ ultimate submission to Islam runs parallel to the predicament experienced by Myriam as she finally breaks free from the docile and submissive role-playings initially assigned to her – firstly as a Jew in France, and secondly as a female subject constantly objectified by the male gaze of François. The counter-­focalization of the novel in the form of Myriam’s journey to autonomy and freedom not only punctuates and critiques the “submission” of François to Islam, it also re-asserts the novel’s incessant efforts to determine the future contours of Islamist revivalism in Europe and elsewhere in terms of an a priori field of neo-­orientalist dystopic imagination – one where Islam is desirable only insofar as it allows the realization of a patriarchal fantasy for unconditional female submission, and where Zionist Israel with its inherent Arabophobia and Islamophobia become the only refuge for women like Myriam who are determined to escape from both patriarchal domination and ethnic hate crimes like anti-Semitism. This counter-focalization of the novel in terms of Myriam’s unnarrated journey to freedom, autonomy and resistance against Eurabia 5 further provides us with a differential context to situate François’ earlier statement – “there is no Israel for

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me” (ibid.: 91). It imagines that Europe, unlike Zionist Israel, has no choice but to give in to Islamic revivalism and its perceived monism since the moderate National Front had not done enough to rein in the constant influx of immigrants and the onslaught of multiculturalism in France. The submission of France to the Islamic republic is characterized by passivity and apathy, rather than active resistance or civil war as was advocated by the likes of Marine Le Pen, the altwhite nativist, who often led rallies that carried posters like “We Are the People of France” or “This Is Our Home” (ibid.: 97). The “Je suis Charlie” protests were part of a desperate effort to keep intact the pure, homogenous identity kernel which Emmanuel Todd identifies as the collective “Charlie” syndrome of the white European reactionary middle-class who are made to believe that for a long time they have been subject to the politically correct oppressive milieu of “multiculturalism” and its perceived tolerant tendencies towards the migrant “others”, but are now fighting to reclaim a nativist, pure “self ” unscathed by the ambiguity inflicted by a syncretic collective milieu. He says, In all Western societies, a Charlie lies slumbering ¼ Everywhere, Charlie rules, but he does not know where he is going. Even though he consciously claims to be following positive universal values, he is unconsciously on the lookout for a scapegoat. Everywhere, xenophobia, until recently a characteristic of the poorer sections of society, is starting to pervade the upper half of the social structure, generating a long-term oscillation between Islamophobia and Russophobia. As a result, in all Western societies, a fit of ‘French-style’ collective hysteria is possible if a senseless act of terrorism suddenly brings the ‘universal’ Charlie back to the reality of the unjust and violent world that he dominates and condones. (2016: Preface) Michel Houellebecq’s Submission is an extension of this collective hysteria and its teleological narrative trajectory gestures towards a culmination of all those fears and apprehensions that typify the self-fashioning of the “Charlie” identitarian kernel of the French republic, and by extension, the whole of the neo-European revivalist regime in the West. The hegemonic contours of “Je suis Charlie” are premised around a covert alt-white nationalist project in France, and elsewhere in Europe, that use the cover of the laïcité secularist thesis and the conditionallydemocratic grounds of the “right to blaspheme” to push forward the imaginative contours of an Islamophobic dystopia that shall help the western nation-states to retroactively prepare the grounds for a homogenous nation built around the kernel of conditional hospitality for its radical Islamic other(s). The Rushdie affair following the publication of Satanic Verses in 1988 prepared the fecund grounds to project Islam and its orthodox adherents as being antithetical to the idea of the secular and the proto-Enlightenment contours of “universal critique”; it provided a vantage point wherein a subtle and dormant

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Orientalism could be projected against the Middle East and traditional Islam, and a discursive space could be preserved wherein the Orientalist brotherhood of Charlie Hebdo could still exhibit their white cultural supremacy through the alibi of the upholders of the freedom of expression and press. As Gayatri Spivak notes of the post-Rushdie era and the creolization of the Judaeo-Christian hegemony under the aegis of democratic ethics and secularism, what is the agenda here in not noticing that the people in the United States and the high-minded British press who are judging the self-appointed punisher - the Ayatollah - are the ones who are in fact trying to mobilize a certain kind of Orientalism. Old elemental fears and phobias of European cultural consciousness are being mobilized under the alibi of freedom of expression, in order to judge the punisher. (1991: 123) Interestingly, the conversion of François to Islam in this neo-Orientalist dystopia is narrated only in terms of a deferred futurity - a break away from the temporal order of the “present” in the narrative. This final gesture towards a deferred, unrealized futurity, a “yet-to-be”, encapsulates the actual onto-political motive of the novel insofar as it proleptically awaits the intervention of such cataclysmic radical Islamist events as the Charlie Hebdo massacre to punctuate and thereby finally revert and irrevocably undo this “submission” to Islam.

Notes 1 “In the Grey Zone: Slavoj Žižek on responses to the Paris killings” by Slavoj Žižek in London Review of Books, Vol. 37 No. 3, 5 February 2015. 2 Badiou’s idea of the revolution as a poststructuralist “event” irreducible to the cogitative machinations of “being” is borrowed from Jacques Lacan’s idea of the “Real” as a beyond of the Symbolic order. 3 Slavoj Žižek in Welcome to the Desert of the Real! (2002) describes the western representations of the 9/11 attacks as an instance of the twentieth century “passion for the Real”. 4 Seth Armus in “Trying on the Veil: Sexual Autonomy and the End of the French Republic in Michel Houellebecq’s ‘Submission’”, French Politics, Culture & Society Vol. 35, No. 1, Special Issue: Literature and the Press (Spring 2017), pp. 126–145. 5 A portmanteau political neologism first used by Bat Ye’or in Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis (2005) to describe a far-right Islamophobic conspiracy theory that suggests the gradual colonization of Europe by the Islamic Arabian powers.

Works Cited Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. Asad, Talal. “Islam, Secularism and the Modern State.” Interview by Nermeen Shaikh, Asia Society, accessed 16th September, 2021, https://asiasociety.org/islamsecularism-and-modern-state

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Badiou, Alain. “The Red Flag and the Tricolore.” Translated by David Broder, Verso Press, February 3 2015, http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1833-the-red-flagandthe-tricolore-by-alain-badiou Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace. New York: Penguin, 2000. Houellebecq, Michel, and Lorin Stein. Submission. New York: Picador, 2016. Hussein, Shakira, Scheherazade Bloul and Scott Poynting. “Diasporas and Dystopias on the Beach Burkini Wars in France and Australia.” In The Routledge International Handbook of Islamophobia, edited by Irene Zempi and Imran Awan. London: Routledge, 2019, pp. 263–274. Jameson, Fredric. The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Lizotte, Christopher. The Geopolitics of Laïcité in a Multicultural Age: French Secularism, Educational Policy and the Spatial Management of Difference. PhD diss., University of Washington, 2017. Mondon, Aurelien and Aaron Winter. “Articulations of Islamophobia: from the extreme to the mainstream?” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2017, pp. 1–29, doi: 10.1080/01419870.2017.1312008 Najmabadi, Afsaneh, and Gayatri Spivak. “Interview with Gayatri Spivak.” Social Text, no. 28, 1991, pp. 122–134. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/466380 Todd, Emmanuel. Who is Charlie? Xenophobia and the New Middle Class. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016.

4 SINHALA BUDDHIST NATIONALISM AND SHRINKING SPACE FOR MUSLIMS IN SRI LANKA The Post-Tamil Elam War and Post-9/11 Situation Rajeesh C. Sarngadharan

Introduction South Asia is in for major unravelling wherein states like Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh and India have unleashed majoritarian whipping against minorities. Myanmar has opened up fissures against Rohingyas, Sinhala Sri Lanka has unleashed its scourge against Muslims and Tamils, Pakistan is beating its Hindu minorities and their places of worship are attacked, Bangladesh is making life miserable for Hindus and India has unravelled historical communal tensions against Muslims, which form the largest minority in the country. In the guise of Majoritarianism and Religious-Nationalism, the emergence of ultra-­religious and political right-wing movements has shaken and flustered the region’s main civic, federal and secular institutions. While secularism demands the separation of public and political institutions from religious institutions, recent developments in the South Asia indicate that the representatives and bureaucrats who have won and allocated the mandate to rule, cause democratic space to turn into the ‘tyranny of the majority’. The recent communal skirmishes and scuffles between two ­communities  – Sinhalese and Muslims – in Sri Lanka should be viewed in the same lens which exactly reflects the injunction of majoritarian Sinhala Ethno-Buddhist Nationalism in statecraft and societal aspects. The post-Tamil Elam war revealed the Mahinda Rajapaksa-led Sri Lankan administration’s soft and authoritarian stance. Electoral plans and strategies based specifically on ethnic and political equality have begun to be used by the two major national parties. Some are seeking, aspiring and clamouring to establish a political structure in accordance with Sinhala Buddhist philosophy. Some depict Muslims as a minority which deserves to be marginalised. Ostensibly, as a consequence of their identity-driven desire for more sovereignty deeply promoted by financing from Middle East Nations DOI: 10.4324/9781003362999-5

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and support from Global Ummah, the Sinhala chauvinist groups ­representing majority schism challenged the recent socio-political transformations of the Muslim minority. The ongoing religious and cultural pressure from right-wing Sinhala Buddhist groups – JHU, BBS, etc. – has forced national political parties to deviate from their legal and constitutional responsibilities to establish an equitable society.

The Projection of ‘Old and New Enemies’ Within South Asia, Sri Lanka’s stature is often drawn from its history of dealing with colonialism. During the colonial period, the divide and rule policy of British government preferred Tamil minority more and sidelined the interests of Sinhalese as they had been constantly questioning the foreign presence on the Island. Therefore, after the Independence, the Sri Lankan government started initiating policies which directly intended to derail the progress that Tamil ethnic groups had already achieved. Many scholars have well documented the fact that Sri Lanka right after its independence in 1948, initiated a project to establish Sinhalese Buddhist domination on the island that has multiple ethnic identities, to glorify itself as a heterogeneous society. From 1950s onwards, the state took several measures to undermine the ethnic diversity of the state, to begin with, it gave pre-eminence to the Sinhala language by the infamous Sinhala Only Act of 1956. From language, measures to segregate Tamil population were taken up in the fields of employment and education as well. When negotiation between Sinhalese and Tamil leaderships failed, the country witnessed spirals of violence between both communities. This also laid the foundation of Tamil Eelam movement to liberate the Northern Eastern provinces through coercive measures and establish an independent state for the Tamil ethnicity. The militancy that was later translated as civil war was eliminated in 2009 during the tenure of Mahinda Rajapakshe. Now in the modern phase, the Sri Lankan society has created a new enemy, the Muslims. An eminent scholar from Sri Lanka, Neil Devotta has the questioned the common perception that the country in the 1940s and 1950s had truly committed leaderships to uphold the democratic values by considering minorities as citizens of the Island nation. The country’s transition to illiberalism could be traced from the period when the government began to undermine the ethnic diversity by the initiation of majoritarian policies. Moreover during the last phase of the civil war, many independent international agencies have criticised the Sri Lankan government for its use of extrajudicial handling of violent nonstate actors and the adoption of extra constitutional policies to give free reign for the coercive wing of the state, all these were brought in place by the Rajapakshe regime to defend their authoritarian tendencies. In addition, the government has been severely criticised for its deliberate plans to project Muslims as a new security threat to the society. International agencies have criticised the government on the pretext that under the shadow of counter terror operations and solutions

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to the ethnic conflict, democratic principles were flouted to suite the regime’s malpractices.

Initial Incidences of Violence Depending on the mechanism by which it has been integrated into the island’s culture and the economy at various periods of history, the Sri Lankan Muslim population is internally segregated and dispersed throughout the region. They are historically classified into Sri Lankan Moors, Indian Moors, Malays, Memons, and Bohras with respect to roots. Sri Lankan Moors are Muslims of mixed Arab descent living in coastal towns, while Indian Moors migrated from South India and settled before imperialist and colonial expansionism in various parts of the island. Due to ties between the Sinhalese and Malay ruling classes that date back to the 9th century, many Malays came to Ceylon and settled there. During colonial rule, the Bohras entered the island from Western India, mostly Mumbai and Gujarat, as merchants. The Memons trace their origins to the Hindu merchant community of Lohana in Sindh, who in 1423 were converted to Islam and given the name ‘Momin’ or ‘believer,’ which later became Memon. They are geographically scattered in numerous parts of the island, comprising 9.7% of the population of the country, but aware and assertive of their distinct identity (Imtiyaz, 2009). The origin of Muslim minority persecution in Sri Lanka can be traced back to the early colonial period (Zackariya & Shanmugaratnam, 1997). The arrival in Ceylon of Portuguese political and military maritime ambitions was combined with the advent of Roman Catholicism, and the earliest victims were persecuted and coerced by non-adherents of this religion. In 1643, in Matara, many Muslims were killed, mosques were set on fire, and 4,000 people were forced to run for their life. The British government, after the Portuguese and Dutch, attempted to appease Muslim populations to fight the strong Sinhala Kingdoms. At the same time, Ponnambalam Ramanathan and Azeez were stirring controversy about the identity of Muslims on religious and Tamil ethnic lines during the last quarter of the 19th century. The beginning of the 20th century encountered the first and foremost challenge to the Islamic symbolism synonymous with the incident of fez cap in 1905, when advocates belonging to the Muslim community were expostulated in the courtroom for offering the same. In the year 1915, when Sinhala Muslim protests broke out, tensions increased. The primary reason for the incitement of riot was found to be the passing of the Buddhist procession through the mosque, this catapulted Sinhalese-Muslim rivalry, and the prevailing narrative was the one formulated by the cultural and nationalist face of Anagarika Dharmapala, who once proclaimed Muslims as Jews or aliens using Shylokian tactics to expropriate riches from Ceylon. For the Muslim culture in the island country, the 1915 protests were a defining moment (Kannangara, 1984). As a result, the representatives from the community

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found cooperating with the majority community, i.e., Sinhalese as prudent for their survival and sustenance. The Tamils were irritated by this change, particularly after Independence. In the Independent Post Period, the war between Sri Lankan state powers and the LTTE raised concerns about the loyalty of the Muslims in the North-East Provinces controlled by the Tamil (Ali, 1981). When the LTTE coordinated ethnic cleansing and forced expulsion of the Muslim population, mistrust and distrust reached its zenith. State forces were neutral to the human rights abuses unleashed on the Muslim minority in the province in this diplomatic quagmire. Secondly, the detailed critical analysis of facts and events provides an enigmatic account of the situation of Muslims in Sri Lanka, starting with the 300 years of colonial repression and the expulsion of Muslims by LTTE armies (Stewart, 2014). The third reason covers the post-Tamil Elam IV war to the present situation where Sri Lankan Muslims are facing the brunt of the violence by militant groups seeking to regain the dominance of the island.

Incidences of Violence against Muslims in Sri Lanka There have been more examples of such tensions and violence between Sinhalese and Muslims since the Tamil Elam War IV. The motive tends to be more strongly theological in more recent cases. It has become clearer that by attacking Muslim populations since 2009 on the belief that Muslim faith marginalises Buddhism in areas where Muslims are demographically dominated, Buddhist nationalists exemplify their Buddhist identities. On 20 April 2012, an attack on a mosque in Dambulla in north-central Sri Lanka disrupted the scenario. Around 2000 Buddhist disciplines approached the mosque and organised a rally demanding the destruction of the mosque. A crowd of demonstrators stormed a clothes warehouse in Pepiliyana, Colombo, in March 2013, solely because it belonged to Muslim merchants. Another mosque was targeted in the Grandpass district in August 2013. The Muslim group was forced to move the mosque to another location. Violence broke out in Welipitiya in the very next year, 2014, leaving three dead. There were many cases of violence in Sri Lanka’s Ampara and Kandy regions in February 2018. In Ampara, a Muslim chef in a restaurant was brutally manhandled by the Buddhist mob due to fear of uneatable food particles present in the meals offered to Sinhalese. Later, it was found that the particles were wheat flour clumps. The story about the wheat flour particles was later circulated through Facebook that sterilising chemicals had been applied to the meals. Buddhist monks declared a cultural war on Muslims in response, culminating with the assault on a mosque and the theft of goods, including Muslim business establishments. Another community scuffle erupted in Kandy in the same month, which was the result of the death of Kumarasiri, a Sinhala man, after a violent encounter over a traffic dispute with a group of Muslims. A well-organised mob led by Buddhist monks with their followers had beaten Muslim community members and destroyed Muslim-owned lands, homes, and

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places of worship in the Teldeniya-Digana area as a result of the Sinhalese man’s death. These cases confirm that violence against Muslim minorities is rising all over Sri Lanka today (Weerawardhana, 2017). It is also apparent that aggression against Muslims has escalated dramatically since the end of the civil war. The following sections discuss some of the rhetoric of nationalist Buddhist organisations that support this confrontation directly or implicitly. It is important to explain why these organisations want to attack Muslim populations and why they claim that Muslims pose a threat to the Sinhala Buddhist order that has affected the country and is alleged to continue to rule it (Ali, 2004). Recently, there have been gravest attacks which are termed as Easter Bombings, and according to analysts like Chris Slee (2019), Radicalism and Wahabism have only served the Sri Lankan government well.

Radicalism among Sinhala Buddhists and Muslims In Sri Lanka, the post-9/11 scenario and post-Tamil Elam war scenarios offer a distinctive feature where religious and temporal characteristic are frequently related within the political debate, where antagonistic political parties challenge concerns regarding religion and political dichotomy. The mushrooming of rightwing radical religious groups with their self-portrayal as vanguards of majoritarian society could not deter such narratives, their relations with other numerically vulnerable minorities are marked by intolerance to the cultural standards of the latter, the goal is to restore the ‘us’ and ‘them’ colonial constructions. These organisations have clear antecedents and move on a mission to revive and rebuild Buddhism in Sri Lanka. These organisations operate at the heart of the grassroots of anti-Muslim politics. They share targets developed as a means of protecting Buddhism from potential challenges from non-Buddhists and non-Sinhala. In modern Sri Lankan politics, the pervasive use of social media as a medium for disseminating the opinions of these Buddhist nationalist groups also points to the growing importance of technology. They are profoundly concerned with ensuring that the dominant religion in Sri Lanka continues to be Buddhism. The mission statement of Sinhala Ravaya defines its purpose as: ‘let it never happen that because of international and domestic plots, the Sinhala and Buddhist country will be swept from the World.’ BBS also feels, like Sinhala Ravaya, that Buddhism must be protected against non-Buddhist attacks (Gunasingham, 2019). In this regard, the goals page of their website is very straightforward, and it stands to create a Buddhist society; to generate a fearless monastic heritage; to preserve and develop Buddhist industries and entrepreneurship; to protect archaeological sites of Buddhism; and to step up, protect and face the challenges against Buddhism. But these comments take on a far more disturbing tone in the light of the recent communally and economically driven assaults against the Muslim community and their businesses in Pepiliyana and Maradona. The promotion of Buddhism by BBS at the detriment of other faiths does not allow for the creation of a harmonious world in which Muslims, Christians,

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Hindus, and Buddhists will work together, but for the creation of a Buddhist society. BBS objected to the building of a mosque in Kuragala on a Buddhist site and threatened to have it torn down. They say that Muslims are damaging Buddhist rock caves in the city. The reasoning behind these arguments is that in order to displace Buddhists from those regions, Muslims are taking over the world and are now building mosques and other religious sites. The existence of these Muslim sites is thus believed to be a threat to the stability of Buddhism.

Cultural Hegemony, Sinhala Buddhism and Sri Lankan Muslims In the post-civil war era, the tendency of the Sri Lankan state towards ethnocentrism paved the way for Buddhist right-wing groups to have access through the imposition of religious and cultural directives to dismantle stability. Recent events suggest that the island has been sunk into the degeneration of the country’s secular credentials. The very sustainability of religions other than Buddhism in Sri Lanka has been challenged by a coterie of communally charged political and cultural parties (Hasbullah and Korf, 2013). Using halal tactics, the slaughter of animals prompted Buddhist nationalists to challenge Islam. It is suggested that halal is non-Buddhist and unkind. Among Sinhala Buddhists, cattle are particularly respected and cow meat is not consumed. Importantly, the protection of Buddhism from outside imperial powers also concerned it. Anagarika Dharmapala’s views on cow slaughter are likely to inspire the halal abolitionist movement as he is considered one of the first Sinhalese to successfully defy British rule. Cultural communities such as Healthy Buddhism, Sinha Handa, and Bokka are dismissive of Islam because it promotes the procurement of halal certificates by food corporations. Historically, Anagarika Dharmapala, also a significant contributor to modern Buddhist nationalism, was influential in establishing this movement. With respect to halal abolitionism, it is important to remember that the movement is not solely a nonviolent animal rights movement. Motives are religious and ethnic. Animal protection is only a tool for criticising Muslim traditions and corporations in this case. The larger anti-Muslim campaign, a movement that refers to general Buddhist ideals that sound rational on the surface but are really used as a weapon to attack and marginalise Muslim groups, should be understood in this light (McGilvray, 2008). Buddhist groups are still seeking to spread misleading knowledge about the island’s existence of the Ahl-e-Hadith movement and its ties with Muslims from Sri Lanka. Ahl-e Hadith is an Islamic religious movement, meaning the people of hadith, which considers the Quran, Sunnah, and Hadith as the primary sources of religious authority and condemns anything else added since the earliest times in Islam. In fact, they oppose taqlid - the authoritarian code of a particular religious teacher – and favour ijtihad - independent legal logic – it has extended its presence in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan in recent years and has obtained financial assistance from Saudi Arabia, but in Sri Lanka’s case, no such movement or organisation has been identified yet. Sinhala inclined

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outfits, however, advise individuals to keep a wary eye on the island’s All Ceylon Jamaiyuthul Ulama, All Sri Lanka Muslim Congress, Tabliq Jamate, Jamat-eIslami, etc. There have been several claims of Muslim militancy and the presence of an ‘Osama Front’ and ‘Jihadis’ in the Sri Lankan media, but such reports have not been fully substantiated. At the same time, Buddhist organisations have been very critical of the large spectrum of networking and distribution activities carried out by Muslim organisations, including religious material education and informal groups involved in spreading the Islamic way of life. They look at the Muslim dress codes as symbols of religious fanaticism, especially skullcaps for men and the veil for women, and have pressured the Sri Lankan government to increase surveillance on organisations such as Jamaat-e-Islami and Tabligh Jamaat. The growing influence of Wahabi Islam among Sri Lankan Muslims at the expense of Sufi Islam and the proliferation of mosques constructed with Saudi Arabian money,  is a reality. They are also seen as having close relations with Islamic countries that are wealthy and prosperous, who will one day enslave the Sinhalese. Indeed, Wahabi Islam’s presence has weakened the common cultural relations between Muslims and other religious groups. Sri Lankan Muslim merchants and craftsmen had unique roles to play in Buddhist religious festivities in the past, but Wahabi purists sponsored by new Saudi-funded Islamic institutions started to frown on them (Ali, 2014). Sinhalese have therefore come to view Muslims as the Jews of Sri Lanka and as important pursuers of self-interest. They depicted the arrival of Wahabism in Islam, establishing an ethnic and social rift that widened the gulf. The Muslims are the ‘other’ quintessential.

Conclusion How democracy functions in a multi ethnic country is a puzzling question, ­nevertheless, the global democracy index has formulated four types of regimes in accordance to the score obtained via the above-mentioned indicators namely, complete democracy, flawed or erroneous democracy, hybrid forms of democracy, and finally the authoritarian nature of democracy. Electoral behaviour was excellently captured in the research by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba in their famous work titled Civic Culture, they developed three different political participation categories: Parochial that represents a gloomy image of people’s participation and is a regular feature in societies that rests upon traditional modes of governance, the Subject culture could be identified as having an enthusiastic participation among the citizens in determining political outcomes, although lacks any potential to alter the regimes’ behaviour due to authoritarian characteristics, and participant culture, which is the most optimistic one where citizens have greater influence over the government, or could be translated as the best example of David Easton’s input and output functions in a political system where mechanism for feedback is given higher relevance.

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In political science one of the major debates was on the role of state and the functioning of democracy. In the West there emerged two discourses, one that favours minimalist state intervention and the other being that of a positive attitude towards the state intervention. Those who have a bandwagon for minimalist state were of the opinion that the state was not capable of capturing the aspirations and needs of each and every citizen, and state led welfarism was seen as critical in the view that an individual would become a dependent on the state’s provisions, and thus would affect the policy of self-reliance. On the flip side, those who favoured state intervention were of the opinion that state could play a major constructive role in reducing social and economic inequalities, this was felt required from the social reformist perspective that have developed in the lines of social democratic traditions. In Sri Lanka, the culmination of the Tamil Elam War IV in 2009 signalled the advent of illiberal democracy and soft authoritarianism. A democratic and secular state now intrigues and connives theoretically and lawfully for the creation of a state based on demographically majoritarian Sinhalatva ventures. The Sri Lankan state today described a new other as a new danger, Muslims, nine years after the ethnic annihilation of Tamil militants. The transformation of the Muslim religion from the status of ‘consuming biriyani and voting UNP’ to the status of political queen maker has left a multitude of questions for Sinhala Buddhist organisations. Two major political parties’ Muslim appeasement policies, unfair allocation of state capital, increasing unemployment among Sinhala youth, exponential growth of the political and cultural space of Muslims, etc., have forced the Sinhala Buddhist communities to accept Muslims as a new possible challenge. At the same time, the relations with the Global Ummah of some Muslim groups in Sri Lanka, unrestricted support from Saudi Arabia and Middle Eastern nations, the involvement of the Ahl-e Hadith Movement and Rohingya refugees, Halal certification problems, etc. put Sri Lankan Muslims at the end of Islamophobic rhetoric. The relentless brutality of Sinhala Buddhist nationalist organisations against Muslims is motivated by the perception that Buddhism is challenged by the Muslim culture. However, unlike the Tamils in the northeast and the Sinhalese in the south, Muslims in Sri Lanka have never resorted to armed rebellion to assert their political position. While their identity consciousness and formation have evolved in the midst of violent confrontations between two groups, Sinhalese and Tamils, they have remained beyond the frontline of militant politics. They were encouraged by the scattered existence of the Muslim community in Sri Lanka to settle near the Tamils in the northeast and the Sinhalese in the south. Since its formation, they have been incorporated and accommodative with all other parts of the island. The latest community assaults on Muslim homes and business shops may therefore be seen as an expansion of the intolerance of the far-right Buddhist communities to minorities on the island. From time to time, such frequent and continuing assaults on minorities motivated by Sinhala ethnic Buddhist nationalist impulses by projecting Muslims as internal and external

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challenges made the political expert brand the Sri Lankan state as a democracy of control, illiberal and ethnocentricity. Eventually, this island nation will soon be able to have a rare definition of soft authoritarianism.

References Ali, Ameer. “The 1915 racial riots in Ceylon (Sri Lanka): A reappraisal of its causes.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies Vol. 4, No. 2. 1981. P. 1–20. Ali, Ameer. “The Muslims of Sri Lanka: An ethnic minority trapped in a political quagmire.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Vol. 5. No. 3. 2004. P. 372–383. Ali, Ameer. “Political Buddhism, Islamic orthodoxy and open economy: The toxic triad in Sinhalese–Muslim relations in Sri Lanka.” Journal of Asian and African Studies Vol. 49, No. 3. 2014. P. 298–314. Gunasingham, Amresh. “Sri Lanka attacks.” Counter Terrorist Trends and Analyses Vol. 11, No. 6. 2019. P. 8–13. Hasbullah, Shahul, and Benedikt Korf. “Muslim geographies, violence and the antinomies of community in eastern Sri Lanka.” The Geographical Journal Vol. 179, No. 1. 2013. P. 32–43. Imtiyaz, A. R. M. “The Eastern Muslims of Sri Lanka: special problems and solutions.” Journal of Asian and African Studies Vol. 44, No. 4. 2009, P. 407–427. Kannangara, A. P. “The riots of 1915 in Sri Lanka: A study in the roots of communal violence.” Past & Present, Vol. 102, 1984, P. 130–165. McGilvray, Dennis B. Crucible of Conflict: Tamil and Muslim Society on the East Coast of Sri Lanka. Duke University Press, Durham, 2008. Slee, Chris. “Sri Lanka: Behind the Easter Sunday bombings.” Green Left Weekly. 2019. Stewart, James John. “Muslim–Buddhist conflict in Contemporary Sri Lanka.”  South Asia Research Vol. 34. No. 3. 2014. P. 241–260. Weerawardhana, Chamindra. “Paradigms of [in] tolerance? On Sri Lanka’s Bodu Bala Sena and transformative dynamics of lived religion”, in Lived Religion and the Politics of (In) Tolerance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2017. P. 19–39. Zackariya, Faizun, and N. Shanmugaratnam. “Communalisation of Muslims in Sri Lanka: An historical perspective,” in  Alternative Perspectives: A Collection of Essays on Contemporary Muslim Society. Muslim Women’s Research and Action Forum, Colombo, 1997. P. 7–46.

5 THE MAKING OF XENOPHOBIA Migrating from Hatred to Grief in the Novels of Mohsin Hamid Debamitra Kar

Xenophobia represents a curious case of personal and community interaction, since it is both, personal and collective, specific and general, imagined and ­experienced. The feeling of animosity, which may have origins in individual experiences, can be translated and recoded as a collective reaction; or, it could also be transferred from the collective consciousness to the individual mind over the years through the seeping passages of history and its mnemonic devices. Events in world history has shown how xenophobia has been associated with different communities in different times, the animosity has been raised and abetted by war, terror and migration, leading one to believe that the feeling of hatred is as essential component of the human psychology, owing to the selfish gene that propagates the idea of self-preservation. This notion of individualist origin of animosity can be countered if the discussion is premised upon the idea of limited resources and competitive growth, which would arguably show that xenophobia in its form of collective expression and action is a product that is made by the historical time, space and ideological demands. The incident of 9/11 has redesigned the diasporic novels as the long-­standing issue of postcolonial disjuncture has given way to a more dissipated notion of conflict-based identity politics. It is not that the mal-adjustments within the melting pots have disappeared altogether, but the repercussions of these interactions are no longer restricted to inter-community conflicts but are distributed across a greater spectrum of differences, with the addition of a more complex category of religion. It would perhaps not be too unwise to stretch it to the existing world politics where the so-called points of power have given way to a more decentralised power conglomerate, a technocratic ‘empire’ which Hardt and Negri described in their book Empire. Thus, when in Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the protagonist Changez, who came from Pakistan to America to realise his dreams, goes back to his country of origin, DOI: 10.4324/9781003362999-7

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one can realise that the power that Changez sought to master in the West was not absolutely impossible to appropriate from a so-called third-world country. In fact, Changez’s journey counters the so-called immigrant-turning-citizen trope though it necessarily does not mean that he is looking for an alternative to the existing power dynamics, as the entire narrative is beset with his threatening presence and mischief-making capacity. Hatred is internalised and is given a more concrete shape through the setting, which is the volatile political locale of a university campus in Lahore. If compared with John Updike’s Terrorist, which follows a more usual western narrative of immigrant-turned-terrorist trope, the distinction can be more immediately felt. Hamid relocates the responsibility of immigrant to being accepted into the fold of the western society to the responsibility of society to accept the immigrant—from the passivity to an active functionality, from merging to hospitality. Borders, for Hamid’s protagonists, may disappear only to reappear again, in the form of the sudden invasion of the American flags in the sky scape of New York city, or a selected frisking at the airport or simply as the experience of vulnerability that these events create in the mind long after their actual happenings, which Changez compares with his brief experience of a love with Erica: … it is not always possible to restore one’s boundaries after they have been blurred and made permeable by a relationship: try as we might, we cannot reconstitute ourselves as the autonomous beings we previously imagined ourselves to be. Something of us is now outside, and something of the outside is now within us. (Hamid 2007: 173–174) However, the identity of the immigrant is neither unilateral, nor simple. In his desire to fulfil his dreams, Changez’s journey, his dream and his intentions are primarily conditioned by the usual precepts of postcoloniality. Interestingly, all these three aspects of the narrative, the journey, the dream and the intention are political as well as philosophical. For instance, the motif of the journey has intrigued the human imagination since the beginning of civilisation, gaining different meanings both as the event and as the experience. The journey of the pilgrims of Chaucer was both a practical event as far as their physical details could testify and the religious exercise could authorise, whereas their stories represented their experiences which were both informed by what they were before the journey and in a way predicted what they could become after its completion. The journey of Changez is thus a phenomenological exercise, an exercise which in-itself was undergoing through several narratives as it crossed the geopolitical borders. Not only did it acquire a political signification, an economic certitude, it also, by the virtue of being the experience that is shared by the various communities of men and women who undertake such journeys, represented a continual human process across time and space. No pilgrim thus could travel alone. And, ‘[w]e are all migrants through time’ (Hamid 2017: 209).

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The dream of Changez undergoes a definite paradigm shift. What he wanted to become at the beginning of his narration and what he represents to have achieved needs to be read in different registers to call any of them successful. The dream to become rich and successful or the dream to be rooted in his own land and milieu—are both valid and self-contradictory. The diaspora literature hardly speaks of eudaimonism or modest happiness; one never comes to know, if the characters after they find their homes, are happy; or for that matter if postmodernism allows us to be happy in the old-fashioned way of the word. However, Changez’s dream-in-itself is not political, but the way he experiences it, through his empirical understanding of human desire and happiness, makes it politicised. The question of dream is thus closely related to the question of his intention. And intention requires an imagining (or imaging) of the self and of the surrounding. Thus, until, Changez had not imagined Pakistan, his native place as he lived in it in a certain way, he could not have imagined America as what he had purported it to be to him; therefore, the clash comes, when his idea of America directly changes, through political events, into something else. Thus instead of reading how America changed towards Changez, I would rather like to point out how his perspective of America alters, thus look at the issue of hatred and xenophobia not as ‘what others did to me’ but rather as ‘what I did to myself ’. Having made the statement, I need to clarify the fact that article does not aim to participate in the so-called moral blame game. Xenophobia can be read as a moral crisis, without even moralising about it. Morality as an ethical choice has become distant from our political understanding simply because it is associated with the diminutive practice of moralising. The modern state is an organisation without a palpable centre; hence, the usual fountain of moral righteousness, God or the King, is substituted by a more legal-cultural apparatus which distances morality from individual common sense and pushes it towards a juridical expression. The nature of judiciary on the other hand dilutes the notion of the moral good, and ensconces it within the legal rectitude which determined by plaintiff-defendant debate and proof of crime. Arendt summarises it succinctly by saying ‘legality is morally neutral: it has its place in institutionalised religion and in politics but not in morality’ (2016: 757–758). On the other hand, morality is employed, as in case of moralising, to justify a homogenised, a-cultural and apolitical means to attach fixed meanings to the variegated and complex human actions and emotions. As its relation with the universal and the metaphysical weakens, it becomes prey to the specific and contextual, which by any rational categorisation is opposite to the definitions of morality. Arguably, in order to read xenophobia as a moral failure the present article attempts to bring back the problem to its metaphysical root, and read it not merely as a distrust of one community towards another but as an understanding of the ‘self ’, a self-reflexive and ontological-phenomenological exercise, that is guided by two inter-related theoretical considerations, that of dialectical understanding of the self and the ‘desire’ for the ‘other’ that the self employs in understanding itself.

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The notion of desire is central to the understanding of the ‘self ’. If the self as a thing or being can be imagined in its opposite, as a no-thing or non-being, then according to the rule of dialectics, both the being and the non-being transcribed as the ‘other’ should be assimilated to understand the self in its totality. Such dialectical understanding of the self is not premised on the experiential certainty that the ‘self ’, or for that matter, anything, cannot be understood by itself without the reference to the other. The ‘I’ is dependent on the ‘other’ for recognition; without it, the former cannot exist as a solid ‘self ’; and thus, the other is a part of the essence of the ‘self ’. We, however, must extend the notion of the self from the individual space to the collective sphere, where the collective self looks for a unity and resists the alleged disruption by negating the collective other, in the form of community. Hamid pens it quite eloquently in Exit West: … the nation was like a person with multiple personalities, some insisting on union and some on disintegration, and that this person with multiple personalities was furthermore a person whose skin appeared to be dissolving as they swam in a soup full of other people whose skins were likewise dissolving. (2017: 155–156) Acknowledging the other creates a problem because as Kant says, ‘it is impossible to have a unified experience, a unified object, without a unified self ’ (qtd in Kain 2005: 40). Arguably, then, the beginnings of xenophobia could be traced in the negation of the heteronomous self. It is easy to understand why the self would always try to negate the other: the other makes it wary of its lack of, or represents a kind of qualities that are impossible to attain. Instead of moving towards the idealism that necessitates the assimilation of the opposites, a proposition which hardly seems possible in the present context, the cultural implication of the negation is given more importance. In the present context, the practice of other-ing takes up two very distinct behavioural patterns: first, the other is definitely seen as a cultural ‘other’ and secondly, the other is an evil, a stranger to our ‘moral’ norms. For instance, Changez begins his narrative by showing how he loved America. In his process of re-fashioning, which entailed the shift to a foreign country and to be successful in the financial terms, he wanted to recreate himself as an object of desire for America. This desire for financial success is not what America wanted, but it is what he thought America wanted from him, for his lack of financial sustenance in his own country. His desire, in this case helped him to become the homo economicus, a development that was considered to be positive by the capitalist state and its policies. This desire for economic success is paralleled by his desire to become Erica’s boyfriend and Hamid has shown how this desire drove him to the extreme of mimicking his role. In the moment of heighted passion, he wanted Erica to forget his physical reality and to consider him as her dead boyfriend, and enjoy the union. This strange act of giving up his self to become the object of desire for the

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other, echoes the Lacanian decentring of desire where even the physical needs can be subordinated (or appropriated, as in this case) for the greater demand for recognition. Such ontological development on Changez’s part could have continued uninterrupted had not the events of 9/11 taken place. Even though Changez believed that he had transformed himself totally and successfully according to the desire of the other, the other has not accepted him. If for the sake of argument we consider the other to be the self, Changez now becomes the other, who can only be negated and rejected as he now represents more of a genus, a racial identity than an individual. To apply the rules of Hegelian dialectics again, it is necessary that the self would reject the other for it is the easiest way out to safeguard its own unity. There are two ways possible, either to devour them, ‘anthropophagic: annihilating by devouring them’ or anthropoemic, which Bauman defines as ‘banishing them from the limits of the orderly world and barring all communications with those inside’ (qtd in Khair 2016: 35). These two tendencies can be translated to effective policies of a nation state as the incidents of 9/11 and the current political trends in India would show: the others can be killed or they can be ghettoised or converted. Accordingly, Changez is suddenly considered to be the threat, the evil; he is frisked at the airport, and the changing sky of New York made him realise his difference and strangeness. His transformation into the otherness of the other is completed when Juan-Bautista, who resembled his maternal grandfather (Hamid 2007: 141), revealed that he was just a financial mercenary, a janissary of the western empire and Erica was sent to the mental asylum from where she vanished. What becomes apparent from the above discussion is that here the self and the other are created from both sides, they do not have any fixed unilateral development. Thus, the Hegelian model of Lordship and Bondsman relationship does not apply in this case, since, here the relation is between two equals, though definitely one cannot forego the economic power game implicit in the relation, yet the cultural coefficient becomes more dominant in this case. I am not negating the capitalist interference and control over the creation of the other, but I would not consider it to be the only criterion on which the other is created. For instance, when Changez is rejected by the western economic system they did not reject his contribution to the system but the issue of security was greater than his individual cooperation. However, Changez’s resistance towards being absorbed into the system definitely has an economic aspect: he refuses to contribute to the continuation of the welfare of a western state. Though the other is a cultural other, however, in the post-9/11 world it is invested with a moralising quality. The other is increasing a moral failure: it is evil, something strange to our ethical codes and codices. The post-9/11 politics has ushered in a new language of terror which gradually legitimises a moralising tendency reaching almost a religious overtone. ‘The axis of evil’ (Bush), ‘the persecution of innocent’ (Netanyahu), and the opposition to the democratic principles and freedom (as depicted in the National Security

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Strategy of United States in 2002) all taken together show that language forces us into a new kind of reality in which democracy approximates theodicy and its preservers the priests of a greater order and its opposition evil incarnate. Perhaps, the most contributory factor to this is the issue of women and rules of conduct that the so-called liberal democracies desist. In fact the issue of religious dogmatism is also seen from this register, where, the forced secularism becomes a moral right and fundamentalism its other, an unmitigated evil. Such characterisation of the Muslim community has been rampant in both the western and eastern media as amply pointed by scholars like Amina Yaqin, Peter Morey and others. Though moralising has its own share of politics, when it is applied along with the formation of the cultural other, it aids to the continuation of the state of emergency and the gradual securitisation of the society (Bauman 2016: 24). In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, then, the problem of the narrative finally lies in the choices that Changez makes: one state against the other; one set of self against the other self or conversely one set of other for another. To the American interlocutor, he is the other, and this other is aware of the geopolitical advantage that he has over the American in Lahore. Changez thus could never transcend the barrier of the dialectics. As I have pointed out at the beginning of the discussion that by rejecting the other one rejects a part of the self, and therefore, it fails to assimilate to a higher reality, similarly, Changez himself becomes a victim of xenophobia and could not perhaps come out of the politics of hate, something that Saeed and Nadia were able to do in Exit West. What is remarkable in the latest novel by Hamid is that he could translate the pain of migration into a sad wisdom of a journey. I would like to point out two key stylistic techniques adopted in the text: parallelism and rhetoric of grief, and together they counter the previous narrative of violence as represented in the earlier novel. The biggest problem of xenophobia is that the element of fear has a tremendous impact on the socio-economic policies as well as on the ontological understanding of the self. Tracing the history of xenophobia would suggest that in the modern times, there is no one fixed self, and no one fixed allegiance and no one fixed other. I find the study of Peek Lori quite interesting in this regard who has pointed out that xenophobia has a recurrent presence in the US history. When it declared war against Imperial Germany in 1917, approximately half a million of German immigrants were classified as enemy aliens. During World War II, 260,000 men and 220,000 women were arrested for being German immigrants. Race prejudice and war-time hysteria resulted in the incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese men, women and children, though two-thirds of them were native born Americans (Lori 2012: 5–6). In the recent post-9/11 crisis, the xenophobia has included not only the Muslims, but specifically though not exclusively Arab Muslims (ibid.: 11), since the two terms are used interchangeably in the official documents, and even the second-generation immigrants from other countries (ibid.: 147).

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However, the nature of xenophobia has changed as Tabish Khair has aptly argued in his book. Thus, instead of tagging and differentiating as the Nazis did, one protests against the difference. Extending the argument, one can say that the differences are more internalised into making of the self. There is no one self, no essentially monolithic self but rather various selves and their various others. This dissipation could be seen as a problem to counter xenophobia (it kind of dissipates the hatred and thus making it more difficult to control) but Hamid, I would like to argue, turns it to his advantage. Instead of one self against one other, he has put a more empathic view of the selves against the selves, and the others against the others, thus turning hatred if not into love but into a kind of diffident understanding. The most pivotal statement is perhaps recorded by Nadia when she realises before their departure that ‘when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind’ (Hamid 2017: 94). The statement reveals how everyone is beginning their journey from a compromised moral ground, and the necessity to migrate is prioritised over the other responsibilities. Thus, the guilt consciousness is no longer an individual event but a collective responsibility, something that Saeed’s mother felt when she thought that she had seen her students with guns in their hands. The narrative poses several selves—who are migrating in different cultural, spatial and temporal terms, making their choices, participating in the collective guilt—against one another. There is nothing common in them except perhaps the grief that guilt gives birth to and the illogical fear of the worse possibility. Thus the burglar in Australia who realised the loneliness of the white woman, or the old man in California who suddenly found himself without a home as his land was being used to fortify the borders, or the Tamil family on the run from one persecution to the other as the quadcopters kept close notice of their movements, or the young woman in Vienna who wanted to join in the peace rally to save the migrants suddenly found her own people becoming stranger to her, or the London accountant who on the verge of committing suicide decides to leave his home in search of a new one and through one of the doors lands up in Namibia, or the love of one Dutch man and another Brazilian, or the old woman in Palo Alto, migrating through time, or the maid in Marrakesh who refused to leave the house of her master even when no one is left to take care of her—migration is true in everyone’s life; even if one has not migrated from one state to another, they have to migrate in time and space, where space transcends the geopolitical reality. Thus for Saeed, all these losses had combined into a core of loss, and in this core, this centre, the death of his mother and the death of his father and the possible death of his ideal self who had loved this woman so well were like a single death that only hard work and prayer might allow him to withstand. (Hamid 2017: 188)

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Thus loss here is generic. It is a loss that is translated to an absence, an ‘absence of the absolute that should not itself be absolutized and fetishized such that it becomes an object of fixation and absorbs, mystifies or downgrades the significance of particular historical losses’ (LaCapra 2001: 51) or distances into an externalised lack posited away from the self or systemised into a belief of others being responsible for that loss (ibid.: 52). In this regard, I find the novel’s treatment of loss very similar to the loss depicted in Jonathan Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close where the grief of the young boy for losing his father in 9/11 is paralleled by the grandfather’s loss of the love of his life in the Dresden bombings and finally his loss of speech. On the other hand, these multiple narratives which intersect the narrative of the two individuals looking at migration from different perspectives and growing more distant as their perception changes are the points of departure from the established diaspora politics that has the danger of running into a metanarrative of unilateral minority identity formation which becomes so useful both for the minoritarian and majoritarian politics at large. The spilling over of the feeling of persecution at the hands of the other creates an unqualified fear, a fear of possible threat that I find is best expressed by Cavafy in his poem the ‘Coming of the Barbarians’. The reality of the possibility, a perceived threat formation motivates ideological makeovers and finally policy manipulations. It is a classic Marxist case of the ideological superstructure exerting an effect on the politico-legal structures, and in effect on the continuation of the established production process. What I would like to add in this context is the fact that the so-called anti-West rhetoric thrives on a proposed economic equality, where the drain of wealth by the Western nations, drawn upon a colonial history creates a sense of difference. For instance, the use of the concept of financial janissaries and western hegemony that unites Changez and the Chilean businessman is not unfounded on truth but this uncritical anti-West creates a situation where we are made to forget that Changez, in his country came from an affluent background and after coming back and joining the academics would not make much of a compromise on his financial credibility. The point of my argument is thus: though xenophobia uses a language of economic threat, it never guarantees that this threat would not continue to percolate within the same society which at present is arming itself up against the so-called strangers. This argument can be extended to apply to any other issues like identity, cultural preferences, women’s issues, and so on. If considered, xenophobia today is more of a defensive strategy that operates in a war like situation, being used both by the empire and its opposition, and under such circumstances it would always follow the pattern of group formation where smaller or less significant differences are forgiven for making a politically viable bloc that can counter the enemy/other/opposite. It is this unilinear and to some extent nomological group formation that Hamid counters in his recent book.

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From xenophobia to migration, the narrative first becomes a timeless journey. Migration is no longer a political and cultural exercise but an inevitable mark in the life of the modern men and women. It does not ease out the differences, for the intensity of the journey alters different people differently, a fact that more sentimental or chauvinist world view refuses to accept: the men and women who suffered a trauma would be silent and lonely. It may separate us at the individual level but Hamid suggests a greater unity is possible: a unity through grief, a collective mourning process that reaches inwards. The act of grieving counters the evil; it is not an outcome of any moralistic enterprise, nor is it a case of humanistic simplification, but a simple ethical imperative, which if practised properly, could become a category on its own. Unlike religion which sees the evil in the soul or legality which sees it inbred in human psyche, or culture which sees it inherent in the other, or politics which finds evil in social practices, this simple morality sees evil not as ontological but as an irrational category, which can only be defeated by recourse to reason, common sense and enlightenment. Saeed’s prayer thus looks for the bare grief of all human beings as the ultimate cause of lament. He feels: … this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, … and out of this Saeed felt it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity’s potential for building a better world, and so he prayed as a lament, as a consolation, and as a hope…. (Hamid 2017: 202)

References Arendt, Hannah. ‘Some questions of Moral Philosophy’. Social Research. 61: 4, 1994. Bauman, Zygmunt. Strangers at Our Door. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016. Hamid, Mohsin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. New Delhi: Penguin, 2007. ——— Exit West. Gurgaon: Penguin, 2017. Kain, Philip J. Hegel and the Other: A Study of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Albany: State University of New York, 2005. Khair, Tabish. The New Xenophobia. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016. LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, MD and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 2001. Lori, Peek. Behind the Backlash: Muslims in America after 9/11. New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2012. United States Gov. The National Security Strategy of the United States of America. ‘Nssarchive.us. NSS archive, 17 Sept. 2002. Web. 6 Apr. 2017. https://nssarchive.us/ wp-content/uploads/2020/04/2002.pdf. 27 Nov 2022.

6 PAX AMERICANA! American Exceptionalism and Salman Rushdie’s Language of State Shayeari Dutta

The explosive afterlife of the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) offers an insight into the interstices between migrant voices and migrant bodies. The “Rushdie Affair” makes it impossible to imagine the fictive “Brickhall” in the novel as the site of dangerously unassimilated immigrant bodies without accounting for the real city of Bradford and its “book-burning Muslims”. In the novel, the trauma of bodily violations suffered by the migrant communities of Brickhall find their psychosocial release in the underground Hot Wax Club, where wax effigies of racist villains in history and in contemporary British politics are melted down each night as part of an “extrajudicial” orgy of retribution. The format of this limited catharsis symbolizes in more ways than one, the impossibility of escaping cycles of violence to which the minoritized body has been subjected as part of the logic of the liberal polity. Saladin Chamcha’s class privilege notwithstanding, his grotesque metamorphosis triggered by the bodily indignities he suffers at the hands of the British law enforcement personnel aligns him momentarily with underground expressions of “culture” birthed at the site of systemic violence, and distinct from the British “high culture” to which he had aspired as a sort of Naipaulian “mimic man”. His body’s uncontainable monstrosity and the loss of human speech replaced by loud animalistic grunts attest to disenfranchised migrant subjectivity’s “otherized” utterances in which the body is foregrounded and effaced in cyclical fashion. Rushdie’s persecution on the other hand inheres in the simultaneous repression and release of his authorial voice; in his open letter to Rajiv Gandhi, the then Prime Minister of India, condemning the hasty banning of his book, and in his critique of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s “second class” treatment of the author in a letter to Paddy Ashdown, the Liberal Democrat Party leader, Rushdie legitimizes his status as British citizen and as an intellectual of the “free world” (Appignanesi & Maitland). Not only does the deployment of cultural capital DOI: 10.4324/9781003362999-7

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under duress serve to remind civilized society of its moral duty toward ­upholding the sovereignty of artists, but his legal status as “citizen” also circumscribes the state’s ethical duty to protect only those recognized as such. In a lot of ways, Rushdie’s vocal assertion of his rights complicates his claim to represent other migrants. Against the backdrop of racialized immigration legislation seeking to control the definition of “Englishness” based on linkages between partiality and the right of abode in England (Baucom), Rushdie’s appeal to a distinctly Western norm of civility effaces the problem of the mutating forms of racism in advanced liberal democracies. In fact Tariq Modood makes a point about the mobilization of culture in the debates surrounding the Rushdie Affair. Analyzing the rise of a British “new racism” in the 1980s as a response to the era of decolonization and mass migrations, Modood identifies this phenomenon as the evolution of cultural racism based on “cultural difference”, distinct from the original idea of “biological racism”. Here cultural racism manifests the “perceived problem of assimilating or integrating culturally primitive and backward peoples into modern civilizations” (155). Rushdie’s complicity in allowing cultural racism to thrive unopposed inheres in the novel’s positing of a faulty notion of cultural “choice” predicated on the norm of civility. Thus, Chamcha’s metamorphosis into the split symbols of foul criminality and race-hero ultimately alludes to the migrant’s inherent flexibility – his embodiment of “selected discontinuities”, a “willing re-invention” and a “preferred revolt against history” – as opposed to Gibreel’s “untranslated” self (Satanic Verses 427). In the final analysis, Chamcha is guided by “choice” in his rejection of the compromised “causes” of Dr Uhuru Simba and a reversion to an imperfect Bombay. Borrowing the haunting image of blackbirds from Hitchcock’s iconic film where a single bird is followed by others, gradually strengthening in number till they colonize the skies, Rushdie prophesizes an age of growing illiberalism and extraterritorial Islamic fundamentalism in which the Iranian Ayatollah’s fatwa against the writer of The Satanic Verses serves as the grand “prologue” (Rushdie, Joseph Anton 2). At the same time, the Rushdie Affair signifies a new timeline in his self-discovery and self-fashioning as “post-fatwa” subjectivity. Situating himself at the very beginning of a new historical trajectory of conflict, Rushdie reconfigures the world in terms of an ideological battlefield where the lines are clearly drawn between the proponents and protectors of freedom on the one hand, and their opponents on the other. According to this formulation, the Affair becomes the originary tale, expanding outwards over time to encompass the intensifying rhetoric of hatred which finds its logical summation in the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in America. Here the terms of cultural conflict are mediated by Rushdie’s persecuted persona and symbolized by his obsession with the theme of “a trumpet-blaring apocalypse” (Gorra 375). Thus, his postfatwa, post-9/11 writing keeps returning to the cult of the Artist defined by ­boundary-crossing, shape-shifting caped crusaders battling for the preservation of “universal” principles from their positions of radical peripherality, while at the

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same time, articulating a “language of state” mobilized by the liberal West- and later epitomized by the ideal of “Pax Americana”, against the regressive practices of “the world’s precious localism” (Rushdie, “Globalization” 297). Significantly, Rushdie’s turn toward a project of self-reclamation following the fatwa years identifies America as the quintessential land of re-creation and metamorphosis complementing the notion of the “mobile self ” conducive to the nourishment of gloriously inauthentic artists-as-migrants (Ganapathy-Dore). Rushdie’s memoir outlines this heroic enterprise in terms of an extreme sacrifice which all serious authors must make in their combative roles – “To write a book is to make a Faustian contract in reverse. To gain immortality, or at least posterity, you lose, or at least ruin, your actual life” (Rushdie, Joseph Anton 12). To identify Salman Rushdie’s rhetorical proximity to the “language of state” deployed by the national media, state heads and mainstream public opinion in both Britain and America, it is necessary to revert to the cultural context of the Rushdie Affair. According to an elite consensus among a typically Western literary circle, the success of The Satanic Verses is measured by its ability to trace the trajectory of the “true” migrant – a product of assimilation. Thus the migrant’s specific historicity is hollowed out in the process of reproducing migrancy as an ontological transformation affirming the fragmentary nature of the modern subject and her capacity for change. During the Affair the British Home Secretary Douglas Hurd delivers a speech tellingly published in a tabloid with the headline, “Behave Like British, Or Don’t Live Here”. The aforementioned proximity between elite discourse and a “language of state” is rehearsed in this context in Jonathan Friedman’s question – “For whom is the cultural transmigration a reality?” (79). This process itself is identified as the “politically correct point of view” of the postmodern intellectual elite who has popularized the terms “hybridization”, “creolization”, “trans-ethnicity”, “trans-nationality” and “hyphenated identities”, toward constructing a certain top-down notion of “cosmopolitanism”. Consequently the conflation of such positive terms of engagement with the experience of displacement and fractured identity deny the effects of “localization of identification” and “indigenization” which fragmentation has produced. According to Friedman’s critique, “in the works of the post-colonial border-crossers, it’s always the poet, the artist, the intellectual, who sustain this displacement and objectifies it in the printed word”, eliminating in the process the reality of multiculturalism as “an expression of a broad shift in the ‘identity space’ of declining Western modernity” and the “strengthening of countervailing subnational and ethnic identities” (72). Part of the problem of the intellectual elite’s mobilization of identity in the form of abstractions inheres in the evocation of universalized ideals of courage and solidarity – for instance, Rushdie’s “Declaration of Independence” as part of his acceptance of the inaugural presidency at the 1993 International Parliament of Letters, refers to “the boundless kingdom of the imagination, the half-lost land of memory… and perhaps, the most important of all our habitations- the unfettered republic of the tongue” (Rushdie “Declaration”). In “The Tanner Lectures

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on Human Values” delivered at Yale University in 2002, Rushdie foregrounds the trope of frontiers to understand the dynamic possibilities of the term, both in its specific American context of Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 “Frontier Thesis” as well as in terms of a more universal metaphor of “frontier-crossing beings”. The “dance of history” he describes as the simultaneous emergence of a “new, permeable post-frontier” and the securitization of the borders of the liberal state against the threat of terrorism, pivots on America’s capacity for reconciling its global power to an emergent “post-frontier” role (90). Reflecting on the possibility of creating art in a post-9/11 context, Rushdie conflates his own exilic migrant status with the anonymous figure of the “illegal immigrant” – captured in Sebastio Salgado’s famous photograph – running toward the Mexican side of the border with America chased by an immigration patrol vehicle. While problematizing American “freedom” by identifying himself as the citizen of those “exclusive, increasingly well-guarded enclaves”, Rushdie’s meditation on human values produces two major blind-spots- Firstly, the disclaimer with regard to Salgado’s photograph, that “before 9/11 many of us would’ve been on the running man’s side”; and secondly, after identifying the “migrant” as the “archetypal figure of our age”, his cooption of the powerful symbolism of the “man without frontiers” to define the persecuted artistic persona (82). Rushdie’s referencing of the temporal break caused by the 9/11 terror attacks confounds his position on the ethical legitimacy of a surveillance state by positing contradictory uses of the “frontier” as both necessity as well as constriction of human freedom. This confusion in turn provides a rationale for the strengthening of borders and hyper-control over “suspicious” bodies. At the same time it lends continuity to the author’s post-fatwa perspective by characterizing the geopolitical crisis in terms of a battle over the power to create images; thus, the 9/11 event becomes a metaphor for censorship attesting to the iconoclastic fury of the fatwa. According to this portentous discourse, the “monstrous act of the [terroristic] imagination” is seen to have struck the first blow to the values upheld by Western civilization by attacking the writer’s creative freedom within Western territory (99). Here Rushdie’s question, “How should we live now?” suggests a curious compromise – even as the “worst-case scenario of the frontier of the future” is actualized in the building of walls by nations of the West to limit cross-border movement of goods and bodies, the task of preserving the “spirit of this frontier” against terrorism’s new permeability ultimately falls upon artists who must caution the people of the democratic West against self-censoring and lead them instead toward their moral obligations as the “guardians of the modern world” (84). This proposition refers to the second blind-spot in Rushdie’s analysis of the “frontier”. The actual displaced global populations cannot be reconciled with the writer’s self-image of a “true” migrant embodying the “creative aspects of such cultural commingling” as presented by the condition of migrancy. In the good migrant-bad migrant binary the latter refers to those who are unable to bear the stresses and hostilities of the newness of dislocation, thereby “retreating from such questions behind the walls of the old culture” (85). Thus, Rushdie’s

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“double displacement” becomes a double belonging, enabling him to secure for himself both the periphery as well as the center while playing with the literal and figurative in posing the question – “How should we live now?” Consequently, the answer to his question inevitably relocates the “crisis of our time” to a radical dreamscape, since – “In dreams begin responsibilities” and “the way we see the world affects the world we see” (99). In a sense, part of the support for Rushdie among writers’ fraternities at the time of the Affair suggests an enervation of the artist’s combative role vis-àvis the state in addressing the issue of the nexus of global power which continues to thrive on the orchestrated crisis of migrancy and displacement. Here Susan Sontag’s testimony before the subcommittee on International Terrorism of the (US) Senate Foreign Relations Committee is significant. Extending her support for Rushdie, she emphasizes on the urgency of a foreign policy that would preserve America’s national character founded on principles of freedom and the promotion of literacy. In her capacity as a representative of the PEN American Center Sontag expresses her distress at “the silence of the White House” (Appignanesi & Maitland 166). Calling the fatwa an attempt at “censorship by terror” against her constitutional right to “write, publish, sell, buy and read books free of intimidation”, Sontag outlines PEN’s public statement in terms of a crucial question – “What can the US Senate do to reduce the danger to American freedom of expression from such pressures?” (168). Accordingly, the terms of the debate are realigned by securing a figurative boundary around a “free” and “literate” America, while demanding at the same time a more robust anti-terrorism foreign policy. It is possible to identify in PEN America’s official declaration the imbrications of a language of state, hypernationalist media exhortations against a perceived “anti-America” residing within and beyond her territory, and statements by artists emphasizing the cultural binary of the “liberal West” and “anti-liberal non-West”. Although terrorism as a catchphrase enters the West’s popular imagination and its foreign policy vocabulary with renewed vigour following the 9/11 attacks, as far back as 1989 Sontag deploys terrorism as a trigger word by suggesting that an attack on a writer’s freedom is as dangerous as an attack on an oil tanker (168). Sontag’s words not only reassert Rushdie’s allusion to the “category error” committed by the protesting Muslims in confusing the figurative richness of his novel with a literalist reading (Heller), but they also testify to the author’s changing public persona. Rushdie’s post-9/11 rhetoric follows a logic of state whose terms of engagement with the project of recovering the “politics in literature” needs to be traced back to the Affair. Here Timothy Brenan gestures toward the compromise in Rushdie’s “Left-Labour-humanist” sensibility and a turn toward “a liberal apotheosis of the “literary” in the context of a Western triumphalism” despite his alleged betrayal by the British government: …Rushdie struggled to have others see The Satanic Verses as a matter of state… He equated his own travail to that of the Western hostages

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in Lebanon and the British businessmen imprisoned in Iran and Iraq… asked similar enticements and threats used to free them, to be used on his behalf…The mere symbolism of The Satanic Verses as secular irreverence began  to  assume the garments of state in a more brutish, more solemn literal form. (Brenan, “Cultural Politics” 117) In the growing intimacy between Rushdie’s post-1989 opinion pieces and the consolidation of a certain mainstream public discourse on “Muslim reactions” to The Satanic Verses predicated on the belief that the protests in Britain are being orchestrated entirely by the Iranian clerical class or funded by “Saudi money”, the purported threat to liberal society’s “way of life” is propounded. This has serious implications for the author’s post-9/11 stance. Although it might be argued that Rushdie retains a certain skepticism toward US political rhetoric and its deployment of the word “evil” to designate the 9/11 perpetrators, it is in no way an urgent call for retaining a long historical vision of America and her allies’ involvements in Afghanistan and Iraq from the time of Cold War politics. What writer Nadeem Aslam calls “the long Cold War” being fought on Afghanistan’s soil involving multiple players and shadow warriors (Wasted Vigil) is normalized in Western discourses on “global peace” as necessary means to ensure the maintenance of geopolitical stability. The normalizing rhetoric denotes a shift in the author’s more recognizable liberal-left position in matters of politics implicating global imbalances in power, “to positions indistinguishable from many mainstream media responses to 9/11” (Sawhney 46). His criticism of the tendency among sections of the left intellectuals to interrogate the historical continuities between America’s foreign policy and the 9/11 terror attacks earns him entry into the circle of “the New Empire loyalists” identified as a “new belligerati set” of intellectuals advocating war on imperialism (Ali). In a 1999 article titled “Globalization” the author narrates a scene from a British literary festival where a 40 percent approval for the motion- “It is the duty of every European to resist American culture”, makes him wonder at the increasing force of “anti-American sentiment”: Clearly, those of us who shelter under the pax Americana are deeply ambiguous about it, and the United States will no doubt continue to be surprised by the level of the world’s ingratitude. The globalizing power of American culture is opposed by an improbable alliance which includes everyone from cultural-relativist liberals to hardline fundamentalists, with all manner of pluralists and individualists, to say nothing of flag-waving nationalists and splintering sectarians, in between. (Rushdie, “Globalization” 297) Understanding international peace according to the terms set by the cultural, economic and military might of America produces a global scenario in which

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the ethical challenges inherent to neocolonial “interventions” are effaced by suggesting an apocalyptic alternative dominated by images of ethnic cleansing, apartheid and gas chambers. Struggling to temper the “pax Americana” phenomenon with a perfunctory injunction to America against an abuse of her “pre-eminence”, Rushdie’s prose divorces globalization itself from its simultaneously proliferating underbellies; thus he claims that people enjoy the fruits of American culture when they behave as consumers, but abhor the same when they don their “cultural hats” (298). According to this reading, the global flow of ideas and commodities which “Americanization” embodies depends on a cynical pattern of consumption whereby the propagation of “freedom” as universal ideal requires a simultaneous acceptance of America as the global universal: …And if by chance there were a universal value which might, for the sake of argument, be called ‘freedom’, whose enemies- tyranny, bigotry, intolerance, fanaticism- were the enemies of us all; and if this ‘freedom’ were discovered to exist in greater quantity in the countries of the West than anywhere else on earth; and if, in the world as it actually exists, rather than in some unattainable Utopia, the authority of the United States were the best current guarantor of that ‘freedom’; then might it not follow that to oppose the spread of American culture would be take up arms against the wrong foe? (298) In another piece Rushdie characterizes “the defining struggle of the new age” as that between “Terrorism and Security” (Rushdie, “Terror vs. Security” 326). Yet again the author writes from the perspective of a quintessential American citizen who is forced to reconcile to the fact that in order to fight the extraterritorial threat of terrorism, “security” must operate by the logic of the “worst-case scenario”; crucially for Rushdie, to live by the worst-case scenario “is to grant the terrorists their victory, without a shot being fired” (328). Rushdie’s clear demarcation between the terrorist “bullies” and “our secret protectors” fails to respond to the interconnections between the two which globalization intensifies. His American romance refuses to complicate the discourse on freedom and security whereby “shadow warriors” are often indistinguishable from one another as the history of the CIA and its activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the Cold War and its aftermath reveals. This echoes Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of “liquid modernity” as a time of “nomadism” attesting to the rising power of a new global elite committed to the maintenance of a system of checks and balances by conducting “deregulated” community-level acts of violence. Here the logic of surveillance expresses itself in the redefined category of “communitarianism” predicated on the “institutionalization of urban fear” and the “crisis of ‘public space’ and of politics” (94). The purpose of the supranational order is to produce “explosive communities”- intrinsically violent- which carry all the traces of a xenophobic society in attempting to produce “the myth of community solidarity

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in a purification ritual” (100). In Bauman’s words, “Globalization is much more successful in adding new vigour to intercommunal enmity and strife than in promoting the peaceful coexistence of communities” (192). Thus Rushdie’s emphasis on the necessity for embracing freedom as a democratic ideal by-passes the everyday “practicalities” of sustaining the “explosive” aspect of such communities that are constituted by the fear psychosis generated both by the terroristic imagination as well as neocolonial “security” regimes (Rushdie, “Terror vs. Security” 328, Bauman 193). In the October 2001 article titled “The Attacks on America”, Rushdie recalls the prophetic vision of his pre-9/11 “Terror vs. Security” article while registering his outrage at the terroristic onslaught on America: They broke our city. I’m among the newest of New Yorkers, but even people who have never set foot in Manhattan have felt her wounds deeply, because New York in our time is the beating heart of the visible world, tough-talking, spirit-dazzling…To this bright capital of the visible, the forces of invisibility have dealt a dreadful blow. No need to say how ­d readful; we all saw it, are all changed by it, and must now ensure that the wound is not mortal, that the world of what is seen triumphs over what is cloaked, what is perceptible only through the effects of its awful misdeeds. (391)

In making free societies safe- safer- from terrorism our civil liberties will inevitably be compromised. But in return for freedom’s partial erosion, we have a right to expect that our cities, water, planes and children really will be better protected than they have been. The West’s response to the September 11 attacks will be judged in large measure by whether people begin to feel safe once again in their homes, their workplaces, their daily lives. This is the confidence we have lost, and must regain. (392) Needless to say, the extremity of tragedy is filtered through the author’s sense of personal violation originating in the fatwa years and culminating in the recognition of America as his ultimate refuge. His “Americanized” sensibility alludes to the protean nature of New York City in particular, and its ability to inspire radical metamorphoses in people seeking to divest themselves of older identities and the restrictive certainties of the past. The criticism which holds true for Rushdie’s 2001 novel, Fury – that it depicts migrancy as a volatile dance of creative and destructive forces of identity-formation while completely overlooking the socio-economic dimensions of immigration to the USA – applies to his non-fictional piece as well. The “bright capital of the visible” does not account for the invisibilized “waste products of globalization” inhabiting the margins of the industrial centers of the world (Bauman, Wasted Lives 66). These are the

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refugees, the asylum seekers and the immigrant-outsiders who are identified as the “waste of the planet-wide triumph of modernity” threatening to destabilize society with “the distant noises of war and the stench of gutted homes” (66–67). In Rushdie’s analysis the carrying of the past on the bodies of migrants “marks” them for their inability to evolve. Yet the “marked” migrant is already a hybrid upon whose body history enacts its violent transgressions and leaves behind the dis-figured remains as memory of modernity’s offensive. Therefore what is “cloaked” is not just the fearsome forces of terrorism on American soil but also society’s inability to acknowledge the living bodies reduced to waste in maintaining the semblance of the “tough-talking, spirit-dazzling” city. Significantly, against the backdrop of America’s preparation for a “counter-attack” to the 9/11 crisis, Rushdie’s call for an urgent and “early resolution of some of the world’s thorniest problems” reveals the author’s altered position with regard to American interventionism (392). The suggestion is that America might preserve her preeminence by conforming to a more morally acceptable form of “intervention”: Better judgment will be required on all sides in future. No more Sudanese aspirin factories to be bombed, please. And now that wise American heads appear to have understood that it would be wrong to bomb the impoverished, oppressed Afghan people in retaliation of their tyrannous masters’ misdeeds, they might apply that wisdom, retrospectively, to what was done to the impoverished, oppressed people of Iraq. It’s time to stop making enemies and start making friends…To say that is in no way to join in the savaging of America by sections of the left that has been among the most unpleasant consequences of the terrorists’ attacks on the United States. (392) The struggle to legitimize America’s moral obligation is iterated in Rushdie’s meditation on the fraught subject of globalization, for which he cites Amartya Sen’s thesis, i.e., globalization is not bad in itself, but unequal distribution of resources is (“Step Across”). Amartya Sen’s focus in Identity and Violence, from which Rushdie quotes, is however on the West’s problematic response to the threat of terrorism and its tendency to revert to a “civilization-based” rhetoric while attempting to promote greater communication among civilizations. Terming the West’s reliance on “religion-based classification of people” a hamhanded approach, Sen contends that the popular bogey of “Islamic terrorism” has only strengthened the voices of Muslim clerics who otherwise constitute a minority within the so-called “Islamic world” (13). Alternately, dissemination of theories of “civilizational confrontations” dominates the West’s imagination, particularly in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on America, while simultaneously reinvigorating calls for “reforming Islam” by positing the “moderate Muslim” as a manageable category. The popular appeal of such narratives inheres in the interpretation of contemporary conflicts in their complex localized manifestations as “ancient feuds”; consequently this approach makes it impossible to

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imagine “identity” as anything other than “discovery”. The role of the intellectual as public embodiment of a “feud” defined in terms of the “freedomfundamentalism” cultural binary does not attest so much to a civilizational crisis as it does to a crisis within “civil society” occupied by men and women of letters like Rushdie and others. The lost opportunities of this sphere of influence in navigating the complex terrain of socio-cultural relations of difference among divergent communities of the West, suggests a failure on the public relations front. By amplifying the righteous war rhetoric of the global approach to terror as part of an effort at mobilizing the “public sphere” against fundamentalism and censorship, Rushdie ends up circumscribing civil society’s potential to represent the interests and concerns of a wider and more heterogeneous public. If, in a sense, the events of the 9/11 terror attacks consolidates Rushdie’s moral claims to a greater scrutiny of “cultural relativism” among left-liberal apologists for religious orthodoxy, (particularly the Islamic kind), then the form of the liberal democratic state being championed by the binaristic representation of the post-9/11 world order exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of the system of exclusion institutionalized by America’s immigration policies and naturalization law. Thus moral relativism operates as the very basis on which the liberal nation is conceived, while negating the principle of humanity and the moral equality of all persons (Cole). This directly implicates Rushdie in his promotion of the US War on Terror and a grudging defense of stricter regulations at the border. Espousing a typically “American” form of plural cultural identity based on notions of freedom and democracy as bulwark against terrorism, the War on Terror cultivates a sense of “American exceptionalism” sustained by an ahistorical approach to the event (Miller). Kristene A. Miller points toward the capitalization of the term itself as a reference to an actual war suffused with “historical cachet”, while the popularized uses of the “bare name-date of 9/11” without mentioning the year 2001 suggests a temporal break or the inauguration of a new historical epoch “at this calendrical ground zero [where] previous September 11s disappear into that zero” (3). Significantly, the moral exclusivism of America’s “Good Fight” serves to reemphasize the puritanical idea of the nation as a “democratic paradise” (2, 4). In fact, the contours of this paradisal polity expose the contradictory links between America’s hostile attitude toward immigrants and refugees and a xenophilic attachment to the “foreigner” as enshrined in the “huddled masses” rhetoric of American multiculturalism. Here the case of Ali Majnu is significant. An immigrant taxi-driver who appears briefly in the pages of Rushdie’s prophetic text, Fury, to exhibit a “decipherable” road rage with Malik Solanka, the protagonist, as his witness, Majnu embodies the collective anxieties of the “good immigrant”. According to Patricia A. Owens, the “good immigrant” figure is key toward meeting security concerns at “home” particularly in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, while shifting the debate away from the West’s own imperialist footprints in foreign lands where NATO’s efforts at bringing liberal democracy to “disturbed” regions has triggered a massive humanitarian crisis of forced displacement. Here

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Owens’ focus is on the xenophilic strategy which seeks to sentimentalize the category of the “immigrant” by dislocating the subject from a thriving political ecosystem such that, ironically, “ethical humanitarianism [is] conducted in a depoliticized public context” (288). Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the “private” as an essential component in the development of individuality – “a space necessary for creation of personalities able to participate in public spaces at all, for the creation of a thoughtful, engaged citizenry” – is employed by Owens to expose the humanitarian crisis inherent to the act of denying the refugee a “home” by crowding such individuals into homogenous spaces as part of the re-habilitation drive (289). Understood as such, the political ramifications of Ali’s rage against “godless” Americans followed by his fearful acknowledgment of America’s ­a ltruism – “God bless America, okay?” – produce a context of disenfranchisement for the immigrant taxi-driver thrust under the constant glare of the “public” as he navigates the streets of New York. Rushdie’s novel pursues the subject of memory gaps by producing its own technique of effacement whereby Ali’s trajectory reinforces an official perception of working class immigrants as potential security threats for whom the entire paraphernalia of strict immigration policies, detention centers, the private prison complex and a heavily militarized state ­surveillance system is created as an enactment of their obliteration from the living polity. Owens’ analysis also focuses on the growing demand in the West to discourage resettlement of displaced people in Western countries and secure the global North “from the human costs of violence and neoliberal economics on a global scale” (290). Furthermore, Owens’ study unpacks the double meaning of the “American way of life” by positing it as both a defense mechanism triggered at each meeting point between immigrants and “natives”, as well as an enabling national myth about newcomers being best suited to the task of enforcing integration through their desire to belong (292). The “good immigrant” commandment is echoed in Rushdie’s non-fictional writings on the threat to the liberal “Godless” American society from the illiberal fundamentalist infiltrators whose primary objective is to remake America in their own image. Interestingly, Malik Solanka’s religious or ethnic statuses play no role in the development of his storyline whereas Ali Majnu’s Muslim identity becomes the premise on which his brief intrusion into the narrative space of the novel is built. Seeing himself in the “foolish, young Ali Majnu” reduces the latter to a ready template for analyzing Solanka’s own artistic rage, while, alternately, Ali figures as a cautionary tale against the impulse to dissociate words from bloody deeds (Fury 67). If Solanka ultimately fails to unpack Ali Majnu’s road rage and nervous patriotism by ignoring the asymmetry between the latter’s absent citizenship – denoted by sovereignty over law – and his oppressive “subject” position which renders him vulnerable on account of his ethnic-religious and economic identification with  targeted groups at the border and within the state, then this necessarily holds up Rushdie’s xenophilic portrayal of American multiculturalism to greater scrutiny.

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Consequently in a post-9/11 piece, reflecting on America’s long War on Terror, the author writes: America did, in Afghanistan, what had to be done, and did it well. The bad news, however, is that none of these successes have won friends for the United States. In fact, the effectiveness of the American campaign may ­paradoxically have made the world hate America more than it did before… …anti-Americanism would probably not abate. It has become too useful a smokescreen for Muslim nations’ many defects – their corruption, their incompetence, their oppression of their own citizens, their economic, scientific and cultural stagnation. America-hating has become a badge of identity, making possible a chest-beating, flag-burning rhetoric of word and deed that makes men feel good. It contains a strong streak of hypocrisy, hating most what it desires most, and elements of self-loathing (‘We hate America because it has made of itself what we cannot make of ourselves’). What America is accused of – closed-mindedness, stereotyping, ignorance – is also what its accusers would see if they looked into a mirror. (“Anti-Americanism” 399–400) Rushdie’s caustic “language of state” entrenched within a patriotic ethos establishes the sacral dimensions of the nation, where the twin deities of military might and economic power qualifies the democratic polity as the ideal arbiter of retributive justice in the world. Urging people to choose “unbelief ” over traditional religion’s “infallible moral arbiters and irredeemably immoral tempters”, Rushdie’s own moral universe seeks to reaffirm the fixed poles of “the good and bad, light and dark, of the supernatural realm” in secular terms (Bradley & Tate 383). In fact Rushdie’s growing compatibility with official narratives on 9/11 has a historical resonance in USA’s reaction to WW-II where individual trauma is seen to collapse into “a shared cumulative trauma”, such that America’s resurrection as a “Never Again!” society (even after winning the war) is predicated on rigid “social defenses” collectively applied to the national psyche (Auestad). As a collective expression, this form of neurosis has troubling implications for immigrants, minorities and refugee groups who are often at the receiving end of the nation-state’s violent reckoning with its own insecurities. Rushdie’s invective against the perceived “enemies” of American moral supremacy suggests a similar crisis in the author’s self-reflective ability when it comes to “acknowledging” the trauma of 9/11 and its personal resonance. At the same time, his language of state mimics the “narcissistic character armour” adopted as defenses by the nation, such as assertions of territorial and military invulnerability; assertions of moral rectitude…rejection of anything that could be called ‘appeasement’ in foreign affairs, assertions of ‘exceptionalism’; celebrations of American

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individualism (often gendered as ‘rugged individualism’ and thus ­indistinguishable from machismo); and triumphalism…. (Auestad xviii) In the final analysis, the contradiction between Rushdie’s post-fatwa, post-9/11 discourse, and the records of the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice itemizing a surge in cases of “bias crimes” and “incidents of discrimination against Muslims, Sikhs, and persons of Arab and South-Asian descent, as well as persons perceived to be members of this group”, in both the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and the succeeding years (“Combating Post9/11”), is telling. The growing crisis of civil rights violations in the “litigating sections” of “Educational Opportunity”, “Fair Housing”, “Public Facilities and Public Accommodations” and “Religious Land Use” amplifies and exposes the long history of institutional violence against religious and ethnic minorities. The huge number of legal battles that the Civil Rights Division records, pertaining to people’s cultural practices and religious symbols, attests to a more complex and entrenched ideological strife characterizing America’s international as well as domestic responses to Islamic terrorism than what Rushdie concedes. The author’s contention that “it’s always in the interest of the minority communities to defend free expression, because their own rights are involved” (“Watch: Salman Rushdie on Intolerance”), makes a significant error of judgment by assuming that “justice” and “freedom” are equally available to – or even compatible with – all sections of society.

Works Cited Ali, Tariq. “The New Empire Loyalists.” The Guardian, 16 March, 2002, https://www. theguardian.com/world/2002/mar/16/usa.comment Appignanesi, Lisa and Maitland, Sara (eds.). The Rushdie File. London: ICA: Fourth Estate, 1989. Aslam, Nadeem. The Wasted Vigil. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2008. Auestad, Lena. “Introduction.” Nationalism and the Body Politic: Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Ethnocentrism and Xenophobia, edited by Lena Auestad, Karnac Books Ltd, 2014, pp. xv–xxviii. Baucom, Ian. Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity. Princeton University Press, 1999. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2000. Bauman, Zygmunt. Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts. Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2004. Bradley, Arthur and Tate, Andrew. The New Atheist Novel: Fiction, Philosophy and Polemic after 9/11. A Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010. Brenan, Timothy. “The Cultural Politics of Rushdie Criticism: All or Nothing.” Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie, edited by M. Keith Booker, G. K. Hall & Co., 1999, pp. 107–128.

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Cole, Phillip. Philosophies of Exclusion: Liberal Political Theory and Immigration, Edinburgh University Press Limited, 2000. Friedman, Jonathan. “Global Crises, the Struggle for Cultural Identity and Intellectual Porkbarrelling: Cosmopolitans vs. Locals, Ethnics and Nationals in an Era of Dehomogenisation.” Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multicultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, edited by Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood, Zed Books Ltd, 2015, pp. 70–89. Ganapathy-Dore, Geetha. “Playing Hide and Seek with Names and Selves in Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton, A Memoir.” Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association of AngloAmerican Studies, vol. 35, no. 2, 2013, pp. 11–25. Gorra, Michael. “Naipaul or Rushdie.” Southwest Review, vol. 76, no. 3, pp. 374–389. Heller, Zoe. “The Salman Rushdie Case.” The New York Review, 20 Dec. 2012, https:// www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/12/20/salman-rushdie-case/ Miller, Kristine A. “The Wrong Side of Paradise: American Exceptionalism and the Special Relationship After 9/11.” Transatlantic Literature and Culture After 9/11: The Wrong Side of Paradise, edited by Kristine A. Miller, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 1–16. Modood, Tariq. “‘Difference’, Cultural Racism and Anti-Racism.” Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multicultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, edited by Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood, Zed Books Ltd, 2015, pp. 154–172. Owens, Patricia A. “Xenophilia, Gender, and Sentimental Humanitarianism.” Alternatives, vol. 29, 2004, pp. 285–304. Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses: A Novel. Viking, 1989. Rushdie, Salman. “Declaration of Independence for Those Without Frontiers.” Independent, 14 Feb. 1994. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/­declaration-ofindependence-for-those-without-frontiers-1394056.html Rushdie, Salman. Fury. Vintage Books, 2002. Rushdie, Salman. “Step Across This Line.” The Tanner Lectures on Human Value, Yale University, 25 Feb. and 26 Feb. 2002. Rushdie, Salman. “Terror vs. Security.” Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction 19922002. Vintage Books, 2003. Rushdie, Salman. “The Attacks on America.” Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992-2002. Vintage Books, 2003. Rushdie, Salman. “Anti-Americanism.” Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction 19922002, Vintage Books, 2003, pp. 398–400. Rushdie, Salman. “Globalization.” Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992-2002. Vintage Books, 2003, pp. 296–298. Rushdie, Salman. Joseph Anton: A Memoir. Jonathan Cape, 2012. Sawhney, Sabina and Sawhney, Simona. “Reading Rushdie After September 11, 2001.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 47, no. 4, pp. 431–443. Sen, Amartya. Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. Penguin Books India, 2007. The United States Department of Justice. “Combating Post-9/11 Discriminatory Backlash.” https://www.justice.gov/crt/combating-post-911-discriminatory-backlash-6

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

Laila Lalami’s 2006 novel Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits and Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies (2020) deal with the ambiguities and fissures involved in the ideological and the biopolitical registers of nationality and national belonging in the years after 9/11. Muslim xenophobia propagated by 9/11 and the “war on terror” have led many Americans to find Islam as a distant principle espousing oppression, irrationality, and violence—the ideological contrast to the western modernist ideologues that self-fashion the democratic nation-state of the west and its liberal ethos in terms of an oppositional realm to the constructive ideas of the Middle East and Islam. Deciphering the visceral enmity for Muslims unleashed after 9/11 and returning with greater fury after the rise of Donald Trump and right-wing Republicanism, this chapter looks into the rise of the anti-immigrant and racist ideology to the failure of American welfare capitalism to mitigate the ethnic and racial divide in the wider community through a provocative and profound inquiry into the complex and hyphenated identity. The rise of alt-white ethnic nationalism and the cooptive mechanisms of conditional cosmopolitanism in western societies shall be assessed to understand the ways in which the spectres of migrant precarity haunt the modern nation-state and the ipseity of its conditional “bios”. This chapter also diagnoses the conflicted place in US society through the multifaceted framings of citizenship and shifting temporalities of Laila Lalami and Ayad Akhtar’s minutiae of democracy, human rights and belonging with a yearning for home and homeliness. Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits frames the narrative around the shifting demographies and temporalities of the political refugees who passes the ocean from North Africa to Europe with the effects of the legality of citizenship. Lalami takes stock of the fraught relationship between citizenship, nationalism, and belonging with the contemporary discussions of emigration sui generis. Her formation of the postcolonial nation under the artifice of the travel ­narrative DOI: 10.4324/9781003362999-10

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opens with the narrative of Mediterranean migration as an e­ ight-person Zodiac ferries 30 migrants at the dead of the night at the Spanish coast. The first narrator Murad makes us see the transitional space of imperial militancy, cultural correspondence and the present-day ethnocentric portrayal of North African migrants. Halima, a struggling mother from Casablanca; Faten Khatibi, a pious, university expelled 19-year-old single Muslim girl from Rabat; Labin, a worried father; and two economically disenfranchised young men, Murad, the bachelor English degree holder from Tangier, and Aziz, the married man from Casablanca, the immigrants with “deterritorialized self ” (Abunaseer 2016), reiterate the narrative of the illegal immigration by Moroccans to Spain while traversing the psychological and cultural distress under a postcolonial politics of identity ­formation. Border crossing affects illuminate the stereotypes of home and belonging as the agency of immigrants are strewn over the complex religious affinities and the cloak of invisibility. Subscribing to the Islamist Party, a young college student Faten, flees the secret police and heads to Spain whereas the mother of three young children Halima with her religious faith returns to Morocco after being forced by the Spanish guards. After a century of Spain propelling its own emigrants outward, the surge of emigrants from North Africa sailing towards Spain, has snowballed the anxiety over what Daniela Flesler calls the “return of the Moor” (Flesler 2008). Halima and Faten with their vulnerable positionality as oppressed women end up on the same boat sailing from Morocco to Spain with a hope of a modest life as companionless on the other part of the Mediterranean. On account of the family discordance, the 29-year-old Halima leaves her alcoholic barbarous husband with her three children on a boat for Spain. Eventually, the other female protagonist, Faten, a final year student in a college hailing from a poor family gets herself entangled with an upper middle-class girl Noura, whose guardian unwelcome such relationship under the panic of political persecution. These two Middle Eastern women unaccompanied by a male “protector” emphasise a potential mobility to enhance the living of their lives with a yearning for refugee assimilation in an unaccommodated home. The dominant structures of “home”, “country”, and “outsider” transcend the trope of cultural boundaries, what Elizabeth Anker contends how “contemporary narratives of human rights marshal many well-rehearsed conventions of imperialist discourse, along with paternalistic conjectures about the need of the ‘Third World’ for salvation through recourse to the very values that those conventions smuggle in.” (Anker 2013: 35). And the Somali poet Warsan Shire argues in her poem “Home” that “no one leaves home unless/ home is the mouth of a shark” (Shire 2018). Shire also asserts that, “you have to understand, / that no one puts their children in a boat/unless the water is safer than the land.” (Shire 2018). Because of her husband’s oppression, Halima risks the lives of her children, and makes an attempt to induce the judge to allow her a divorce. She panics as she offers the judge a bribe, “It was a mistake to have thought that Hanan or that judge or that magic powder could get her out of her situation […] She had to do something for her future—today” (72–73). Across the Straits of Gibraltar, Aziz, Halima, Faten

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and Murad with their shifting identities, i­ nstability and ­continuous d­ rifting with the non-adherence to their national belongings and cultural affiliations find themselves dislodged from the home and tradition, and are entangled in a never-­ to-be completed series of transformations—an unending venture. Here, Iain Chambers is worth quoting—“postcolonialism is perhaps the sign of an increasing awareness that it is not feasible to subtract a culture, a history, a language, an identity, from the wider transforming currents of the increasingly metropolitan world. It is impossible to ‘go home’ again” (Chambers 1994:74). Aziz finds Hall’s conjecture “migration is one way trip. There is no “home” to go back to. There never was” (Aziz 1996:115) embodied in the Moroccan cultural centredness merged into a Mghribiyya consciousness which furnishes the philosophical underpinning for this text. From a dedicated Muslim activist in “The Fanatic”, Faten’s journey to ­becoming the independent unencumbered sex worker in “The Odalisque” for the financial and religious independence abroad is akin to a territory which one invades in terms of an exotic fetish and submissive human (Lalami 2005:75). Martín, one of her clients resembles Faten with the sense of otherness keeping in mind the mythological otherness of the odalisque or the harem. Lalami takes the readers into confidence to make them understand her revival through political Islam before Faten’s journey to Spain. As she is raised in a low-income neighbourhood, she decides to join the Islamic party and wear a headscarf and hijab with her friend Noura. Her religious revival is a kind of economic revival and movement as Faten opposes the “injustice we see every day” (18), since the impoverishment in Morocco gestures towards the fact that Muslims are not sharing their wealth for the poor people—an important pillar of Islam. Faten finds “proof enough of the corruption of King Hassan, the government and the political parties” (18) against her forms of piety, purification, religious faith. She finds the non-integrity of Muslims that punctuate the life of the poor across Morocco, “If we had been better Muslims, perhaps these problems wouldn’t have been visited on our nation” (18). Faten’s practice of Islam and the inner spirit beckon a pathway towards political and economic revamp of the nation. Working as a prostitute later on after her migration, Faten shares the street with immigrant women from Romania and Ukraine as well as with Spanish prostitutes, who seek to live a satisfactory life by entering into the European Union. Faten and Aziz’s stories seem to showcase the ways in which the Moor has returned to Spain with the continual disorientation of cultural disruption under the colonial matrix of ideological consciousness of hegemonic stereotyping. Lalami portrays the economic, domestic and sexual exploitation with the fear of the coloniser as these migrants find themselves in Spain as global foreigners and sustain what Saunders calls “the stigmata of an ambivalence, of an infantile and ‘primitive’ past” (Saunders 2001:189). The past primitivity holds the essence of the Spanish make believe where the involved relationship between Morocco and Spain foregrounds how emigrants under the trope of exclusionary practices experience the constraints for postcolonial agential instability with a transnational “suppressive

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structures of hegemonic homes” in transit (Elboubekri 2014). Lalami’s other characters Murad and Aziz both construct the emigrant precarious underpinnings with neoliberal economics and governmental organisations which enable them as disposable marginalised populations with a biopolitical reality of Maghribi population. Their national belonging fluctuate as Aziz finds migration as the only method for his wife and to him to “start living” (Lalami 2005:46), whereas Murad is “never tired of hearing” migrant narratives who successfully had made the crossing (63). Lalami’s portrayal of de-territorialised subjectivity under a restricted notion of borders and nation subscribe to harr’ga or illegal immigration as a territorial threat that resonates with Agamben’s (1995) differentiation between zoē (bare life of a corporeal body) and bios (socio-political life of a subject). Engaging on the contours of precarity created by the governing biopolitical logics of Western liberal democracies and labour relations, Lalami explores how dispossessed people are subjected to symbolic, structural, and direct modalities of violence that concomitantly constitutes their ceaseless suffering with the politics of (un) liveability. At the beginning of the first story, Murad imagines “the job, the car, the house” (5) and Aziz ponders on the plight of his newly married wife who will be coerced to live five years with his parents in Casablanca while he undergoes a back-breaking orientation in Spain. Though these migrants are persistently in danger of political marginalisation in the context of the Global War on Terror after the 9/11 and in present-day Western liberal democracies, palpability of hope is always there with the feasibility of dream. As Lalami narrates: “It will be all right now. He [Murad] comforts himself with the familiar fantasy that sustained him back home…Despite an interruption in the fantasy, Murad won’t stop dreaming of another chance” (11). Here, “precariousness implies” in the words of Butler “living socially, that is, the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other.” (Butler 2009:14). Therefore, life requires constant support and a favourable habitat which empower it to flourish and continue, in order for that life to be liveable “there is no life without the need for shelter and food, no life without dependency on wider networks of sociality and labour” (Butler 2009: 24–25). Faten and Aziz in the second part of the novel sail to Spain, whereas Murad as a tour guide and a worker at a tourist shop travels to à la Bowles with Faten. Experiencing a form of statelessness and nomadic life under the larger systemic fraudulence and violence, people like Faten clings to live with the sex work where racist John Martín finds her as a dish, as her breasts appears to him as mangoes and she smells like black olives. Faten’s conversion into a professional prostitute renders her as figments of cultural disorientation with the “strategic essentialism” of rape as Martín emerges as a “Spanish colonizer” in their relationship beyond the boundaries of territorial crossing and the cultural frontier of discursive identities with an economy of a colonial understanding. In developing the theory of frontier, Salman Rushdie dwells on the eminence of existential scepticism in his pioneering essay “Step Across This Line” by seeking answers:

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Why did the sea so thoroughly lose its appeal that they risked everything to migrate from the old to the new? […] What urges were born in them that overpowered even the survival instinct? […] Our own births mirror that first crossing of the frontiers between the elements … In our deepest natures, we are frontier-crossing beings. (Rushdie 2002:350) Rushdie dexterously situates the plight of “they” as the probable immigrants to the Western countries and the essence of crossing the frontiers, whereas Lalami attests to the decaying state of affairs of the lower classes who have to come face to face with the “terrifying guardians of territory, an ogre here, a dragon there”. The transnational repositioning of the native under the matrix of colonial West (Spain) and neocolonial possibilities (postcolonial Morocco) which valorises the economic globality in altering the project of “trans”-modernity with an affirmation of the production of what Aníbal Quijano suggests as the “coloniality of power” syndrome (Quijano 2000:533). In Homeland Elegies, Ayad Akhtar’s portrayal of exclusionary tropes on the basis of religion, race, and identity within the post-9/11 republic transcends the individual dilemma of being a Muslim, and the novel offers insight into the construction of self and the relationship with Islam in Trump’s America. The narrator’s mother Fatima was born and brought up in Central Punjab which separated the Indian nation to witness the enormity of Partition, and she moves with her husband to the United States from Lahore. The narrator with his vibrant childhood memories visits his mother’s family’s Rawalpindi bungalow only to decipher an undercurrent of respective feelings for the country with some final lucid conversations with his parents. Impelled by an ambiguous sense of resentment and alienation as a Muslin man after September 11th in the United States, Akhtar addresses America as an “overture” with an American malady unprotected with the lens of “the God-blessed, light-of-the-world exceptionalism that informed every hour” which he “spent in history class” with his intense personal American elegies. The narrator’s father’s “love for America and [ … ] firm belief in its supremacy” (Akhtar 2020: 12) stands in sharp contrast to the beliefs of his mother Fatima, who misses her “Old World” (77)—her native Pakistan—and finds consolation in listening to polka music: “a homespun Wisconsin reminder she was not the only one who’d come here from somewhere else, not the only one still working to keep alive the memory of another place” (320). The narrator’s feelings of homelessness in his American home under the modern political scenario open up the claustrophobic avenues with a “brand of crazy” which is fully baked into him. A leading cardiologist who treats Trump in the early 1990s, Akhtar’s father as an admirer of Trump in the 2016 election, evinces “an image of just how much more his American self could contain than the Pakistani one he’d left behind.” The ubiquitous presence of Donald Trump in the fabric of the text embodies a palpable tension over the nation-state’s sovereignty, individuality and the American dream. His father, Sikander is a Trump voter, staunch American patriot, a “great fan of America” (Akhtar 2020:12) who keeps a copy of The Art

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of the Deal, the 1987 book authored by Donald Trump and Tony Schwartz, in the living room. After a series of professional and personal disasters, and experiencing grief over the death of his wife, Sikander admits that he had been wrong about Trump. His son concludes that: My father loves America. Loves it more than makes sense to me sometimes, frankly. He thinks he’s American, but what that really means is that he still wants to be American. He still doesn’t really feel like one. It’s been forty-­ five years, and he still doesn’t really understand what it means. Because being American is not about what they tell you—freedom and opportunity and all that horse shit. Not really. There is a culture here, for sure, and it has nothing to do with all the well-meaning nonsense. It’s about racism and money worship—and when you’re on the correct side of both those things? That’s when you really belong. Because that’s when you start to represent the best of what they think they are. (Akhtar 2020, 235) For Akhtar’s father, the US neither develops an experiential perspective on “home” as it represents familiarity, permanency, order, comfort and place-bound culture that is fixed and rooted, impervious to change against change, nor does it encourage long-term immigrants and inhabitants to get to know one another and practice what Kwame Appiah (1998) has called “rooted cosmopolitanism”: “Attached to a home of his or her own, with its own cultural particularities, but taking pleasure from the presence of other, different places that are home to other, different people” (91). Appiah contends that while being rooted is important for us, it need not entail a dismissive notion of other(s’) places. The “home” connotes a shelter primarily meant for Akhtar and their family members, as he thinks that “only the embrace between us mattered now”, as he hugged his father after a bitter argument. Itself, being an embrace of a complicated and difficult patrimony, personal and cultural, Homeland Elegies travels over the summum bonum of the “Trumpian Weltanschauung” (29), where the reactions of this novel’s US Muslim characters to the 9/11 terrorist attacks are too subtle and complex to brief in a sentence, as Akhtar mourns the tragedy “at once suspects and victims” (Akhtar 2020:308). Akhtar’s love for America is a lover’s quarrel with this country, and, at its best, it has candour and seriousness to burn, as the narrator proclaims at the end: I’m here because I was born and raised here. This is where I’ve lived my whole life. For better, for worse—and it’s always a bit of both—I don’t want to be anywhere else. I’ve never even thought about it. America is my home. (Akhtar 2020, 506) The narrator’s cancer-stricken mother pined for decades for Latif, her ­husband’s best friend who quit America to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. In the aftermath

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of 9/11, she uncharacteristically pronounces on the retribution for the burdens white people have imposed: “They deserve what they got and what they’re going to get” (Akhtar 2020, 88). The narrator measures up the strong lethality and disloyalties of “they”, with the interpretive notions of dwelling, belonging, and betrayal that echo through the text as well. The mother’s disdain for “they” threads the lingering beliefs in Islam’s imminent political ascendancy. Relating a conversation between Akhtar’s uncle visiting Abbottabad (the military garrison town where Bin Laden had shielded himself ) and Sikander, the narrator tolerates his uncle Naseem’s rant on the value of military prowess as the premier quality of leadership. As uncle Naseem ends his conversation about ISIS, the narrator argues that the principles Naseem was outlining were, of course, central to the disgusting social and military project that would come to bloom in Syria and Iraq like toxic desert dogbane, a demonic, self-referential refraction of that first Muslim community Naseem invoked, the original Companions of the Prophet recast as sex-crazed purveyors of snuff films whom even Rushdie’s satirical genius could not have imagined (125). Akhtar deploys this in an artful manner; by mediating upon the corporeality of terror against the everyday consummation of Muslim glory and hauls up his narrator to a seer mingling amongst characters who are concomitantly pitiable like his parents, lethal like his sympathiser, Riaz, and cartoonish as everyone else. Though the palpable conflict steers between the abstract principle of fear and the reality of employing a political strategy to counter the act of terror, within this lies a coterminous space of immiscible understanding with fact and feelings under the “potency of politicised framings and the success of their conceptual vocabulary” (Cilano 2009:17–18). However, Islamophobia and the categorisation of terror under the name of Islam, as Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin (2011) point out, “trace the restricted, limited ways that Muslims are stereotyped and ‘framed’ within the political, cultural, and media discourses of the West” (2). As the attack of 9/11 was perpetrated by people bearing Muslim names, the Islam is assumed to be deeply complicit with terrorism. In most of his interviews, Akhtar was asked to identify the words used by reviewers that he found hateful. He pointed to the word “Muslim”, and the idea of pigeonholing the same in a telling preoccupation with immigrant Muslim identity. Homeland Elegies unearths the conundrums of an elegy for a pluralistic and non-monolithic America that no longer exists—a post9/11 America, where Muslims only are the singular enemy within and “9/11 [was] an inside job” (115). The attitudes of the narrator’s parents toward America before and after 9/11 find a parallel as Akhtar draws on the intellectual groundwork of Edward Said, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Frantz Fanon, only to build up a modus vivendi in the Trump era, where one is “socially defined” as Muslim even if one is a nonbeliever. And what does it take to be at once victim and suspect in a “Christian land”? (Akhtar 2020:175). The narrator struggles with the dilemma of reconciling immigrant experience with a sense of belonging. The resultant sense of unbelonging is described thus:

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that terrible day in September foreclosed our futures in this country for at least another generation – as much as it bothered me, as much as I felt a victim of what this nation had become for us, I, too, had participated in my own exclusion, willingly, still choosing, half a lifetime into my American life, to see myself as other. (Akhtar 2020, 176) The understanding of the host as a guest also entails the deconstruction of the native/stranger binary—where the natives are also the strangers, alienated from the very home that embraces them. The idea of embracing strangers is rooted in the same skill as the idea of “expelling” them, as in both situations, the meeting with strangers becomes a way through which “we” claim ourselves as “willing”, though the “we” is influenced differently by the difference that is expected to belong to the others/strangers (Ahmed 2000:190). Both Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits and Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies deal with the ambiguities and fissures involved in the ideological and the biopolitical registers of nationality and national belonging in the years after 9/11.With the story of a father, a son, and the country they both come to call home, Akhtar captures the sense of belonging and dispossession in America and juxtaposes it to guerilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan in his attempts to understand the tides of rising nationalism and the “othering” of minorities across geopolitical spaces and time zones. With Akhtar’s deep intellectual explorations of identity and emotional urgency, Homeland Elegies looks into the divided loyalty that navigates “American dilemma”, and views the protagonist and his father through the white American gaze to embrace difference, “to stop pretending that I felt like an American,” (Akhtar 2020:188) with love-hate relationships. Exploring the visceral antipathy for Muslims unleashed after 9/11 and returning with greater fury after the rise of Donald Trump and right-wing Republicanism, Lalami and Akhtar dig into the rise of anti- immigrant and racist ideology to the failure of American welfare capitalism to mitigate the ethnic and racial divide in the wider community through a provocative and profound inquiry into an artist’s complex and hyphenated identity that navigates his conflicted place in US society in their contemporary searing works. Lalami’s characters are similar to that of Conditional Citizens (2020) in the modern American system with shock, fear, grief and rejection where the glaring words of former president George W. Bush “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists” bear the connotation that one could not be Muslim and American, or, Arab and American at the same time. Exploration of citizenship, race, ethnicity, and identity in America with diversity and pluralism expound the ontological interdependability of all social life through the political mediation of precariousness and differentially exposed to violence, injury, and death. While Lalami predominantly focuses on the constitution of precarity within Western liberal democracies post 9/11, Akhtar, nevertheless, argues that “lives are supported and maintained differently, and there are radically different ways in which human physical vulnerability is distributed across the globe” (Butler 2004:32). The ontology of a precarious life outside the

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boundaries of the 21st-century populations with new immigrants, impoverished masses though challenge the crux of neoliberal economics, the modalities of violence and conditions of neoliberal disposability within the contextual differences has developed the framework of “contemporary forms of the subjugation of life to the power of death” (Mbembe 2019:92). Both the authors develop a strong link throughout their texts between non-White racial identity and conditional citizenship by ensnaring the experience of discrimination and mistreatment reinforced by the cultures of state violence, widespread bigotry and casual Islamophobic brutality. What emerge are the wider negotiations at the issues of belonging/unbelonging centred on exiles and immigrant Muslims as they relate to all who live in this country. Their spar over belonging, citizenship, boundaries of Americanness and seductions of neoliberalism transcend the boundaries of Americanness as America welcomes with one arm, and shoves away with the other. The musings on the issues of immigration, citizenship, and the national politics of integration rehash a number of incidents deeply entrenched in radical imagination including the framing of anti-Muslim sentiment in the 9/11 era and newfound racism of the Trump era. The politics of resentment against Muslim and Islam in America and the ban on Muslim entry into public life exacerbate the politics of hate and fear with the rise of Islamophobia—a social anxiety toward Muslims and Islam—an anonymous collective energy, not un-like Durkheim’s “effervescence” but often sustained through a sense of crisis. The trajectories of such repertoire of political actions—performative and artistic—become visible among actors with different belief systems and habitus. The civic visibility as well as the formation of society based on exile and migration that novels like Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits and Homeland Elegies raise about critical approaches to underpin the stakes of modernity in an implicit dimension of modern social imaginings that are embodied in the habitus of a population under the performative modernity in context. Acts of performance as well as spaces of modernity with their distinctiveness beyond the boundary of the nation-state are not socially neutral and are produced by the negotiation of exclusion and domination. Here the space used by the Muslim migrants their distinctiveness (as religion poses a question), as Henri Lefevbre contends, are not to an empty one but a space of production of defining boundaries of exclusion and inclusion, social relations, of the licit and illicit that unsettles the modern democracy. Migrants’ Islamic subjectivity become a new sociability as they subsume the boundaries and limits emerging as “forbidden modern” (Göle 1996) amidst the aporetic American space of ambivalence and undecidability. Derrida’s notion of the democracy-to-come rests upon a certain radical onto-political gesture that enacts a certain yea-saying towards a radical alterity that refuses to be defined or known in a priori terms. The terms of the citizenship in such a democratic space can only be enunciated in terms of a language and identitarian state that resists being written and represented. The Levinasian notion of a saying, rather than the constative realm of the said, thus contours the writing of such a democratic realm and the contours of its citizenship.

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Any alterity thus gestured towards thereby rewrites the terms of the stranger and the host, as it dismantles the notion of the home and the language of the dwelling. The apocalyptic event of 9/11 not only reiterates the Xenophobic nature of European modernity and its geopolitical self-fashioning, it conversely gestures towards a newer temporal and geo-spatial order wherein the normative conditions of our dwelling and othering might be rewritten to ascertain the terms of a newer democracy-to-come in a language and literary space that debunks the earlier signposts of our dwelling and sense of strangeness. The very idea that migrant Islamic identity might come to envisage a newer modality of “sociability” and identity capital in Western societies is thus symptomatic of a new transmutation that might forever alter and transcend our received ideas of cosmopolitan hybridity, which for a long time has served as an alibi for western modernity and the terms of its conditional hospitality which are meted out to strangers and immigrants arriving at its borders. While the West grapples with an immigration crisis due to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, it remains to be seen how and in what ways does the West allow the terms of geopolitical hospitality, conditional asylum, biopolitical citizenship to adapt to the ethical crises at hand without harking back to those same structures and ideologues that led to the crisis in the first place.

Works Cited Abunaseer, Rima. “The Deterritorialized self in Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits.” The Journal of North African Studies. Vol. 16. No. 2, 182–198, 2016. Agamben, G. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. Akhtar, Ayad. Homeland Elegies. New York: Little Brown, 2020. Anker, Elizabeth S. Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Cosmopolitan Patriots.” In Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, edited by Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, 91–114. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York and London: Verso, 2004. ——— Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? New York and London: Verso, 2009. Chambers, Iain. Migrancy, Identity, Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Cilano, Cara. From Solidarity to Schisms: 9/11 and After in Fiction and Film from Outside to the US. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009. Elboubekri, Abdellah. “The Dislocation of ‘Home’ in the Writings of Laila Lalami,” Journal of Multicultural Discourses. Vol. 9. No. 3, 251–264, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10. 1080/17447143.2014.938749 Flesler, Diana. The Return of the Moor: Spanish Reponses to Contemporary Moroccan Immigration. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2008. Göle, Nilüfer. The Forbidden Modern: Veiling and Civilization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Lalami, Laila. Hope & Other Dangerous Pursuits. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2005. ——— Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America. New York: Pantheon, 2020.

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Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham and London: DUP, 2019. Morey, Peter, and Amina Yaqin. Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation after 9/11. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Quijano, Aníbal.“ Coloniality of Power, Ethnocentrism, and Latin America”, Nepantla. 1, 533–580, 2000. Rushdie, Salman. Step across This Line. New York: Random House, 2002. Saunders, Rebecca. “Uncanny Presence: The Foreigner at the Gate of Globalization”. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Vol. 21. No. 1–2, 88–98, 2001. Shire, Warsan.“Home,” Genius. 2018. https://www.facinghistory.org/standing-up-­hatredintolerance/warsan-shire-home, n.p.

8 GLOBALIZATION, ISLAMIC MACHINE, AND “CRITICAL LOCALISM” IN THE AFTERMATH OF 9/11 Mosarrap Hossain Khan

Introduction In Japanese artist Yukinori Yanagi’s art exhibition, entitled “World Flag Ant Farm” (1990), the artist exhibited the flags of all the countries of the world mounted on a wall. The flags were made with small acrylic boxes filled with colored sand and were interconnected with plastic tubes through which ants passed blurring the edges of the national flags. After a couple of months, the flags had become completely unrecognizable. Yanagi’s exhibition must be construed against the backdrop of the momentous events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the fall of the Soviet regime in 1991. The decline of the Communist rule across the world heralded the possibility of global integration through market capitalism. Francis Fukuyama in his article, “The End of History?” (1989) – this article was subsequently expanded and published as a book, The End of History and the Last Man (1992) – writes: The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism. In the past decade, there have been unmistakable changes in the intellectual climate of the world’s two largest communist countries, and the beginnings of significant reform movements in both. But this phenomenon extends beyond high politics and it can be seen also in the ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture in such diverse contexts as the peasants’ markets and color television sets now omnipresent throughout China, the cooperative restaurants and clothing stores opened in the past year in Moscow, the Beethoven piped into Japanese department stores, and the rock music enjoyed alike in Prague, Rangoon, and Tehran. (3)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003362999-11

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Fukuyama further adds that what we are witnessing is not merely the end of Cold War or the passing of a particular period of post-war history but the “end of history” as such, which starts with the victory of western liberalism and democracy, which is supposed to smooth the path of western consumerist culture around the world. Fukuyama’s article offers us a glimpse of the “universal homogenous state” – a term coined by the Russian émigré theorist in France, Alexandre Kojeve, who popularized the work of Hegel in Europe – in which only the economic activity will remain since all previous contradictions have been resolved and man’s primary needs have been satisfied. Fukuyama is undoubtedly one of the earliest philosophers to theorize economic globalization and the resultant triumph of liberal democratic regimes across the globe. In this chapter, I will explore how the theories of globalization that predicted declining sovereignty of the nation-state is reversed in the wake of the September 11 attacks on America. The contemporary discourses of security reinvent a reinvigorated nation-state to counter, paradoxically, the growing menace of a global network of Islamic terrorism. My contention, however, is that the contemporary discourses of Islamist fundamentalism – both by the Islamists and the West – in the context of globalization over-determines the capability of pan-Islamism failing to see how very often the resistance movements in the Islamic countries operate within the local framework of the nation-state. This chapter, then, is an attempt to theorize counter-globalization movements within the framework of local and nationalist aspirations. Such a theorization, while offering “critical localism” as a resistance to globalization, deconstructs the hegemonic discourses of transnational Islamist fundamentalism, on the one hand and the claims of Western economic and cultural globalization, on the other. In my analysis, I shall use America – the geographical, political, and cultural entity – as a shorthand expression for the West.

Globalization, Nation-State, and Post-Nationalism In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), Delezue and Guttari propose the concept of “Body without Organs” (BwO), which “is continually dismantling the organism, causing asignifying particles or pure intensities to pass or circulate, and attributing to itself subjects that it leaves with nothing more than a name as the trace of an intensity” (4). The BwO functions as a “plane of consistency” where the flow of the world or the world machine can operate completely freely without any disruption. For Deleuze and Guttari, everything in the world is a flow and everything – such as the sun, the moon, paint, blood, etc. – is made of flows. The BwO is the fulfillment of the desire to flow without interruption since the absence of body parts ensures that the flow is not cut off; rather, all the flows relate to each other over the surface of the body. The BwO is their conceptualization for the postmodern condition in which capitalism is the driving force. They opt for the concept of rhizome instead of the tree.

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The rhizome contains “lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, ­territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc., as well lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees” (9). This rhizomic theory is particularly helpful in understanding the impetus behind contemporary globalization which thrives on an imaginary “plane of consistency” in which capitalism is the driving motor, a Body without Organs (BwO), or, in other words, a “universal homogenous state” of Kojeve, in which deterritorialization denotes the “circulation of states” (21). The deterritorialized nation-states as the facilitator of global capital are rhizomatically connected to a global surface where the machine of capitalism operates without any interruption. The concept of Body without Organs (BoW) is particularly illuminating in understanding the deterritorialized nation-states in a globalized world. Nomadism, the ceaseless movement of capital, goods, cultures, or humans – as opposed to the state with its static roots – is a desirable condition in the era of globalization. In the global capitalist economy, the might of the nation-state in propelling economic growth has been reduced in favor of a globally integrated market system. In the borderless economy, the states have abrogated their operational autonomy to the wealth-generating region states that lie within or across their borders, to catalyze the efforts of those region states to seek out global solutions, and to harness their distinctive ability to put global logic first and to function as ports of entry to the global economy. (Ohmae, 2004: 218) This new decline of the nation-state is in sharp contrast with its original 18th-century form of an organization which managed the economic affairs. In Hardt and Negri’s (2000) formulation, the modern sovereignty in the 18th century and thereafter operated through the creation of territorial boundaries or “the striation of the social filed” (325). The reduction of state power in managing economic affairs is compensated with an increase in social welfare activities as the citizens of a sovereign nation turns to the state for social securities. The state’s role in providing welfare to the vulnerable parts of its citizens is an outcome of the inequities resulting from market integration whose short-term consequences are “social dislocations and economic insecurity” (Garrett, 2004: 236). While the redistribution of wealth in the form of social security programs gives the modern state a semblance of legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens, the power that the states once enjoyed in economic matters is now redundant. In her study of globalization and the role of the state, Saskia Sassen (2006) posits that the welfare role of the state which was paramount in the post-World War II is now making way to its role as a neoliberal or competitive state. In this new global economic order, it is commonplace to find private authority in policy issues which were previously exclusive domains of the state. One of the key elements in the new scholarship on globalization is how the power of global capital can force the nation-state to

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adopt certain policies that favor the market. Sassen writes, “In all countries now incorporated in the global economic system, governments have issued legislative measures, executive orders, and court decisions enabling foreign firms to operate in their territory and their markets to become international” (230). The role of the state is not merely restricted to reducing its authority by governing less but also its ability to produce a series of new legalities which will produce – in Deleuze and Guttari’s words – the “plane of consistency” – on which the global capital will be able to operate without interruption. The production of these new legalities in the developed world is then expected to be replicated in other less developed states. The new global economic order forces the states to denationalize some of its state agendas in favor of private corporate players. Thus, while the authority and sovereignty of the state is remarkably reduced, it is still expected to perform certain works for the furtherance of global capital. In Negri and Hardt’s conceptualization, capital deterritorializes the nationstate and functions on the “plane of immanence.” The new postmodern sovereignty, called Empire, employs a new global logic of rule that smoothes the path of capital flow. In the context of the decline of the state power and the reorganization of the state in global market economy, Arjun Appadurai (1996) writes, “The world we live in now seems rhizomic, even schizophrenic calling for theories of rootlessness, alienation, and psychological distance between individuals and groups on the one hand, and fantasies (or nightmares) of electronic propinquity on the other” (29). Rejecting the conventional center-periphery model of global cultural economy, Appadurai proposes a theory of disjuncture in which global cultures interact in a “complex, overlapping and disjunctive order” (32). In order to theorize the disjunctures between economy, culture, and politics in the new global economy, he coins terms such as ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes with each one of these -scapes denoting landscapes which constitute the “imagined worlds” (33) inhabited by people across the globe. His main contention is that “imagination as a social practice” (31) motors global cultural interaction. In the disjunctive global order, the relationship between the states and nations is an embattled one as the hyphen between the nation and the state becomes the site for potential conflict. The nation is no longer confined to the territorial boundaries and a new post-national imaginary is said to be emerging in transnational social forms. However, the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 have altered the unfettered mobility of global capital and propelled the resurgence of the political state, which will be discussed in the next part of the chapter.

9/11, Islamic Fundamentalism, and the Nation-State The discourses of security and the rituals of mourning after the attacks on 9/11 have revitalized the state – not only in the US but across the globe – which, in turn, have presented Islamist fundamentalism as a global/transnational

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phenomenon. The transnational specter of Islamist terror is seen as an antithesis to the modern conceptions of liberal, democratic political state and an anathema to capitalism/consumerism. Any discussion of how 9/11 affected the speed and velocity of economic g lobalization presents 9/11 as an unprecedented event in the life of America, ­ thereby lending legitimacy to start the narrative of terror and violence with 9/11 and erase what came before. Judith Butler (2004) avers that it would signal a failure of collective responsibility to start the narrative of terror and violence at 9/11 in understanding the history of what has brought about something like this. To begin the narrative in American foreign policy much prior to the event is not an exoneration of the perpetrators of violence but an attempt to construct a different framework for explaining the event in its totality. Ali Behdad (2008), too, argues that the tendency of American scholars to date the history of racial profiling of Muslims and other minorities in the US in the wake of 9/11 is a sign of historical amnesia in which the Americans often do not remember how the minorities have so often been treated as aliens. Behdad provides the example of his own precarious existence in the US during the Iranian Revolution when students from Iran were placed under surveillance in the US. The 9/11 attacks have elicited a diverse set of responses regarding the prospects of globalization. Some like John Gray in an editorial in The Economist (2001) claimed that the attacks proclaimed the end of globalization. The Bush administration along with major western powers claimed that the September 11 attacks had serious ramifications for the international financial market, and it was felt that a new security regime needed to be developed for countering the global menace of transnational Islamist terror. Commenting on the implication of 9/11 for globalization, Fazal Rizvi (2004) writes: …how have, and indeed whether, the debates about globalization changed after September 11[?] What impact has September 11 and its aftermath had on the processes of globalization? Has it speeded up or slowed down globalization? What will September 11 mean for global economic integration and social disintegration and exclusion? To what extent is the cosmopolitan project inspired by globalization compromised by ensuing tensions between Islam and the West? Which aspects of globalization have been confirmed and refuted by September 11 and its aftermath? And what implications has it had on the anti-globalization movement? (161) Rizvi demonstrates three significant changes in the discursive field within which globalization is debated. First, a new discourse of security curtails the movement of people across national borders. Second, the nation-state has made a spectacular return from being a mere policy maker in the logic of rule for capital to the securer of its citizens. Third, this new discursive field has rendered the relationship between the West and Islam as one of antagonism, impeding the promotion of cosmopolitan values that globalization once promised.

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The reinvigoration of the powers of the nation-state in the backdrop of the 9/11 attacks is premised on an assumption that the security of the citizens could be guaranteed only with the abrogation of crucial democratic rights to the state. The PATRIOT Act, enacted by the US parliament, gives unprecedented power to the state for surveillance within the country and at its borders. Sunaina Maira (2008), studying the impact of 9/11 on South Asian youth in the United States, writes, “After 9/11, however, flexible citizenship can be a tenuous or even potentially dangerous strategy for Muslim immigrant youth, for transnational ties and shifting national allegiances are precisely what have come under scrutiny for Muslim Americans by the state in the era of the PATRIOT Act” (172). Thus, globalization, following the economic liberalization policies, instead of facilitating transnational movements has severely curtailed the movement of certain communities. The discourse of “security” is adroitly deployed by a resurgent state to keep out “dangerous” people from vitiating the secure national spaces and, also, to normalize segregation on the basis of race, religion, and other parameters. Such border control practices were originally conceived by Emerich de Vattel in the mid-18th century in his foundational treatise on international law, where he argues that restriction on the entry of the foreigners is crucial for the assertion of sovereignty of the state (Zolberg, 2002). Drawing on Foucault’s idea of governmentality, in which political power regulates and manages population and goods, Butler (2004) argues that a “revitalized” state can inflict untold miseries not only on its citizens but on the alleged perpetrators of violence against the US as the untried detainees of the Guantanamo Bay would testify. With the suspension of law in both its national and international forms during the “state of exception”, a new exercise of state sovereignty takes place “through an elaboration of administrative bureaucracies in which officials now not only decide who will be tried, and who will be detained, but also have ultimate say over whether someone may be detained indefinitely or not” (Butler, 2004: 51). The “revitalization” of the state and the relocation of power within the state are performed through certain structures of affect such as fear and mourning. The liberal democratic state thrives on a moralistic “antipolitics” of fear in the wake of the attack and the political virtues of debate and discussion are effectively destroyed. Carl Schmitt posited the concept of “state of exceptions,” according to which, the sovereign state in times of peril can enact laws in terms of its political will rather than depending on normative laws. The state of exception legitimizes itself on feelings of paranoia and moral outrage against the perpetrators of the attacks on 9/11. Kanishka Jayasuriya (2002) terms this phenomenon as the new “politics of fear” which turns the liberal state into a law and order state, as the “national governments have resorted to security as a key component of their political practice…The accentuation [after September 11] of a “globalization” of fear has been met by what could be a new form of statecraft, i.e., modes and practices of political rule, of which security is the dominant motif: a process that is leading to the creation of a new postliberal state of fear” (136). Consequent upon creating a fear psychosis in the name of Islamist terrorists, the state abrogates to

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itself the right to mourn and grieve. As Judith Butler (2004) so compellingly writes that certain lives are “grievable” in public and certain others are not. The lives lost after 9/11 is highly mournable and, in fact, public mourning is promoted by the state. The instrumentality of such grief turns mourning into a banal site of liberal politics as President Bush calls for resolute action following the grieving. The relocation of state power after 9/11 performs its legitimacy through the structures of affect – fear and mourning are but two of its critical components. In his essay “The Clash of Civilizations?” (2000/2004), Samuel Huntington predicted that once the nation-state loses its sacrosanct status owing to the conflicting pulls of globalism and tribalism around the world, the human society will increasingly resource its identity politics from civilizational consciousness (37). The September 11 attacks are thought to be an exemplar of the conflict between the West and Islamic civilizations. The extrapolated evils of aggression, violence, terror, and abhorrence toward liberal, democratic values were attributed as immanent to Islamic societies. The essentialization of Islamic society in western conception is premised on the transnational, pan-Islamic concept of ummah, the worldwide community of believers in Islam, a form of deterritorialized transnationalism based on religion (Kastoryano, 2002). While one may disagree with Huntington’s thesis of “clash of civilizations”, it may still have been, as Achin Vanaik (2002) writes, perpetrated to stoke pan-Islamic sentiments: “Precisely the approximation in magnitude of the goal to that of state terrorist acts – the “grandiosity” of the apparent political goals behind September 11 – best explains the scale of the attack” (35). The particularity of this attack has been located by scholars (Gole, 2002) in the continuum of Islamist fundamentalism in events spread over the last three decades or so – the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981, Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, the destruction of the Buddha statues by the Taliban in 2001. The discourse of pan-Islamism is thought to be operating within a transnational social imaginary. The western nation-states facilitating the movement of global capital and market in a new world order endorse such an undifferentiated theological view that consciously chooses not to see the specific aspirations of the Islamic nation-states, theocratic or otherwise. The “local” Islam with its diverse manifestations within the national context is elided in favor of the global whose face is essentially fundamentalist/terrorist. In the next segment of my essay, I will very briefly attempt a critical localistic reading of Islam within the specific context of the nation-state.

Globalization, Islam, and “Critical Localism” In Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (1981), Edward Said writes that the predominant American media representation of Islam is either that of an oil exporter or a terrorist: “Very little of the detail, the human destiny, the passion of Arab-Muslim life has entered

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the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Islamic world” (26). The lack of human destiny that Said refers to is the consequence of a stereotypical theological image of Islam operating at a deterritorialized “plane of immanence.” This deterritorialized image of Islam is, then, fed into a reterritorialized image in which the Islamic machine is motored by a desire for violence and revenge against the West. In this regard, the discourse of pan-Islamism is remarkably similar both on the side of the Islamic fundamentalists and on the side of those who wage war on terror. What is particularly elided in this discourse is “local” Islam in its specific national contexts. The history of Islam is as varied in different local contexts as that of any other religion. In the context of globalization, Appadurai reminds us, locality is “constituted by a sense of social immediacy, the technologies of interactivity, and the relativity of contexts” (178). In this sense, the local is always already inflected with the global mediated by the technologies of interactivity. In Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), the Ivy League educated Changez returns to Pakistan after 9/11, unable to fathom the absurdity of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the subsequent American attack on Afghanistan in which Pakistan was made a trusted ally of the US: I had been telling you earlier, sir, of how I left America. The truth of my experience complicates that seemingly simple assertion; I had returned to Pakistan, but my inhabitation of your country had not entirely ceased. I remained emotionally entwined with Erica, and I brought something of her with me to Lahore – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I lost something of myself to her that I was unable to relocate in the city of my birth…Such journeys have convinced me that it is not always possible to restore one’s boundaries after they have been blurred and made permeable by a relationship: try as we might, we cannot reconstitute ourselves as the autonomous beings as previously imagined ourselves to be. Something of us is now outside, and something of the outside is now within us. (172–174) Changez’s emotional entwinement with Erica or the metonymically substitutable America complicates the notion of locality or the subjectification of the local in a globalized world. The technologies of interactivity and the relativity of contexts produce a subject embodying “critical localism” (Clifford, 1997) as a matter of choice to subvert equally the claims of fundamentalist pan-Islamism and global capitalistism. The contrapuntal vision of the returned (or exiled?) who views himself “at once inside and outside our world” (Said, 1999: 6) refuses to buy into the binary rhetoric of “us” and “them” on which is premised the performativity of Islamic terrorism and the western “war on terror.” The global vision is rejected in favor of a local one and the local is no longer a walled off social life; rather, it is a strategic, alternative subject position for the articulation of a radically different version of Islam. No wonder Changez makes the advocacy of “a disengagement from your country [America]” his mission in life

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and organizes political demonstrations “for greater independence in Pakistan’s domestic and international affairs” (179). These demonstrations are radically different from the articulations of the fundamentalist Islamists who use violence to resist the homogenous forces of western modernity and, paradoxically, produce a homogenous vision of Islam. The internal heterogeneity of Islam and difference in “quotidian practices of Muslims across geographical frontiers, spanning varied local contexts, becomes subsumed under the common rubric of resistance to globalization” (Pasha, 2002: 330). Hamid’s novel offers a new possibility of non-violent resistance against the western neo-imperial powers from a particular national context, while distancing itself from the corrupt state.

Conclusion The discourses of Islamist terrorism in the context of globalization erase local differences in the process of constructing a pan-Islamic polemic in which the Islamic notion of ummah or unity in the quest of God pervades debates on Islam. In this chapter, I have tried to explore how the diminishing power of the nation-state in the neoliberal world order reinvigorates itself through a politics of fear in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on 9/11. A revitalized nation-state produces an undifferentiated discourse of transnational Islam as a threat to its sovereignty. Such discourses elide the local versions of Islam that are produced within the context of specific nation-states and material practices. This particular localized version of Islam that I have tried to elucidate, however, does not envisage itself as an atavistic desire for purity and authenticity; rather, this alternative vision of Islam is worldly in the sense of being aware of its necessary global entanglements.

References Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Behdad, Ali. “Critical Historicism.” American Literary History, Vol. 20, Issue 1–2 (SpringSummer 2008), 286–299. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997. Delezue, Gilles & Felix Guttari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004/1980. Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History?” The National Interest, Vol. 16 (Summer 1989), 3–18. Garrett, Geoffrey. “Partisan Politics in the Global Economy” in Lechner, Frank J. & John Boli (Eds.), The Globalization Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2000/2004. Pp. 231–239. Gole, Nilufer. “Close Encounters: Islam, Modernity, and Violence” in Calhoun, Craig, Paul Price et al. (Eds.), Understanding September 11. New York: The New Press, 2002. Pp. 332–344.

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Gray, John. “Is Globalization Doomed?” The Economist, September 27, 2001. https:// www.economist.com/leaders/2001/09/27/is-globalisation-doomed. Accessed on September 7, 2021. Hardt, Michael & Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000. Hosmer, Katie. “The United Nations of Ant Farms.” My Modern MET, August 16, 2012. https://mymodernmet.com/yukinori-yanagi-the-world-flag-ant-farm/. Accessed on September 5, 2021. Huntington, Samuel P. “The Clash of Civilizations?” in Lechner, Frank J. & John Boli (Eds.), The Globalization Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2000/2004. Pp. 36–43. Jayasuriya, Kanishka. “September 11, Security, and the New Postliberal Politics of Fear” in Hershberg, Eric & Kevin W. Moore (Eds.), Critical Views of September 11: Analyses from around the World. New York: The New Press, 2002. Pp. 131–47. Kastoryano, Riva. “The Reach of Transnationalism” in Hershberg, Eric & Kevin W. Moore (Eds.), Critical Views of September 11: Analyses from around the World. New York: The New Press, 2002. Pp. 209–233. Maira, Sunaina. “Flexible Citizenship/Flexible Empire: South Asian Muslim Youth in Post-9/11 America.” American Quarterly, Vol. 60, Issue 3, ‘Nation and Migration: Past and Future’ (September, 2008), 697–720. Mohsin, Hamid. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2007. Ohmae, Kenichi. “The End of the Nation State” in Lechner, Frank J. & John Boli (Eds.), The Globalization Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2000/2004. Pp. 214–218. Pasha, Kamal Mustapha. “Globalization, Islam and Resistance” in Lechner, Frank J. & John Boli (Eds.), The Globalization Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2000/2004. Pp. 330–334. Rizvi, Fazal. “Debating Globalization and Education after September 11,” in Comparative Education, Vol. 40, No. 2, Special Issue (28): Postcolonialism and Comparative Education (2004), 157–171. Said, Edward W. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981. Said, Edward W. & Jean Mohr. After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. Sassen, Saskia. Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2006. Vanaik, Achin. “The Ethics and Efficacy of Political Terrorism” in Hershberg, Eric & Kevin W. Moore (Eds.), Critical Views of September 11: Analyses from around the World. New York: The New Press, 2002. Pp. 23–43. Zolberg, Aristide R. “Guarding the Gates” in Calhoun, Craig, Paul Price, et al. (Eds.), Understanding September 11. New York: The New Press, 2002. Pp. 285–299.

9 WAR, TERROR AND MIGRATION Hamid’s Exit West as a Cosmopolitan Novel Faisal Nazir

Introduction The September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre, coming right at the beginning of the 21st century, and the ensuing war on terror, have, it seems, set the manner in which the 21st century has been made to unfold. Terror and war have led to death and dislocation of thousands of people in the world. The post-9/11 literature written in the first decade of the century reflected a close engagement with themes of terror and war and their impact upon people. Now that many other catastrophic events have taken place, including the refugee crisis in the Middle East due to ongoing war, post-9/11 literature has expanded the range of experiences represented in the literature. Many of the writers who emerged on the literary scene in the wake of 9/11 attacks have started to address the longer lasting effects of war and terror, effects which are changing the shape of the world. Dislocation, exile and migration, which frequently lead to asylum seeking, are some of the major effects of wars and terror attacks and many writers have given attention to the experiences of the people who have experienced war and terror in the 21st century. This chapter discusses Mohsin Hamid’s representation of the refugee experience in his 2017 novel Exit West, the two main characters, Saeed and Nadia, of which can be seen to exemplify two contrasting responses to the dislocation experienced after war and terrorism. Saeed and Nadia, the central characters of Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, are drawn very differently by the author. Though they share certain views and attitudes, they also differ strongly in terms of personality traits and attributes. Young and largely liberal in their outlook and behaviour, they share the same dreams and desires, though Nadia is more open and assertive in owning and expressing her views than Saeed. At the beginning of the novel, they find each other’s company pleasant and satisfying, but, as the narrative progresses, they later discover profound differences in their attitudes towards questions of identity and ­belonging. DOI: 10.4324/9781003362999-12

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Saeed becomes nostalgic as he moves away from his homeland and is haunted by the guilt of leaving his father behind, while Nadia, who had already left her parents and was living alone in a flat before she met Saeed, becomes more open and accommodating. Their relationship becomes strained and finally snaps or simply dissolves due to the tension between their opposing views and attitudes. Despite their individual traits and behaviours, Saeed and Nadia, in my view, represent two major and generally opposed perspectives present in contemporary postcolonial literature: the nationalist and the cosmopolitan/transnationalist perspectives. Though Saeed and Nadia both become disenchanted and disillusioned with the nation initially, Saeed develops a strong attachment to his national identity and belonging as the story progresses while Nadia grows to be more and more distant from any such attachments. For Saeed, the nation becomes associated with family and religion, while for Nadia, who had already severed her ties with her family, no such associations exercise any pull towards the nation. Saeed learns to identify with the nation, while Nadia learns to mingle with the world. In this chapter, I aim to argue that though Hamid’s Exit West captures accurately the conflicting responses migrants and exiles give to the experience of displacement and dislocation, it also discloses the limitations of postcolonial literature and theory in representing and theorising these experiences. Saeed and Nadia join a multitude of other illegal migrants and exiles fleeing from various kinds of threats and violence in their homeland and develop bonds of commonality and community with them even as they drift apart from each other. Dispersed throughout the novel are shorter stories, almost glimpses, of people from all over the world whose experience of and responses to migration and exile together with Saeed and Nadia’s longer narrative make up a comprehensive account of migration and exile experienced globally in today’s world. While acknowledging the hostile attitudes the natives bear towards the migrants and exiles, the novel remains optimistic as the migrants and exiles are shown largely to win the right to settlement from the local authorities through courage and fortitude displayed in enduring and resisting native violence and military action. However, while optimistically presenting the vision of a possible future of peaceful global coexistence among communities and individuals, Hamid’s use of magical realist devices such as the dark doors and pathways that magically transport people around the world, and his choice of protagonists – educated, young, middle-class individuals – give the narrative a typically postcolonial colour. The use of the magical doors keeps the journey, or as Simon Gikandi says, the routes, out of sight – routes and journeys that often determine the kind of response the migrants and exiles themselves develop and also receive from the natives. Though the status of all the migrants travelling through the magical doors is illegal without exception in the country of arrival, some of these migrants are more privileged than others due to their economic and educational background. Saeed and Nadia are among those privileged migrants who are allowed to get closer to the native officials because of their ability to speak English. Moreover, even though migrants and exiles from all over the world are accommodated in

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the novel, the internally displaced exiles and refugees within Saeed and Nadia’s own city are excluded from the novel’s vision. They are only glimpsed and passed over and are not given even a short narrative space in the novel. Despite its wide, global scope, these limitations of the novel highlight a general problem with postcolonial literature and theory. This problem may be defined as the predominance of an elitist attitude in both postcolonial literature and theory. Postcolonial literature and theory have always claimed a commitment to defending and representing the interests of marginalised societies and cultures. Yet, what dominates the postcolonial literary and theoretical discourse is not the figure of the subaltern but the figure of the elite postcolonial migrant. Postcolonial literature and theory are dominated by the figure of the migrant intellectual. The migrant intellectual constitutes a distinct category of identity and experience. This is forcefully argued by Elleke Boehmer in “Questions of neo-orientalism” where she identifies and critiques the exoticizing (and often also feminizing) vocabulary of postcolonial literary critiques: an ‘Arabian Nights’ exegetic language which lays emphasis on the narrative ‘magic’, verbal richness, and ‘marvellous crowdedness’ of postcolonial texts, and is tied in with an institutional interest in privileging migrant, multivocal, Rushdiesque (and usually Indian or Indian subcontinent) writing as most vividly demonstrating that exotic otherness. (Boehmer 18) While acknowledging the diversity of postcolonial literature, and deploring the lack of attention given to literature in languages other than English, Boehmer insists that “[n]o doubt because of their recognizability in the west - a recognizability which has been reinforced by marketing strategies – it is the polyphonous novel above all other postcolonial genres which has enjoyed success in European and American academies” (Boehmer 21). In what follows, I will discuss the depiction of nationalism and transnationalism in Hamid’s Exit West, and argue that the novel, like its predecessors identified by Boehmer, privileges the transnational, cosmopolitan outlook and renders nationalism as a problematic response to the global situation characterised by migration and exile. Moreover, in its focus upon the elite migrants, again in the tradition of the mainstream, critically acclaimed and popularised postcolonial novels, the novel excludes the experiences of the internally displaced people within the nation whose existence is acknowledged but quickly passed over and forgotten.

Nationalism, Transnationalism and Postcolonial Theory Contrary to scholarly predictions and projections and popular hopes and aspirations, the world has seen a resurgence of nationalism in the 21st century along with a rise in its attendant attitudes of patriotism and chauvinism. Postcolonial

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theory had through the 1990s heavily invested in transnationalism and globalisation. During this period, hybridity, inbetweenness, and migrancy remained the dominant terms in postcolonial theory. Particularly in the work of Homi Bhabha, the experience of migration and the literature that represented it became central to the theorisation of postcolonial experience in its entirety. Postcolonial theory celebrated border crossings and transnationalism while regarding the nation as a narrative afflicted with ambivalence and contradictions, the ignorance or denial of which by the postcolonial nation-state led to discrimination and injustice towards the minorities within the nation. A comprehensive account of postcolonial theorists’ various critiques of nationalism is given by Laura Chrisman in “Nationalism and Postcolonial Studies” wherein she highlights “the tendency of postcolonial studies to regard nationalism as inherently dominatory, absolutist, essentialist, and destructive” (Chrisman 183). Deploring and questioning these critiques as founded upon debatable premises, Chrisman argues that postcolonial studies needs to pay more attention to a range of historic anticolonial theorists, activists , and struggles; it needs to develop a more rigorous conceptualization of nationalism, that differentiates between elite and popular, patriarchal and pro-feminist, anti-colonial and European, civic and cultural, secular and ethnic nationalisms; it needs to engage with politics and economics as they generate or mediate nationalist ideology; it needs to broaden its theoretical foundations to include materialist alongside poststructuralist perspectives. (198) Chrisman also discusses and refutes a major objection against nationalism made by postcolonial theorists: “the narrowness of its liberatory horizons: to prioritize the category of the nation is, necessarily, to neglect the international dimensions of human liberation” (197). Since postcolonial theory champions transnationalism and celebrates migrant experience and literature, it is averse to restrictions upon transnational allegiances and affiliations which nationalism is necessarily supposed to impose. However, with reference to the work of Edward Said, Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon, Chrisman argues that there is “no necessary antagonism between values of nationalism and global liberation, between politics of international solidarity and nationalist mobilization” (198). Largely ignoring this possibility of exploring the relationship between national allegiances and global affiliations, postcolonial theory considers migration and border crossing as the only authentic and essential postcolonial experiences. This is so because, according to Simon Gikandi, “the very legitimacy of a postcolonial cultural politics depends on the unabashed claim for the idiom of transnationalism” (Gikandi 23). In postcolonial theory, “the rejection of local or national loyalties is often posited as the journey towards ideas and institutions premised on a set of universal moral obligations and loyalty to a common humanity, not nation or ethne” (Gikandi 24).

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Gikandi’s critique of the elitist nature of postcolonial cosmopolitanism is highly relevant to this chapter. One of the most significant questions Gikandi raises is “Who qualifies for the term cosmopolitan?” (31). In his view the exemplary cosmopolitan figure in postcolonial cosmopolitanism is the elite migrant who travels around the world freely and moves in and moves out of metropolitan centres at will. Despite the fact that these elite migrants are far smaller in number than the migrants and exiles who are forced to leave their homeland for political and economic reasons, postcolonial theory, particularly the advocates of cosmopolitanism within it, privileges the experiences of the elite over the destitute migrants. While it is important to acknowledge the relevance and significance of the elite migrants’ experience to theorising cosmopolitanism, its privileged and exclusive status in postcolonial cosmopolitanism leads to a skewed understanding of transnational migration in the 21st century. Postcolonial theory in its privileging of the elite migrants as exemplary figures fails to understand and explain the experience of the poor and the underprivileged whose “radical attachment to older cultural forms … seems to mock the politics of postcolonial identity” (Gikandi 25). Gikandi, thus, contrasts two kinds of migrants and migrations. On the one hand are the postcolonial elites whose “cosmopolitan engagement with the Other is enabled by their own privileged position within global culture” (32). These elite migrants “are not stateless; they move freely across boundaries; they are autonomous subjects; they can choose when to engage with the Other and when to retreat” (32). On the other hand are the refugees whose “strict adherence to old loyalties could be seen as the reflection of the prescribed journeys that bring refugees to the modern west, journeys which preclude the process of education and acculturation, the Bildung of modern life that makes liberal cosmopolitanism possible” (26). Thus, the different experiences of these elite and poor migrants produce different outlooks and sensibilities. For Gikandi, it is important to acknowledge the relevance of the poor migrants’ experiences to the theorisation of cosmopolitanism within and outside postcolonial theory. In his view, “The refugee is the Other of the cosmopolitan; rootless by compulsion, this figure is forced to develop an alternative narrative of global cultural flows, functioning in a third zone between metropolis and ex-colony, producing and reproducing localities in the centres of metropolitan culture itself ” (26). To accommodate these disparate experiences within an inclusive cosmopolitan theory, Gikandi proposes that “we read cosmopolitanism under the sign of its own anxieties, the fear of being one of the rootless crowd, and avoid the temptation to turn it into a free floating signifier of the moment of postcolonial arrival” (26).

The Cosmopolitan Novel Contemporary postcolonial literature and theory, perhaps in response to critiques like Gikandi’s, have turned their attention to the experience of the refugees and asylum seekers and have attempted to conceptualise cosmopolitanism

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and represent transnational migration from that position. In this regard, Berthold Schoene has identified the rise of a whole new genre of fiction which he calls the “cosmopolitan novel”. Though his main focus is on contemporary British fiction, the diversity of the authors included in that category and the general theorisation of the genre by Schoene make it relevant to the study of contemporary novels dealing with themes of migration and exile. Moreover, Schoene has also prescribed the acquisition of certain key attitudes and skills for the cosmopolitan novelist. Schoene’s concept of the cosmopolitan novel and his prescriptions for the cosmopolitan novelist are pertinent to the analysis of Hamid’s Exit West as the novel reflects all the major characteristics identified by Schoene. Basing his understanding of “contemporary cosmopolitanism” on Jean Luc Nancy’s concept of the “inoperative community”, Schoene has identified certain key characteristics of the contemporary cosmopolitan novel. According to Schoene, “Central to the cosmopolitan novel is its representation of worldwide human living and global community” (17). However, since this worldwide human living is divided into different levels of experience (e.g. elite and poor) that exist simultaneously, “cosmopolitan representation must convey this synchronicity of the incongruous, multifarious and seemingly disconnected at the same time as it does its best to capture the streaming flow of a newly emerging contemporaneity” (14). The best strategy of narrating this disjointed contemporaneity is, according to Schoene, the use of “juxtaposition”, a technique which gives the cosmopolitan novel its characteristic “compositeness” (14). “Episodic yet cohesive,” Schoene argues, “compositeness forges narrative assemblage out of a seemingly desultory dispersion of plot and characterization” (14). The cosmopolitan novel makes use of montage techniques “with the aim of cramming as many story lines and clashing imageries as possible into one and the same mise en scene” (14). “Cosmopolitan narration,” Schoene further elaborates, assembles as many as possible of the countless segments of our being-incommon into a momentarily composite picture of the world … without erasing the essential incongruousness or singularity of these individual segments, which are left intact, even though they remain subject to continual re-assortment. (27) However, to compose such a narrative, the cosmopolitan novelist needs to have not only a cosmopolitan vision but also a set of “cosmopolitan skills”. Firstly, Schoene emphasises the need for an “author’s capability to open up and yield to the structuring of the world as she or he finds it, however, bewildering, turbulent or self-contradictory” (16). However, to claim to be a cosmopolitan does not involve a rejection of one’s “local affiliations” but rather “an opening oneself to a radical unlearning of all definitive modes of identification” and a “stepping out of narrow, self-incarcerating traditions of belonging” (21). In order to articulate a cosmopolitan vision, the cosmopolitan novelist “must create the world by yielding to it as it is: exposed, finite, inoperative, powerless” (27). S/he must

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embark “on a tour du monde that concentrates on who we really are, and what in order to survive we have at our disposal” (27). Along with these attitudes and skills, the cosmopolitan novelist’s “most crucial skill” is the willingness and the readiness to “take the plunge and like everybody else start mingling among the world’s vast, inoperative being-in-common, that is, the world as such rather than any one of its projected models of interpretations” (29). Hamid demonstrates his masterful possession of these cosmopolitan skills and attitudes in Exit West, a cosmopolitan novel par excellence. However, what saves the novel from becoming a cosmopolitan ‘formula’ novel is the presence in it of a simultaneously double, contradictory movement towards transnationalism and nationalism. The two attitudes and ideologies are allegorically represented by the two central characters of the novel, Nadia and Saeed. Nadia exemplifies the cosmopolitan attitude in her desire and ability to mingle with the world’s vast diversity, while Saeed reflects a nationalist outlook and attitude in his preference for associating with his co-nationalists and co-religionists. The two contradictory currents in the novel run side by side and remain apart but, and this is the problem I wish to discuss, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism make up the positive, forward current in the novel while nationalism appears to be a backward pull, a counter-current generated by the transnational movement itself. In this sense, the transnational movement acquires a normative status while nationalism is seen in contrast to this standard or norm. In this way, the novel reflects a major and long-standing issue in cosmopolitan theory: the place of nation and nationalism in cosmopolitan theory. The problem becomes more complex when cosmopolitan theory is inflected by postcolonial concerns as the place of nation and nationalism in postcolonial theory itself is a highly contested and hotly debated one.

Exit West: Turning from and to the Nation The difference between Saeed and Nadia is established right from the beginning of the novel. Both are young, middle-class individuals, attending a course on “corporate identity and product branding” (Hamid 1). Saeed is impressed by Nadia’s beauty but is also intrigued by her appearance: she is always clad neck to toe in a black robe, something close to a burka but without the face veil. Because of this “conservative attire”, Saeed is afraid of starting a conversation with her yet he soon discovers to his surprise that she is supremely liberal in her views and wears the black robe only to avoid sexual attention. While Saeed appears to be a moderately practicing Muslim, at least in the matter of saying prayers occasionally, Nadia comes out as a liberal one with her confession that she never says any prayers. These attributes become more pronounced and rigid after the two migrate together and encounter people from different regions of the world. Another difference which is noticeable from the beginning of their relationship is their different attitude towards their family. Saeed is attached to his parents and lives with them. After the death of his mother, he becomes even more

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attached to his father and is reluctant to leave him behind when he and Nadia decide to escape from the besieged city. Nadia, on the other hand, lives alone in an apartment after leaving her conservative family. Saeed’s parents are liberal but not ultra-liberal. They maintain a dignified lifestyle, being educationists by profession. Nadia’s parents and family are conservative in outlook and Nadia’s boldness in behaviour is unacceptable to them, as it is to her teachers at school and university. While Nadia is thus portrayed as a confident and assertive woman, bold enough to take her life in her own hands, her character can also be seen as that of a typical ‘emancipated’ liberal woman. Taking defiance and rebellion to a new level, she decides to leave her family and live as a single woman in a rented apartment. It is at her apartment that Saeed and Nadia’s secret meetings take place. Saeed has to hide himself in a black robe to enter Nadia’s apartment, which suggests that Saeed is invited to adopt Nadia’s identity, to become similar to her. Despite the differences in their character and background noted above, their meetings bring out some similarities in their outlook and aspirations. Saeed’s favourite ‘toy’ at his own place is a telescope which originally belonged to his grandfather and has been handed down to the third that is Saeed’s, generation. The telescope is placed close to another object that symbolises distance and dislocation, a clipper ship. The association of these objects with Saeed suggests his interest in distant objects and places and travel. The other object which is closely associated with both Saeed and Nadia is the cellphone, something which they were “always in possession of ” (Hamid 35). Both use the cellphone to remain connected with the world but Saeed puts limits to his online rambling and exposure while Nadia roams freely around the virtual world. Saeed’s online presence is tightly regulated, one hour daily, while Nadia “[sees] no limit to her phone” and “[rides] it far out into the world” (Hamid 36–37). Nadia also accesses social media frequently though mostly for surfing and watching trends, using “opaque user names and avatars” (Hamid 37). Nadia and Saeed are, thus, both similar and different. As young, middle-class, educated individuals, they share a range of similar attitudes towards life and the world. Yet their attitudes are highly dissimilar towards their families. Saeed loves his parents and remains concerned about their safety and security. Nadia rebels against her family and decides to live alone, rarely or never thinking about them again after their separation. Their different attitudes may be explained by the living conditions and lifestyle of their families. Saeed’s parents are highly educated – Saeed’s father is a university professor – and liberal, though with a moderate observation of religious obligations, saying prayers irregularly but frequently. Saeed is brought up in this liberal environment and imbibes his father’s mild manners and attitudes. Nadia’s family, however, is a very conservative one. She grows up in a highly oppressive religious atmosphere and learns to rebel against it. Saeed maintains a deep attachment to his parents, particularly to his father, more so because he is smitten with the guilt of abandoning him when he ‘migrates’ with Nadia. Nadia never looks back at her family (except once, just to check if

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they are safe) after leaving them and remains staunchly liberal in her o ­ utlook throughout the novel. The difference in their temperaments and the influence of relations with family is noted in the novel: “Nadia had long been, and would afterwards continue to be, more comfortable with all varieties of movement in her life than was Saeed, in whom the impulse of nostalgia was stronger, perhaps because his childhood had been more idyllic, or perhaps because this was simply his temperament” (Hamid 90). Their relationship starts off on a very positive note and both develop a liking for each other. They come very close to each other, emotionally and physically, yet Saeed refuses to consummate their relationship despite their intimacy. When Saeed’s mother is killed by a stray bullet, Nadia decides to move in with Saeed and his father, a move which Saeed had already been proposing to her for a while, insisting that it was too dangerous to live alone in the deteriorating city conditions. As more and more of the city is captured by the militants, Saeed and Nadia, like almost everyone else, start seriously thinking about finding a way out of “this death trap of a country” (Hamid 69). Their attitudes towards the possibility of leaving the country, however, differ significantly, though they are both sure “that they would leave if given the chance” (Hamid 90). They had always dreamt about travelling and visiting exotic places in the world, and had mused about visiting Chile (Saeed) and Cuba (Nadia). Saeed, however, had always thought of coming back to his family and city from his travels. Therefore, the thought of leaving his family, friends, and the city for good is disturbing for him and “[strikes] him as deeply sad, as amounting to the loss of a home, no less, of his home” (90). On the other hand, Nadia is “feverishly keen to depart and her nature was such that the prospect of something new, of change, was at its most basic level exciting to her” (Hamid 90). The two young protagonists are, therefore, determined to leave, or more appropriately, to escape, and, given the living conditions in their city, they assume that no sane person would choose to stay. It comes as a shock to them when Saeed’s father refuses to go along, while wholeheartedly approving their plan to depart. They beg and implore him but to no avail. His main reason for not leaving is that Saeed’s mother is buried there, and he is too attached to everything that reminds him of her to leave it all behind. He knows well that he is risking his life in choosing to stay, but his wife’s memory and also the extended family with which he has maintained close relations are, for him, worth the risk. In my view, through Saeed’s father, in fact, through both Saeed’s father and mother, Hamid has presented a model of moderate ‘civic’ nationalism. Nationalism in its classical definition is conceptualised in terms of an inherited ethnic and cultural identity constituting the “ethno-nation” (Miscevic n.p.). In this view, “the classic ethno-nation is a community of origin and culture, including prominently a language and customs” (Miscevic n.p.). On the other hand, “civic nationalism” is defined as a voluntary association of people on the basis of shared political ideals and values. Located in-between these two “extreme” positions on nationalism is the position of the “liberal nationalists”

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who see “liberal-democratic principles and pro-national attitudes as belonging together” (Miscevic n.p.). Saeed’s parents are depicted as model citizens who maintain a dignified lifestyle and lofty ideals, and while they don’t express any overt nationalist feelings, they remain attached to the social fabric of which they are a part. The fact that they are both teachers – the father a university professor and the mother a schoolteacher – adds to their dignity and respect. Saeed’s father appears to have been an idealist as he chose the teaching profession “for helping the youth and the country through teaching and research”, though later he feels regret for not choosing a more lucrative profession which would have enabled him to send his son abroad (Hamid 49). Moreover, Saeed’s parents are also moderately religious, offering prayers regularly and with greater devotion as the city becomes torn with war and terror. After his wife’s death by a stray bullet, Saeed’s father becomes a sad and self-absorbed person, lost in the memories of his dead wife. However, he also becomes more attached to his family, visiting his brother frequently where, among other things, the conversation revolves around his deceased wife. It is because of his attachment to the memory of his wife that he refuses to escape along with Saeed and Nadia and stays in the city among the places and objects that remind him of his wife. Saeed inherits this sense of belonging from his father and despite moving far away from his city, remains nostalgic and committed to the idea of returning once things get better. Moreover, he remains deeply attached to his father and feels guilty of leaving him behind in a state of danger. The farther he moves away from his homeland, the closer he feels to the memory of his father and his mind remains guilt-ridden. Among the migrants from various parts of the world, Saeed prefers the company of his compatriots and mixes up with them even though they are not described as very trustworthy and reliable: “He was drawn to people from their country, both in the labour camp and online” (Hamid 187). Moreover, it seems to Nadia that “the further they moved from the city of their birth, through space and through time, the more he sought to strengthen his connection to it, tying ropes to the air of an era that for [Nadia] was unambiguously gone” (Hamid 187). Saeed also becomes more religious and performs congregational prayers alone and along with his migrant co-religionists (Hamid 186–187). However, he does not approve of the aggressive attitude adopted by the migrant community for offering resistance to the natives and desists from fighting the military forces determined to capture and expel the migrants. He does accept a gun from the migrants but does not know how to use it and decides to return it the next day. Saeed’s growing religiosity is irritating for Nadia, even if only slightly and gloomily she watches him drift apart from her the closer he embraces his religious identity. Just as in the case of his growing love for his country and nation, his religiosity is also based on his love for his parents. A detailed description towards the end of the novel is given of Saeed’s association with prayers (Hamid 199–203). Initially, he learns to pray after observing his parents offer prayers – not very regularly but with increasing regularity and devotion. He is also moved

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by watching his parents appear relaxed and relieved after saying prayers. As a child he himself asks his parents to teach him how to say prayers. Growing up, he begins to join his father in the weekly communal prayers and is pleased to find himself included in the circle of men his father is a part of. Moreover, he takes saying prayers as a way of expressing his love and gratitude to his parents who had taught him how to pray. During his university years he sees his parents become more regular in saying prayers and he himself prays more regularly regarding prayers as mode of discipline. In his stay at Marin, he becomes more fervent in the saying of prayers “fundamentally as a gesture of love for what had gone and would go and could be loved in no other way” (Hamid (201). Though he remains mostly drowned in melancholy, he feels he is able to maintain contact with his parents through prayers and though the thought of mortality, that of his parents, his own, and that of the whole humanity, is forever on his mind, he believes it is this shared experience of mortality that unites humanity and so he “pray[s] as a lament, as a consolation, and as a hope” (202). Nadia, in contrast to Saeed, is “more comfortable with all varieties of ­movement in her life” (Hamid 90) and is completely at home in this situation of homelessness, or temporary dwellings in camps and occupied houses. She displays no strong attachment to her family and the city and her country of birth, but mixes up with other migrants and develops bonds of friendship and even sexual attachments as she moves around in the world. For Nadia, the act of migration is an act of severing one’s ties with the past and with the people one is leaving behind, and so complete is the break with the people one leaves behind that it is like killing them, “for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind” (Hamid 94). While Saeed shows signs of bitterness upon their arrival in Mykonos, their first migrant destination, Nadia remains confident and takes care of their daily needs. She is also the one to suggest to Saeed that they should “explore the island as if they were tourists” (108). Except for one threatening incident, in which Saeed and Nadia are followed by a gang of men, their stay in Mykonos remains peaceful. During their flight from their pursuers, Nadia injures her arm and requires treatment as the wound begins to fester. She is helped by a local girl who dresses her wound and Nadia forms a close friendship with her. There are hints that this is not just a casual friendship but involves sexual attraction. It is the beginning of Nadia’s discovery of her own lesbian inclinations, which will come to the fore openly in her relation with a cook in Marin, their third destination. Their second migrant destination, however, is London and here too Saeed continues to feel guilty and nostalgic while Nadia finds the environment of the house as a bit like that of a university dormitory at the start of classes, with complete strangers living in close proximity, many of them on their best behavior, trying to add warmth to conversations and strike poses of friendship, hoping these gestures would become more natural over time. (Hamid 128–129)

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This atmosphere of friendly interaction is soon replaced by fear and suspicion, and the migrants divide themselves into ethnic and national groups. The house Saeed and Nadia live in is occupied mostly by people from Nigeria, and so it begins to be called the Nigerian house. Nadia continues to mix up with the Nigerians and attends their assemblies. Initially, the Nigerians find her presence awkward, but then accept her as part of the group. Saeed, on the other hand, does not feel comfortable among the Nigerians and prefers to spend time in a nearby house which is occupied by people from his country. When he discusses the offer to move to that house with Nadia, she dismisses the offer as far less appealing than staying where they were with a room of their own, even if among people from a different country. The thought of returning to her own country is likewise unappealing to her as she felt “she had been stifled in the place of her birth for virtually her entire life, that its time for her had passed and a new time was here, and, fraught or not, she relished this like the wind in her face on a hot day …” (Hamid 156). Eventually, they, along with other migrants, are able to settle down into a home of their own in a settlement like many other migrant settlements built around the city of London. However, being close to each other Saeed and Nadia realise how far they have moved apart, and, not finding their life in their newly acquired home very satisfying, they decide, upon Nadia’s suggestion, that they should migrate to the city of Marin near San Francisco. In Marin, they set up a tent or shanty and find ways of sustaining themselves. But they also start making new contacts and friends. Religion draws Saeed towards a man from African background, a preacher and a community leader, and Saeed also discovers his interest in the preacher’s daughter. Nadia finds work at a “food cooperative” and when her relationship with Saeed touches the lowest point (“a spoilage had begun to manifest itself in their relationship”) Nadia decides to pack up and leave to live at the food cooperative where there are rooms to be taken (Hamid 212–214). For some time the people at the place do not warm up toward her, but after an encounter with an armed man in which she remained quiet and appeared to all watchers to be quite composed, she is accepted and respected by others. She is also drawn sexually towards the head cook, a “handsome woman with strong arms”, and develops a close bond with her, though the details are cleverly omitted from the text (Hamid 2016). When 50 years later they meet again in the city of their birth, Saeed and Nadia behave in a friendly way toward each other, tell their stories, and then part forever. Through these two characters and their different responses to war, terror, and migration, Hamid has captured the tensions and contradictions that define life in the 21st century. There is an increased movement of people affected by war and terror, seeking refuge in far flung unknown or little known territories: “the whole planet was on the move, much of the global south headed to the global north, but also southerners moving to other southern places and northerners moving to other northern places” (Hamid 167). Depending upon the background of the migrants and the response they get from the natives they

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inevitably encounter, displace and displease, the migrants develop attitudes of varying degrees of nationalism and transnationalism. On the one hand, there is the creation of ethnic and national communities within the metropolitan countries in which, facing inhospitable conditions and nativist opposition, as well as their inner conflicts, the migrants from the same country turn toward each other for unity and support. Saeed demonstrates this attitude as he prefers the company of his compatriots over strangers everywhere he goes. On the other hand, there is the creation of new alliances and associations, outside of and sometimes within ethnic communities. When joining the Nigerians, Nadia discovers that all the members of this circle were not Nigerians or not Nigerians of the same type: Nigerians were in fact not all Nigerians, some were half-Nigerians, or from places that bordered Nigeria, from families that spanned both sides of a border, and further that there was perhaps no such thing as a Nigerian or certainly no one coming thing, for different Nigerians spoke different tongues among themselves and belonged to different religions. (Hamid 144) Nadia is always interested in joining groups where she can retain her own ­individuality, of which her ever visible dark robe is such a prominent symbol. Hamid does well to capture these contradictory currents within the war and terror affected lives of the people in the 21st century. However, the cosmopolitan drift of the novel, amplified not only by the story of the protagonists but also by numerous other stories dispersed in the narrative, gives privilege to the transnationalist outlook presented through Nadia. The novel, it seems, insists upon the reader to accept that there are no unities to be found in the world, though there may be alliances made and dissolved and then made again somewhere else to be dissolved again when they have served their purpose. As Saeed and Nadia note, war, migration and the nativist backlash are everywhere in the news, leading not only to “fracturing” of old solidarities and unities, but also to emerging of new, smaller, solidarities and unities: “it seemed that as everyone was coming together everyone was also moving apart” (Hamid 155). The impact of war and the ensuing dislocation of people have made the nation “somewhat illusory” and the nation appears to be “like a person with multiple personalities, some insisting on union and some on disintegration, and that this person … was furthermore a person whose skin appeared to be dissolving as they [sic] swam in a soup full of people whose skins were likewise dissolving” (Hamid 155–156). The dissolving of national identity, as the novel depicts, leads to two opposed reactions: a sense of loss, guilt and desire for return reflected in Saeed, and a sense of freedom, release and desire for forming new relationships reflected in Nadia. It is the second of these which the novel seems to endorse more strongly than the first, though, to be fair, it does give considerable space to the other side and does not question its intrinsic validity.

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A Utopian Vision If there is a vision of the world beyond war and conflict that the novel presents, it is a utopian vision of the emergence of new communities and formation of new relationships. In contrast to the many tragic narratives, published recently and in the past, that represent the experience of exile and migration, Hamid’s narrative is optimistic and utopian. It expresses the hope that in the long run sanity prevails and human values are affirmed. However, peace is not won without struggle, and it is the patience and fortitude of the migrants, demonstrated everywhere but particularly in London, which enables them to triumph over the nativist attacks and the military offensive. The majority of the migrants opt to adopt a policy of non-violence, though Saeed’s compatriots are ready to put up a fight to defend their settlements. When the attack does take place, the sheer magnitude of the violence and the death and destruction it causes – the casualties supposedly include a large number of women and children – shocks the attackers as well as the defendants, and the attackers back off in shock and embarrassment (Hamid 164). Steps are then taken to set up refugee camps at the outskirts of the city and the migrants are allowed to live there and earn a living by working on the construction of these settlements. Saeed and Nadia too get a ‘home’ for themselves in exchange for the work they do in the camps. Even in Marin, they are able to build a shanty for themselves and live in peace among the many migrants living around them. If this optimistic picture is not verified by the actual historical accounts of the experiences of exiles and refugees, many of which are described in David Farrier’s Postcolonial Asylum, it may still be regarded as a poetic vision of human bonding, a depiction of a struggle in which humanity triumphs over cruelty and barbarity and strangers learn to accept each other and live peacefully together even if they are still divided by boundaries and restrictions. However, it may also be seen as an attempt to reaffirm the flattering picture the developed world has created for itself as a place where sympathy, kindness and justice prevail, and where strangers are welcomed and are allowed to live in peace. It is interesting to note that Saeed and Nadia, passing through the magical doors, manage to reach various destinations in the developed world and, along with other migrants, manage to settle there and win a space for themselves. How the narrative is able to sustain this level of optimism is also interesting to analyse. Saeed and Nadia are not poor asylum seekers who are driven out of their land by oppressive forces and captured and imprisoned by the host country. Even before they decide to ‘escape’, they are seen making plans of travelling around the world. To see distant places is a shared dream of the two youngsters and their escape from their country is only a hastened version of what they eventually would have done even if there had been no war and terror knocking at their door (Hamid 20–21). They are very much the privileged migrants who are able to secure a dwelling in the developed world on the basis of their privileged status. This privilege is manifested in their ability to speak English which brings them

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closer to the English officials supervising construction work at the camp. And the camp itself is not the typical refugee camp, many examples of which are given by Farrier in Postcolonial Asylum, but seems rather like a vacation camp where youngsters and older people have gathered together to light fires, tell stories, play music and develop friendships. The analogy with a university dormitory has already been noted and the typical gesture of packing their backpacks every time Saeed and Nadia are getting ready to ‘migrate’ further supports this analogy. In contrast to these privileged migrants able to secure a passage to the developed world, there are those internally displaced people whose lives can only be glimpsed at and passed over. Saeed and Nadia have to be careful as they travel across their city in order to avoid running into and injuring these ‘refugees’: Refugees had occupied many of the open placed in the city, pitching tents in the green belts between roads, erecting lean-tos next to the boundary walls of houses, sleeping rough on pavements and in the margins of streets. Some seemed to be trying to recreate the rhythms of a normal life, as though it were completely natural to be residing, a family of four, under a sheet of plastic propped up with branches and a few chipped bricks. Others stared out at the city with what looked like anger, or surprise, or supplication, or envy. Others didn’t move at all: stunned, maybe, or resting. Possibly dying. Saeed and Nadia had to be careful when making turns not to run over an outstretched arm or leg. (Hamid 23) It is not the novel’s purpose to tell the story of these displaced people, these internal refugees. Their story is too bleak, too dirty, and too tragic to be included in a narrative which aims to provide a poetic vision of the triumphant humanity. It does not have the glamour of the first world encounters, the colours of distant places, and the taste of exotic foods. To present a cosmopolitan vision, these refugees have to be ignored, to be left to their dark fate, while the more adventurous stories of migrants passing through magical doors to the developed world are narrated for a cosmopolitan readership. It is here that the limitations of a novel like Exit West, and generally, the postcolonial cosmopolitan novel manifest themselves. Hamid’s novel explores the experiences of exile and migration mainly to and in the developed world. Of the many stories that are part of the narrative sweep and the cosmopolitan vision of the novel, most are stories of people encountering strangers and coming to an acceptance of the reality of mingled coexistence. Even settled people, people living in the same place all their lives, see the world changing around them and have to accept this changed reality, as the old woman in California discovers that “it seemed to her that she too had migrated, that everyone migrates, even if we stay in the same house our whole lives, because we can’t help it” (Hamid 209). The message that the novel seems to be conveying is summed up in a statement that comes here at the conclusion of the old woman’s story: “We are all migrants through time” (Hamid 209).

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Conclusion To conclude, Hamid’s novel is successful in capturing the contradictory currents of nationalism and transnationalism set in motion by war and terrorism in the 21st century. In Saeed’s character, nationalist sentiments arise out of guilt and nostalgia and are therefore seen in a negative light when compared to the cosmopolitan attitude of Nadia, whose willingness to move and mix with unknown people is endorsed by the narrative. Both these attitudes are, however, attitudes of privileged people – young, educated, middle-class individuals – who can afford to take decisions and choose their own destinies. In contrast to the story of these privileged individuals, a story told with a freedom of imagination, the story of the internally displaced people, people who cannot make any choices, remains untold. The utopian vision of the novel can be constructed only upon the exclusion of these refugees within the nation. Cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, and even nationalism exclude the wretched of the earth.

References Boehmer, Elleke. “Questions of Neo-Orientalism”. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 1:1 (1998), pp. 18–21. Chrisman, Laura. “Nationalism and Postcolonial Studies”. In The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, edited by Neil Lazarus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 183–198. Gikandi, Simon. “Between Roots and Routes: Cosmopolitanism and the Claims of locality”. In Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium, edited by Janet Wilson, Cristina Sandru, and Sarah Lawson Welsh. New York: Routledge, 2010. Hamid, Mohsin. Exit West. Gurgaon: Penguin Random House India, 2017. Miscevic, Nenad. “Nationalism”. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Web. Accessed 25 Jan 2022. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/nationalism/ Schoene, Berthold. The Cosmopolitan Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010.

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

The pyrotechnics of 88 vertical searchlights arranged in two columns of light to represent the Twin Towers lit up the New York skyline every year on 11th September since 2002. This iconic installation, titled ‘Tribute in Light’, which started off as a temporary installation to pay collective tribute to the victims of 9/11 has now metamorphosed into a monument of belligerent nationalism. The trajectory of its reception in the American society is almost indicative of the way a site of memory plays out its significance within the consciousness of a nation. The burden of substantial scholarship around the idea of memory of place, right from Maurice Halbwachs to Pierre Nora can be evoked to dissect this complex politics of memory making. Although Freud talks about memory being the practice of remembering and forgetting resulting from individual choices, later conceptualisation of memory by Maurice Halbwachs gives rise to a new term – ‘collective memory’ (Halbwachs 1). For Halbwachs, memory that extends beyond an individual’s lifetime, i.e., memories of the past are always collectively constructed, although he acknowledges that individuals constitute groups and that different viewpoints on that past may exist. Another major contribution of his studies is that he recognised the significance of space in locating memories. According to Halbwachs, memory is socially produced, and it cannot be described without considering the social and physical place where the individual lives. He argues that each and every memory does not only need to be located within a social framework, but also a spatial framework. Here the concept of space is shaped not only by physical elements, but also by the intangible features that it disseminates: sounds, smells, textures, colours, images. Later the term ‘Les Lieux de mémoire’ (translated as ‘site of memory’) came into critical usage courtesy the French historian Pierre Nora. The publication of Lieux de mémoire, the magistral work under the stewardship of noted French historian Pierre Nora is a watershed moment in memory DOI: 10.4324/9781003362999-14

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studies. A collaborative project of encyclopaedic scope, Les lieux de mémoire was published in three parts—La République, La Nation, and Les France—which add up to seven volumes. The idea behind the monumental effort was supposedly born in a seminar at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris in the late 1970s (Mercer 102). When it was published in French between 1984 and 1992, Lieux de mémoire emerged as a true collaborative work consisting of a series of 132 essays specifically commissioned for the project. It became such an influential marker in French intellectual circles that many were tempted to call it as the ‘moment Nora’ (Dosse 309) of French historiography. Outside France, the volumes became available with the publication of an abridged three-volume English-language edition under the title Realms of Memory where 46 of the original 132 articles were translated by Arthur Goldhammer. In the introduction, Nora insists that ‘Memory is constantly on our lips, because it no longer exists … Lieux de memoire exist because there are no longer any milieux de memoire, settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience’ (Nora 1). Since society has ‘renounced memory’ (Nora 6), there has been an insistence for symbolic substitutes. Nora essentially talks about second-order memory trace that is collected, exhibited and catalogued ‘–‘the trace negates the sacred but retains its aura’ (Nora 9). The term ‘Les Lieux de mémoire’ refers to those places where ‘memory crystallizes and secretes itself ’ (Nora 14); the places where the exhausted capital of collective memory condenses and is expressed in material, symbolical and functional terms. Nora expands the concept to encompass ‘all significant units, of either material or ideal order, from which the will of men or the effect of time has created a symbolic element of the memorial patrimony of a community.’ Thus, what makes a memory site enduring is its capacity to live on despite being constantly remodelled, retaken and revisited. Nora has effectively urged historians to look at lieux de mémoire as having messages waiting to be decoded – complex, plastic messages capable of a host of meanings. Nora’s ideas are taken further ahead by Jan Assmann who finds a relationship between time, identity, and memory. All these three aspects are split into three levels: inner (individual), social (communicative), and cultural. Cultural memory and Halbwachs’ collective memory are linked in that cultural memory as a form of collective. Cultural memory is externalised in material symbols as embodied in texts, rites, monuments, celebrations, objects, sacred scriptures and other media that in turn serve as mnemonic triggers to initiate meanings associated with what has happened. However, things such as landscapes do not have a memory of their own. According to Assmann, ‘the lieux de mémoire’ requires institutions preserving the memory and allowing the act of re-embodiment, for example in ritual. Since all this depends on human agency it also incorporates the inherent possibilities of transitions, transformations, fallibility, misunderstanding and possible politics of various kinds of power struggles. ‘Tribute in Light’ project, facilitated by the art non-profit Creative Time, first appeared as a temporary installation from March 11 to April 14, 2002. Then it ran again on September 11, 2003, to mark the second anniversary of the attack.

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Conceived by designers John Bennett, Gustavo Boneverdi, Richard Nash Gould, Julian LaVerdiere, Paul Myoda and lighting consultant Paul Marantz, the installation is foremost a technological feat. When viewed from a distance (the columns can be seen as far as 65 km away) the two columns imitate the verticality of the Twin Towers. However, what looks like two columns are actually 88 beams arranged into two squares, 44 each, diagonal from one another at two corners of a parking garage near the mouth of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. 7,000watt Xenon bulbs which are used are among the most powerful ever made, custom-supplied by the Italian company Spacecannon. The installation looks deceptively simple although in reality it requires a lot of complex calculations to get the angles right, to make sure they convey the same visual of two unified beams pointing straight upward. Paul Myoda, one of the creators who designed the installation says, ‘Nothing has ever been so tall on the face of the Earth’ (Holmes). It also fits into the typical American idea of hyperbolic gargantuan scale being the yardstick for any kind of evaluation. News reports continuously refer it as a kind of megasculpture. Literally and metaphorically, it imitates the gravity defying presence of the real towers. It is to be noted that in the United States of America, the extensive use of minimalist abstractions while constructing a modern memorial was ignited in the early 1980s by Maya Lin’s iconic Vietnam Veterans Memorial. It is a V-shaped ledge of reflective black granite engraved with the names of those service members who died as a result of their service in Vietnam and in South East Asia during the war, installed on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The selected design was initially very controversial for its unconventional layout, the black colour and the lack of ornamentation. When it was made it didn’t fit in with the idea of a memorial in the American consciousness. There was an uproar as traditionalists complained, and in order to placate them sculptures of soldiers were later added. However, the design proved more enduring than anticipated and it changed the way Americans visually imagine a memorial space. So, when ‘Tribute in Light’ appeared as an installation, the visual index of what a memorial may look like didn’t surprise anyone like before. On the contrary, the idea of depicting the ‘absent’ towers with a simulacrum that is not part of the everyday built infrastructure adds a new layer of significance to the idea of sombre remembrance of loss. The lights imitating the two towers are an example of hyperreal – generation by models of a real without origin or reality. The use of light as the raw material of the installation drives home the point more persistently. Paul Myoda, one of the creators of the project, sees the lights as a Rorschach Test. Everyone takes something different or at least something their own. He adds, ‘they are not only a landmark, but sort of a time-mark, … They go out as this energy, this light into space. I had this kind of fanciful thought that, if there is intelligence out in space, that they will see this kind of strange Morse code going out there, because the light is going out every year. We’re sending out this little signal’ (Holmes). From a distance, the lights also communicate a notion of the infinite, the sense there is no end and perhaps no beginning.

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Overall, there is always a tendency to play up the transcendental or celestial aspect of the installation. The lights are a metaphor of re(placement). The physicality of the towers not there anymore conjured up through a simulation that allows the people to mourn and remember. Myoda says, There’s a strange phenomenon happening, related to its height, … That is, anywhere you go within a few-mile radius, it’s as if it follows you, because it seems to arc over your head. If you stand and you face it and look up, it’s there, but then if you turn around and look up, you can still see it. It is not only so public, where millions of people can see it, but also it feels really personal, because it follows you around. (Holmes) This intimate sensation of being associated with traumatic personal memory of millions of individuals also connects it to Marianne Hirsch’s notion of ‘postmemory’, a form of remembrance which ‘describes the relationship that the “generation after” bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before’ (Hirsch 5). Soon the act of gathering bits and pieces of the past, and joining them together in public, metamorphoses the personal space to evolve into a realm of the collective. The memorial is as personal as it is for everyone to relate to. Mady Ahern, the wife of Michael Ahern whose production team provides the technical know-how, tends to reinforce this belief as she tells, ‘There’s no agenda. There’s no political agenda around it … It really was not, for us, about some nationalistic image’ (Holmes). Despite these claims, Nora’s concept of ‘Lieux de mémoire’ reminds us of the politics that shapes these sites. The politics of site management and community identity directly influence the cultural marking and commemoration that takes place. In name of commemoration, public attitudes are manipulated in complex ways and most often than not, they become powerful symbols of nationalism. Ironically, Nora’s project, also reinforces this idea. Perry Anderson considers Les Lieux ‘one of the most patently ideological programmes in post-war historiography anywhere in the world’ (Anderson 10). He adds that the ‘underlying aim of the project, from which it never departed, was the creation of a union sucrée in which the divisions and discords of French society would melt away in the fond rituals of postmodem remembrance’ (Anderson 10). Nora’s concept of collective memory is intertwined with national identity. For him France as a nation is a powerful emotional anchor and unifying force and to get that point across, he ignores the collective memoires of its colonies which may contest and critique the ideology of the mainland. To draw a parallel to the arguments of Nora, any installation that commemorates an event like 9/11 works similarly based on an overt consensus of an imagined monolithic American identity that in turn imposes a metaphor of transcendence to the memorial in question. ‘Tribute in Light’ is no exception. It virtually mirrors what Nora wants the lieux de memoire to be – they should have ‘no referents in reality; or, rather, they are their own referents – pure signs’ (Nora 19).

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The reality is very different. The polysemous, fragmentary memories contests and resists any totalising myth-making national project, more so in a melting pot like the United States of America. Histories of sites of memory do not exist in a vacuum nor are they static. The meanings attached to these places are constantly evolving, and the sites themselves operate within discursive landscapes that are also subject to change. It is important to read tribute to light not merely as an annual event that celebrates American pride but look for the ambivalence of its creation and the complex strands of fractured contestations that it seeks to bridge.

Bibliography Anderson, Perry. “Union Sucrée.” London Review of Books, vol. 26, no. 18 (2004), pp. 10–16. Assmann, Jan. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Dosse, François. Pierre Nora: Homo Historicus. Paris: Perrin, 2011. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Translated by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Holmes, Jack. “They Don’t Just Flip on the Lights.” Esquire, https://www.esquire.com/ news-politics/a37546821/tribute-in-light-september-11-memorial-behind-thescenes/ accessed 2 Jan 2022. Mercer, Ben. “The Moral Rearmament of France: Pierre Nora, Memory, and the Crises of Republicanism.” French Politics, Culture & Society, vol. 31, no. 2 (Summer 2013), pp. 102–116. Nora, Pierre. Realms of Memory. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

11 THE RADICAL SADNESS OF LATENIGHT TELEVISION The Comedy Talk Show in the Shadow of 9/11 Sudipto Sanyal and Somnath Basu

The Decisive Moment “On September 18, 2001, Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, declared, ‘I think it’s the end of the age of irony’” (Hirschom). Soon, rumours of the death of irony began doing the rounds. A week after Carter’s proclamation (delivered to the website inside.com), the essayist Roger Rosenblatt wrote in Time magazine: “One good thing could come from this horror: it could spell the end of the age of irony.” In a cultural environment that was still reeling from the eschatological impact of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, the demise of irony was taken in stride as yet another ending, a punctuation mark at the abrupt end of the American Century. Fukuyama had, barely a decade earlier, lauded liberal democracy—democracy with American characteristics, in the eyes of neocons like himself and his colleagues at the RAND Corporation—as the logical destination of epochal history, a conclusive, punctuated equilibrium of modernist teleology (Fukuyama 39–51). Now, two airplanes had thrown that equilibrium out of whack by flying into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. To a culture used to grand proclamations, 9/11 was suddenly the grandest yet—no wonder its descriptions fall into the symbolic realm as often as they do into the physical. Three books were published by Verso on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks; Slavoj Zizek, Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard all saw shades of cultural communication, of the symbolic-ideological complex, in the attacks. Frequent comparisons were made to Hollywood. Zizek even called it the “ultimate work of art” (11). In the face of such a decisive counter-punctum, the death of irony adjusted easily into a traumatised national psyche. This ease was so pronounced that even late-night comedy—a genre that is non-conformist and off-kilter at the worst of times—failed to escape its clutches. DOI: 10.4324/9781003362999-15

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Soon, comics who thrived on dismantling sacred cows started delivering e­ arnest monologues on their genuine belief in Western capitalist democracy. As the Associated Press announced on 17 September, “humor was muted in the wake of last week’s terrorist attacks, even as America’s late-night television hosts returned to the air.” Just days after 9/11, the great humourist David Letterman, who was the first comedian to return to the airwaves after the attack, delivered one of the sincerest and most heartbroken monologues on late-night television in the USA, reflecting on dead firemen, religious zealotry and the spirit of small -town America. The New York Daily News called his monologue “one of the purest, most honest and important moments in TV history” (Silman). Three days later, when The Daily Show returned (it had been airing reruns for over a week), Jon Stewart—comedian and host of the show—spoke sombrely on the significance of the attacks for him, the show and for late-night comedy in general (Stewart). Tony Fox, spokesperson for Comedy Central, told the Associated Press, “When you’re talking about a show that is a news parody and the news is so consumed about this tragedy, what’s funny about what’s unfolding here? Nothing… As someone at the show said succinctly, irony is dead for the moment” (Associated Press). In the wake of 9/11, then, late-night comedy shows attempted to make meaning of a new world and America’s place in it—call it the end of the end of history, if you will—in a radically new way. Tapping into the zeitgeist, they eschewed comedy in favour of a bland patriotism, an enforced coming together. Letterman, for instance, praised Rudy Giuliani for his leadership during 9/11 as Mayor of New York—the same Rudy Giuliani who is now routinely excoriated on comedy shows for being a blowhard Trumpista whose “broken windows” policy of policing when Mayor led to massively disproportionate incarcerations of people of colour and low-income groups in the nineties (Colling-Wells). What are the symbolic exchanges that play out in the cultural hangover of a national tragedy, and how do they complicate the ideals of liberal democracy propagated in the so-called American Century by reinforcing ethnic and religious stereotypes? Does the post-9/11 moment see a rejection of postmodern comedy’s tendency to revolt against death through ironical play, or were the rumours of the death of irony greatly exaggerated? In this chapter, therefore, we seek to examine the most modern incarnation of comedic television and its impact upon the political and social tensions present in the USA, and by extension, to many other parts of the world. We propose to examine both the initial response of late-night comedy shows in the USA to the 9/11 attacks, and then attempt to trace, somewhat fitfully, what that event caused in terms of a change in the ongoing social conversation about Islam, Muslims, terrorism, and the notion of a new, evil, other. We also engage with the idea of the so-called death of irony that is claimed to have occurred after 9/11, when the validity of comedy itself was questioned, not just as public opinion, but by the practitioners of the genre itself.

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WEIRD Comedy The advent of the television series in the USA and other countries traditionally recognised as WEIRD—Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic— brought with it the genesis of the comedy show, where, using different formats, social issues were satirised, parodied, or burlesqued. In time, such comedy shows became a touchstone for viewers who formed their opinions about society in general not only from what they learned from other forms of the mainstream media, but from such shows, which often had the secondary object of questioning the notion of news and the top-down mechanism through which information was disseminated in that period. The history of late-night comedy in the USA can be traced back to the age of radio, when variety shows like The Pepsodent Show (which ran from 1938 to 1948) featured Bob Hope delivering a quick commentary on current events before the set-pieces of the show. On television, The Ed Sullivan Show, which ran from 1948 to 1971, was another precursor, though it aired during “prime time,” not late at night. The Tonight Show, which runs even today under a new host, had its first version run as early as 1954, with legendary hosts like Steve Allen, Jack Paar, and Johnny Carson making it one of the most watched programmes of that era. In 1982, Late Night with David Letterman started airing, though Carson remained the most popular host, earning the nickname of the “King of Last Night”. With Carson’s retirement in 1993, though, after Jay Leno took over The Tonight Show, Letterman would start The Late Show with David Letterman, which he would host till 2015. This decade also saw channels like MTV trying to break into the latenight market, hiring the then relatively unknown Jon Stewart for The Jon Stewart Show, which ran between 1993 and 1995. The current dispensation in late-night comedy began to take shape from the mid-1990s onwards. David Letterman created The Late Late Show to follow his own Late Show on CBS—a pairing that still exists today with Stephen Colbert and James Corden helming The Late Show and The Late Late Show, respectively. The Comedy Central channel, which had a relatively quiet beginning in 1989, would soon start dominating television comedy, with shows belonging to different comedic genres. In 1996, Comedy Central launched The Daily Show, a satirical news programme originally hosted by Craig Kilborn. However, the show’s now legendary place in the history of television was ensured after Jon Stewart took it over in 1998 and hosted it till 2015. Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, which used the newer format of a panel discussion on current affairs moderated in a comedic fashion by the host, also gained some success on ABC, where it ran from 1997 to 2002. The 2000s, however, saw the unquestioned dominance of The Daily Show in terms of its outreach and its engagement with contemporary issues. The Daily Show even gave rise to spinoffs, the most successful being The Colbert Report, which ran for ten years—from 2005 to 2014. The Daily Show employed a number of comedians other than Stewart, casting them as “correspondents” as it parodied cable news shows. Some of these

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correspondents went on to become important comedians and actors in their own right—Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Olivia Munn, John Oliver, and Samantha Bee all started out on the show. However, contemporary late-night comedy draws inspiration from another genre as well—the “fake news” show. Precursors include the work of Peter Cook and Alan Bennett in the UK in the 1960s, as well as the British show That Was the Week That Was. In the USA, NBC used its own news material in Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, and Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update,” which continues to air. Another U.S. show that pioneered in this field was HBO’s Not Necessarily the News, which aired in the 1980s. This was the late-night comedy environment in the United States when those planes crashed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in September 2001 and injected melancholy into the very state of things (Baudrillard, Cool Memories, blurb). But then, comedy has always been shot through with melancholy. The New York Times’ literary critic Michiko Kakutani, in an essay published soon after 9/11, noted how England’s Jacobean era—ushered in by the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 in which a group of Roman Catholics tried to blow up Parliament and murder James I, and marked by unnerving scientific discoveries that undermined Ptolemy’s vision of a harmoniously ordered universe—produced acidic satires like Ben Jonson’s Volpone, and corrosive studies in evil like John Webster’s White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi. (Kakutani) This ironic turn in comedic responses to the environment is nothing new—the Platonic dialogues are rife with Socratic irony, after all (and the word irony itself “has its roots in the Greek comic character Eiron, a clever underdog who by his wit repeatedly triumphs over the boastful character Alazon”)—but it entered its late stage of maturation, High Irony if you will, after the First World War (from the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on “Irony”). As the critic Paul Fussell observed in his elegiac polemic The Great War and Modern Memory, “There seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding; that it is essentially ironic; and it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War” (Fussell, 38). World War One was called “The Great War” and “the war to end all wars”. The cosmic irony of those phrases was in evidence soon after, when the war turned out to be the very opposite, the first industrialised war with weapons of mass destruction—the invisible barbarism of poison gas, the wanton destruction of aerial bombardment—in a century of such wars. Fussell notes how, in many forms of literature, the prewar “low mimetic of the plausible and the social” gave way to the postwar “ironic of the outrageous, the ridiculous, and the murderous” (338). For Fussell, irony would “become an inseparable element of the general vision of war in our time” (35). 9/11 was both a rupture in and a continuation of this tendency.

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Cynical Poses The panic hole the Indians have: they dig holes, sit at the bottom and view the sky through the hole. An unrestricted view. Our panic hole is the TV. Silence, blueness, birds, clouds, omens, weather – we have all that on the screen. We have the hole and the lid, the perfect niche. (Baudrillard, Cool Memories V, 3) In his introduction to Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History, the historian Andrew Bacevich points out that “after 9/11, the Bush administration announced its intention of bringing freedom and democracy to the people of the Middle East. Ideologues within the Bush administration persuaded themselves that American power, adroitly employed, could transform that region… The results speak for themselves” (Bacevich, xiv). Good intentions frequently lead to disaster, at least in the history of American neo-imperialism, and an ironic, cynical pose often becomes the best way to clarify the state of things. As Baudrillard writes, “Irony preserves what little reality the world has and its rates of uncertain fatality” (Cool Memories, 93). In its immediate aftermath, 9/11 felt like a traumatic breach of the ironic consensus in comedy at large and in late-night television comedy specifically. It felt, in the words of the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor Branch, like, “a turning point against a generation of cynicism for all of us” ( Johnson). What was it about this one event that prompted a reckoning within the centuries-old cynical heart of comedy? Was the post-cynical swerve that late-night American comedy took (temporarily) after 9/11 an expression of a deep sense of discomfort with the symbolic import of that specific act of terrorism? The violence of 9/11, by its mere facticity, challenged the Western narrative of modernity and the Enlightenment. Hence the melancholy of Jon Stewart’s monologue; the true violence of 9/11, at least in the American cultural imagination, was that it negated a “symbol of American ingenuity and strength and labor and imagination and commerce” (00:07:58–00:08:08, emphases ours). After all, while the Twin Towers stood, they had been for years derided as eyesores and monuments to Wall Street greed. Once they were gone, eviscerated in an unsanctioned act of violence (unlike the bombings carried out routinely by the American military in various parts of the world), the American psyche desperately needed them to remain. It is the image of smoke billowing out of gigantically phallic representations of Western neoliberal capitalist power that threatens to neuter the very fabric of the Anglo-European narrative of liberal modernity, which brings this power to the edge of an abyss of violence. 9/11 ruptured the smooth functioning of what Giorgio Agamben called the biopolitical “Power over Life” by suffusing the visual field with a reminder of a pre-Enlightenment sovereign “Right of Death” (9). In American popular culture, therefore, the true horror of 9/11 is that of anachronism.

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In Europe, pre-Enlightenment comedy tended to emerge from societies on the verge of breakdown, dictated by relations of sovereign violence—hence the anarchy and scatology of a Rabelais, for instance. After the Enlightenment, comedy became refined (see, for instance, neoclassical or Augustan comedy) and tended to operate within the larger relations of power governing the Western world; power which, as Foucault said, “produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth” (“Discipline and Punish”, 194). 9/11 made the fragility of these relations of power apparent—and, consequently, comedy’s imbrication within it.

Can Mainstream Comedy Address Its Own Tragedies? So late-night comedy found itself at a loss when faced with a national tragedy taking place on American soil. The seamless production of reality was dealt a blow that contemporary comedy just didn’t know how to respond to. Consequently, as the humourist Dave Barry wrote in his first column after the event (in the Miami Herald), “No humor column today. I don’t want to write it, and you don’t want to read it.” In many respects, Barry’s column was emblematic of the way in which mainstream comedy reacted to the abrupt upheaval of power relations in a world increasingly viewed through the lens of the American Way. The underlying assumption was that American action in the world almost invariably happened in good faith (“I’m not naive about my country,” Barry continued. “My country is definitely not always right; my country has at times been terribly wrong. But I know this about Americans: We don’t set out to kill innocent people”); evil could only be attributed to those who wanted to harm the USA—“They want us to die just for being Americans. They don’t care which Americans die: military Americans, civilian Americans, young Americans, old Americans. baby Americans. They don’t care. To them, we’re all mortal enemies.” What most comedians and talk show hosts refused to acknowledge, of course, was the death toll that had resulted over the years from American military action in far-off lands, and the sheer volume of the body count that made arguments about intention meaningless. For mainstream comedy, this needed to be a time to set aside differences and come together. The faceless casualties of American military actions abroad faded into obscurity once more, and comedy became sincere. One of the few humour publications, though, that tried to reckon with this disruption of power relations between the USA and its Others was the satirical “news” magazine The Onion. In its first post-9/11 issue, it noted the symbolic charge of the destruction of the Twin Towers—“American Life Turns Into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie,” was how one front-page article was titled—while its headline reverted to cynicism—“US Vows To Defeat Whoever It Is We’re At War With”—acknowledging the fact that American “power” turned frequently into unproductive violence from the perspective of the US’s Others (The Onion).

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It is important to note that even The Onion had refused to publish new material in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 (its first new post-9/11 issue came out only on September 27). “There will be humor, but not now,” Onion staffer Stephen Thompson was quoted as saying by the Associated Press. “We’re not feeling especially relevant right now. What are we going to say? ‘Ooh, that Osama bin Laden, he’ll be the victim of our rapier wit!’” (Associated Press). However, after a certain passage of time and the interventions of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which, once again, placed the U.S. establishment—and cable news—in the role of the oppressor, it became possible to laugh at them again. Added to this was the return of the liberal perception of Muslims being more sinned against than sinned, which made it possible to cast them in the role of victims, willing or otherwise. For Foucault, at some point relations of power threaten to break down into relations of violence. They are then no longer fluid flows, but harden into stasis (“Subject and Power”, 220). This begs the question: Is comedy only effective when it works through relations of power? Is it even capable of addressing the collapse of such relations into relations of violence?

The Probability of Bias: Very High Indeed The rhetoric surrounding the post-9/11 demonisation of Muslims refuses to die down in the United States—and indeed, in any nation where Muslims form a minority of the total population. The U.S. media continued to see the shadow of Al-Qaeda and similar organisations everywhere. Among the more glaring examples of this Islamophobia was the speculation surrounding two terrorist attacks in Norway that took place on 22 July 2011. Initially, many U.S. media organisations suggested that the attack was carried out by Muslim terrorists. While publications like The Wall Street Journal and television programmes on channels like Fox News carried such insinuations, the most controversial one was an opinion piece by Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post, who not only placed the blame of the attacks squarely on Muslim terrorists, but also suggested that this had happened because Norway had participated in the war in Afghanistan and that this attack proved that waging wars to root out Islamist extremism were not only justified, but a critical necessity in modern geo-politics (“Norway Bombing”). When confronted with the fact that the perpetrator was a white Islamophobic supremacist named Anders Breivik, these media outlets issued convoluted retractions, claiming that the initial lack of concrete information had caused them to assume that there was a high probability that the attacks had been carried out by Muslim terrorists. For example, Rubin’s so-called retraction did not even pretend to acknowledge that she had been wrong, instead going on to say, “There are many more jihadists than blond Norwegians out to kill Americans, and we should keep our eye on the systemic and far more potent threats that stem from an ideological war with the West” (“Evil in Norway”). Writing in Foreign Policy, Stephen M. Walt highlighted that The Wall Street Journal, for example, had merely rewritten

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its editorial without offering any apology for the errors in the original version of the editorial. The U.S. comedian Stephen Colbert most explicitly parodied the attitude of these conservative-leaning reports on his popular show The Colbert Report, which used to air immediately after The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (and often followed up stories tackled in The Daily Show) on Comedy Central. In one episode, Colbert provided a summary of the news items and blog posts that had prematurely concluded that the attacks were by Muslim terrorists and then demonstrated (while pretending to be on the side of the conservatives) that even after the real facts came to light, none of the media organisations issued any proper retractions, because, as he put it, “Just because the confessed murderer is a blond blue-eyed Norwegian-born anti-Muslim crusader, does not mean that he’s not a swarthy ululating Middle Eastern madman” (Colbert, 00:01:48–00:02:01). He concluded that, “So if you’re pulling a news report completely out of your ass, it’s safer to go with ‘Muslim.’ That’s not prejudice, that’s probability” (00:03:21–00:03:29). This takedown is emblematic of the ideal liberal response to a situation where Muslims become the target of conservative television and print. Set almost ten years after 9/11, with a so-called liberal U.S. administration and legislature in place, it reminds us how Muslims continued to be feared by the U.S. public and how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have done nothing to stir the American conscience in spite of the fact that the former was attacked on the basis of lies, while the latter was invaded as a knee-jerk reaction to the events of 9/11. Of course, the comedian Samantha Bee has been more forthright than her male counterparts. Initially a correspondent on The Daily Show, Bee started hosting her own show in February 2016, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, which was broadcast on TBS. It was soon recognised as one of the best late-night comedy shows in the country. Bee’s show is additionally noteworthy as she is one of the very few women in the USA who host their own show on a major network. In an episode of Full Frontal that aired on 27 June 2016, Bee travelled to the town of Dearborn, Michigan, which has the largest Muslim population of any American town (“Saw Something, Said Something”). Here, she interviewed a local community leader named Kassem Ali, who explained patiently to her that the Muslim community in Dearborn regularly cooperated with the police and kept a close watch on anyone who might be attracted towards extremism. In the event that there was any concern about a community member behaving erratically, the police were informed, and the concerned people were encouraged to share their problems and solutions were suggested to them—so, sitting down and talking to these people was the most effective way of stopping them from becoming or remaining attracted to extremist ideologies. Bee deliberately adopted the persona of an over-the-top conservative white interviewer, repeatedly asking Ali why there was no evidence that the Muslim community was not turning in Muslim terrorists every day (with an infographic popping up confirming the fact that the Muslim American community provided a significant percentage of tips to the FBI and the CIA about Muslim terrorists), and pretending not to hear him

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when he twice said that American Muslims loved the USA just as much as any other U.S. citizen. Bee continued to act surprised when the deputy chief of police in Dearborn, who also happened to be a Muslim, asserted that there were no major or minor terrorist conspiracies to be found in Dearborn, and that he and the rest of the town took terrorism very seriously and tried their best to ensure that no such activity came to pass in the town. Bee contrasts the attitude of these patriotic Muslims with those of Islamophobic white supremacists who had travelled to Dearborn specifically to carry around posters with anti-Islamic language, as well as to wave a pig head around. While interviewing one of the people who had done this, Bee demonstrated that this person held the same views as Donald Trump, who, at that point in time, was campaigning for President. In addition, Bee contrasted the white supremacist assertion that the USA was in great peril with a statement by Kassem Ali where he said that the USA continued to be a great country. Bee concluded this segment with a characteristically sarcastic summary: “We may never know how American Muslims feel about America, but at least our brave political leaders will never stop not listening to them.” (“Saw Something, Said Something”, 00:05:41–00:05:48). Bee clearly showed how US-American Muslims continued to be demonised in 2016, on the cusp of a U.S. presidential election. At the same time, her “empirical” research attempted to reinforce the liberal stereotype of the “loyal” Muslim American. While it may have been acceptable to liberals, this segment also made it painfully clear how much harder Muslims had to try in order to appear to be patriotic, and how the atmosphere of suspicion has forced them to continuously appear to be patriotic and attempt to fit in with the rest of white America.

An Unwelcome Other: The Refugee as Terrorist The British comedian John Oliver has become known for his in-depth examinations of “serious” issues on his weekly comedy show Last Week Tonight. The long-form nature of these investigations makes this a very different show from other late-night comedy news or talk shows, and allows Oliver to bring unexpected perspectives to bear on certain issues. For example, in that main segment on his show that aired on 27 September 2015, he addressed the question of migrants (“Migrants and Refugees”). While highlighting the xenophobic reactions of several European politicians to the prospect of welcoming refugees from Syria, he pointed out how the asylum-seeking system within the EU worked so slowly that refugees would have to wait for years to be even considered for a formal grant of asylum. Oliver demonstrated that the so-called “practical” reasons advanced by some countries for not accepting refugees were only pretexts—the real problem lay in the religion of the majority of the refugees. Especial mention was made of Slovakia’s contention that they could not accept these refugees because there were no mosques in Slovakia—a hurdle that could be overcome, as Oliver pointed out, by building them. Oliver also highlighted how U.S. media

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outlets had contributed to the demonisation of the refugees with examples like the sharing of an old video (from 2010) of Muslims chanting at a railway station, claiming that this was happening in 2015, and the people chanting were refugees. What was more telling was that Fox News (which had broadcast the video) claimed during the story that they were not suggesting that the refugees were terrorists while simultaneously displaying a screen graphic with the headline “Inbound Terror?”, clearly showing that they were doing exactly that. Oliver also sought to justify the acceptance of the migrants on utilitarian grounds. He quoted reports in The New York Times and The Washington Post which stated that several studies had found that net immigration tended to raise wages for both immigrants and non-immigrants, and that immigration had benefited the economies of 19 out of 20 major industrialised countries examined in a survey. In addition, Oliver pointed out how immigration would benefit various countries in Europe where the population had been shrinking steadily over the past few years. The need to advance practical reasons for the acceptance of the Muslim Other, including the prospect of economic benefits for nations that welcomed them, proves how much the U.S. public is influenced by the profit-motive in every sphere of their lives. In spite of his apparently iconoclastic outlook, Oliver too is mired within the circuits of global capital. By advancing practical, economic reasons for letting in refugees, he negates religious and cultural identity and sets aside religious identity as the principal focus of discrimination. By doing so, he chooses instead to extol the material gain accrued from contact with the Other, therefore perpetuating the tenets of late capitalism.

The Outsider’s View: Comedy from Without The work of the Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef provides a noteworthy change from the fare dished out by established U.S. late-night comedy hosts. Originally a surgeon by profession, Youssef started El Bernameg, a fake news show in Egypt modelled closely on The Daily Show with John Stewart, and has been called “the Jon Stewart of Egypt.” The popularity of his show and his perceived closeness to figures like Stewart (who appeared on El Bernameg while he was making Rosewater, a film about the brutal interrogation of Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari) led to Youssef being prosecuted by successive Egyptian regimes, finally resulting in his exile to the USA. Youssef attempts to hold up a mirror to U.S. democracy and values by comparing them to the unfavourable conditions present in the Middle East and North Africa. His miniseries, Democracy Handbook with Bassem Youssef, provides many examples of the ludicrous extent of anti-Muslim sentiment prevalent in the USA. In Episode 6 of the series, he visits Florida Gun Supply, a gun shop in Inverness, Florida, whose owner Andy Hallinan claims that the shop is a “Muslim Free Zone” selling various explicitly Islamophobic items—practice targets with images that resemble popular stereotypes of Muslim terrorists, guns

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sold with gun oil containing pig fat, and even brownies with bacon bits, so they can’t be consumed by Muslims (00:02:37–00:03:22). Youssef repeatedly questions Hallinan (without revealing his real name) about whether any Muslims had tried to enter his shop, and how he would be able to identify a Muslim if one decided to come by. Hallinan’s inability to provide a proper answer accentuates the comedy of the episode, making it clear that he has no idea about what real Muslims might be like; he only knows the stereotypical portrayal of Muslims by Islamophobes. It is only at the end of the episode, after Youssef leaves the shop, when Hallinan starts asking whether he was a Muslim, since it finally dawns on him that Youssef ’s questions were trying to prove a point. This is perhaps the logical culmination of anti-Muslim sentiment in the US fostered by the events of 9/11 and sustained by the so-called War on Terror for the next 20 years. Youssef reminds us that this general hatred is intertwined with U.S. consumer culture. Here, instead of having his show accommodate the exigencies of late capitalism, he provides an ironic take on how it is this very capitalism that allows an economy of hate to flourish while leaving the agents of this hate none the wiser, but ensuring that a profit is always made.

Comedy as Reminder: The Ilhan Omar Debate The increasingly open anti-Muslim rhetoric deployed across the USA with the active encouragement of Donald Trump and his administration (and more covertly by conservatives on both sides of the political divide in that country) can be best illustrated with the constant harassment faced by Ilhan Omar, a Muslim refugee from Somalia who gained U.S. citizenship and was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018. Since her election, Omar has been routinely targeted by her political opponents as well as more garden variety Islamophobes. While her persecution has been discussed on several late-night comedy shows, Samantha Bee’s coverage of the issue is of particular importance because she also highlights the fact that Omar faces the additional handicap of being a woman in public life, a fact that her male counterparts did not always foreground so acutely. In March 2019, Bee devoted a segment of Full Frontal to a discussion about how Ilhan Omar’s perceived un-American and anti-Semitic statements had led to her being subjected to a witch-hunt by the conservative media, especially Fox News (“The Great Ilhan Omar Debate”). Bee pointed out that Omar’s comments about lobbying in the U.S. Congress and its impact on foreign policy were things that Omar was supposed to talk about as she was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Bee also fact-checked a claim by conservative news media that Omar had accused U.S. supporters of Israel of having dual loyalties, playing a recording of Omar’s speech where she was purported to have made these remarks and showing that she had done no such thing. Bee also proved that Donald Trump had used far more direct anti-Semitic tropes in a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition in 2015, but instead of censuring him, the

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Republicans had gone on to elect him as their presidential nominee and then President. Therefore, Bee concluded, the only reason that Omar was being targeted was because she was Muslim. In support of this assertion, she played an excerpt from a news programme featuring Jeanine Pirro of Fox News, who suggested that Omar’s (perceived) anti-Semitism stemmed from the fact that she wore a hijab and was actually an adherent of extremist Islamic ideology. It is interesting to note that this comment by Pirro was considered to be so controversial that even Fox News officially disavowed it, which shows that Pirro’s mistake was to openly call Omar a Muslim extremist—a more subtle insinuation of the same point would probably have passed without comment (“The Great Ilhan Omar Debate”, 00:05:28–00:05:40). Even at the time of writing, Omar continues to be singled out for criticism far more than her fellow progressives (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan) in the House of Representatives. After the attack on the U.S. Capitol in January 2021, a U.S. Congressperson named Marjorie Taylor Greene was criticised and then censured for her support of the QAnon movement, which inspired the attackers, who were largely right-wing and white. In response, Greene began fund-raising to fight potential attempts to oust her from office: as part of the fund-raising efforts, she circulated a poster exhorting potential donors to help her fight the “swamp” (a term used by Trump and his followers to describe the power circles in Washington, D.C.)—with Omar’s face as the background of the poster (Spiocchia). Greene’s attempt to gain support by stoking Islamophobia was widely criticised, with Omar restricting herself to a one-word tweet—“Subtle”.

In Conclusion, or, Irony in An Uncentred Universe In The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard talks about how irony is born out of the disjuncture between a concept and its expression. In an increasingly decentred and dispersing universe, though, where word and world seem to behave interchangeably, does this disjuncture expand exponentially—ironically—or vanish irretrievably? Kierkegaard would probably have thought the former. “Just as scientists maintain that there is not true science without doubt,” he wrote, “so it may be maintained with the same right that no genuinely human life is possible without irony” (Kierkegaard, 326). There is a slippage between the earnest and sombre responses on TV comedy in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and the ultimately to-be-expected reversion to cynical poses in its subsequent afterlife closer to the present day, and it is there that Kierkegaard’s vision of Socratic irony thrives. Insofar as Søren Kierkegaard and Michiko Kakutani are concerned, the reports of the death of irony were greatly exaggerated. “Many of the forecasts,” Kakutani wrote, “mistook shock and grief for long-term cultural change.”

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But the return of irony comes laden with the old fissures. The circuits of late capital that entwine most cable late-night shows dependent on advertisements or even shows like John Oliver’s or Bill Maher’s (both on the subscribers-only HBO stable of channels) neuter the ironic gap between comedic content and its infrastructural underpinnings. Does this somehow create a rupture between the idea of irony and its connection to human life—a rupture, in Kierkegaardian terms, in the doubt-science relationship? The fact that the presidency of Donald Trump increased bias against Muslims is apparent in the fact that even the Democratic Party refused to support Omar when she was being attacked, and instead attempted to censure her through a resolution against anti-Semitism (which, thankfully, became anodyne after it was modified to include statements against Islamophobia and other forms of hate as well). However, the fact that the Democrats could do this is proof that they believed that they would lose the support of at least some voters if they chose to support Omar—demonstrating that Islamophobia is now so deeply embedded in contemporary American society that it will be a very difficult task to weed it out. This Islamophobia is rooted in a fear of all that is foreign and unfamiliar, in the fear that if this unfamiliar is sought to be understood or embraced, it will undermine existing systems of knowledge, because, as Foucault challenges his imaginary (Western) interlocutor, it is “the fear that makes you seek, beyond all boundaries, ruptures, shifts, and divisions, the great historico-transcendental destiny of the Occident” (Archaeology of Knowledge, 231). The tendency to grasp at this “great historico-transcendental destiny of the Occident” remains wedged deep in the American imaginary. TV comedy keeps gesturing at it, trying to poke holes in it; but when the equilibrium is punctuated, discombobulated, as it was on 9/11 and immediately after, the conscious space of irony in comedy withdraws into nationalist sentiment. Ultimately, this is the Socratic irony at the heart of late-night TV comedy.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Associated Press. “Humor Muted on Late-Night Shows.” USA Today, 17 September 2001. https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/enter/tv/2001-09-17-late-night-humor. htm. Accessed 17 January 2021. Bacevich, Andrew. “Introduction.” The Irony of American History, by Reinhold Niebuhr, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010, ix–xxii. Barry, Dave. “Tragedy Leaves Humor Columnist with Nothing Funny to Say.” The Miami Herald, 16 September 2001. https://products.kitsapsun.com/ archive/2001/09-16/0075_dave_barry_tragedy_leaves_humor_.html. Accessed 17 January 2021. Baudrillard, Jean. Cool Memories. Translated by Chris Turner, London: Verso, 1990. Baudrillard, Jean. Cool Memories V. Translated by Chris Turner, Cambridge: Polity, 2006. Bee, Samantha. “Saw Something, Said Something.” Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, 27 June 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzhFGDNToMA. Accessed 17 January 2021.

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———. “The Great Ilhan Omar Debate.” Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, 13 March 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARomrjtLTQU. Accessed 17 January 2021. Colbert, Stephen. The Colbert Report, 26 July 2011. https://archive.org/details/ COM_20110727_022500_The_Colbert_Report/. Accessed 17 January 2021. Collings-Wells, Sam. “Broken Windows.” History Today, vol. 70, no. 8, 2020. https:// www.historytoday.com/history-matters/broken-windows. Accessed 17 January 2021. Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edition. Edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982. 208–226. ———. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991. ———. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith, London: Routledge, 2007. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Hirschom, Michael. “Irony, The End of.” New York, 27 August 2011. https://nymag. com/news/9-11/10th-anniversary/irony/. Accessed 17 January 2021. Johnson, Reed. “Will War on Terrorism Define a Generation?” Los Angeles Times, 23 September 2001. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-sep-23-cl-48761story.html. Accessed 17 January 2021. Kakutani, Michiko. “Critic’s Notebook: The Age of Irony Isn’t Over After All; Assertions of Cynicism’s Demise Belie History.” The New York Times, 9 October 2001. https:// www.nytimes.com/2001/10/09/arts/critic-s-notebook-age-irony-isn-t-over-afterall-assertions-cynicism-s-demise.html. Accessed 17 January 2021. Kierkegaard, Søren. The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates: Together with Notes of Schelling’s Berlin Lectures. Edited and translated by Howard V Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Letterman, David. “David Letterman 9/11 Monologue.” Late Show with David Letterman. CBS, 17 September 2001. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZeEdye0h9A. Accessed 17 January 2021. Oliver, John. “Migrants and Refugees.” Last Week Tonight, 27 September 2015. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=umqvYhb3wf4. Accessed 17 January 2021. Omar, Ilhan. “Subtle.” Twitter, 3 February 2021, 9:08 a.m. (EST), https://twitter.com/ IlhanMN/status/1356809150802636803. Onion, The. “American Life Turns into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie.” The Onion, Volume 37 Issue 34, 27 September–3 October 2001. ———. “US Vows to Defeat Whoever It Is We’re at War with.” The Onion, Volume 37 Issue 34, 27 September–3 October 2001. Rosenblatt, Roger. “The Age of Irony Comes to an End.” Time, 24 September 2001. http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,1000893,00.html. Accessed 17 January 2021. Rubin, Jennifer. “Norway Bombing.” The Washington Post, 29 May 2011. http:// www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/norway-bombing/2011/03/29/­ gIQAB4D3TI_blog.html. Accessed 17 January 2021. Rubin, Jennifer. “Evil in Norway.” The Washington Post, 23 July 2011. https:// www.­w ashingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/evil-in-norway/2011/03/29/­ gIQAtsydVI_blog.html. Accessed 17 January 2021. Silman, Anna. “8 Times Comedians Helped Us Deal with Tragedy.” Salon, 19 June 2015. https://www.salon.com/2015/06/19/8_times_comedians_helped_us_deal_with_ tragedy/. Accessed 17 January 2021.

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Spiocchia, Gino. “Ilhan Omar Hits Out after Marjorie Taylor Greene Uses Her Face in Fundraising Push.” The Independent, 3 February 2021. https://www.­ independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/omar-marjorie-taylor-greene-­ congress-b1796914.html. Accessed 5 February 2021. Stewart, Jon. “September 11, 2001.” The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Comedy Central, 20 September 2001. https://www.cc.com/video/1q93jy/the-daily-show-with-jon-­ stewart-september-11-2001. Accessed 17 January 2021. Walt, Stephen M. “Exploiting a Tragedy (Updated).” Foreign Policy, 24 July 2011. https:// foreignpolicy.com/2011/07/24/exploiting-a-tragedy-updated/. Accessed 17 January 2021. Youssef, Bassem. “The New Hate Economy.” Episode 6, Democracy Handbook with Bassem Youssef, 14 July 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-msaQRGMTUo. Accessed 17 January 2021. Zizek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso, 2002.

12 9/11 AND THE SUPERVILLAIN CRISIS A Study of the ‘Terrorist Villain’ and Terrorism in Select MCU Films Rohan Hassan

Introduction In the immediate wake of the 9/11 tragedy, ‘an unprecedented event, one that radically alters the way we see ourselves’ (Borradori 25), cultural texts had grappled with the aporia of the shocking occurrence while trying to express the very inscrutable idea of the ‘place and meaning of the event’, which Derrida has seen to be as ‘ineffable, like an intuition without concept[…]out of range for a language that admits its powerlessness and so is reduced to pronouncing mechanically a date’ (Derrida qtd. in Borradori 85). After the initial shock, since then, even to this day, the tragedy have been recounted, referred and alluded to through various mediums in an attempt to ‘exorcise two times at one go’ (Derrida qtd. in Borradori 86), first by reproducing the event and thereby ‘neutralizing, deadening, distancing a traumatism’ (Derrida qtd. in Borradori 86) and secondly by endeavoring to comprehend the complex gravitas of the epochal event. Such processes of response often over the years have in turn led to the restructuring of the formats of narratives of specific cultural texts, especially pop-cultural ones, where they have engaged more critically with existing tropes in their respective genres leading to a heightened sense of self-referential political awareness. Superhero movies too, previously perceived as purely campy and inherently escapist, have in their own way addressed the event of 9/11 and its ramifications, ethical, legal and geopolitical, reconfiguring their age-old clichéd plot structures and recurring thematic preoccupation with the idea of a distinct good versus evil. One of the direct results of such restructuring has undoubtedly been the emergence of the more psychologically complex hero, a being trying to make sense of the new reality and stand up to his duties while being burdened by the collective trauma and anxiety of post-9/11 America. Battling with personal insecurities and vulnerabilities, the hero in turn has been pitted against a more DOI: 10.4324/9781003362999-16

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progressively advanced villain as compared to their pre-9/11 comically theatrical counterparts. Curiously enough, though there has been an attempt in the movies to explore with greater subtlety the increasingly complex psychology of the post-9/11 superhero, the villain has not been allowed any space for such nuanced examination of his psyche. Indeed, if the modern villain has broken away from the constraints of his earlier exaggerated peculiarities and grown in terms of might and ingenuity to match up to the revamped superhero, he has been denied independent political agency, still remaining mostly an agent of brute force to be vanquished by the hero. Another interesting fact has been that though there has been a noteworthy variation in his motive for such a course of action across a variety of these films, the villain in post-9/11 superhero movies has primarily been presented as a figure whose modus operandi, directly or indirectly, has been the dissemination of terror, making him, by extension, a terrorist. In post9/11 Marvel Cinematic Universe, for example, the terrorist villain has remained the standard foil to the protagonist superheroes, from Iron Man (2008), the first movie of their stable, to The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021), one of their latest offerings. This pattern of casting the villain as terrorist in post-9/11 superhero movies can be interpreted as repeated means of negotiating with the complex concepts of terrorism and the terrorist, concepts that unraveled newer intricacies and concerns after the 9/11 attack. Moreover, this casting of the depoliticized villain in the mold of the terrorist, a figure highly political, has also resulted in problematic representation of the character in the films, impacting the general public understanding of such characters. This chapter will attempt to read the problematic representation of the terrorist villain in some select movies of the post-9/11 Marvel Cinematic Universe. The first section of the chapter will deal with a brief understanding the layered concepts of ‘terrorism’ and ‘the terrorist’. The following section would try to read the events of 9/11 as a terrorist attack and its concomitant impacts on society and by extension popular cultural artifacts such as superhero movies. The third section will deal with some select superhero movies to explore the problematic representation of terrorism and the terrorist villain in them.

Terrorism and the Terrorist: A Brief Understanding The roots of terrorism can be traced back to antiquity (see Law 11; Taylor 12; et al.), but the birth of modern terrorism is generally located during the French Revolution (see Chaliand and Blin 95; Gupta 4; Townshend 36). In fact, notes Townshend, ‘the first dictionary definition of the word ‘terrorism’ – ‘système, régime de la terreur’ – was offered by the Académie Française in 1798 in the light, plainly, of recent French experience’ (Townshend 36). The successful overthrowing of aristocracy during the French Revolution was soon followed by the Robespierre led Committee of Public Safety’s ‘Reign of Terror’, which oversaw persecution and killing of thousands of individuals thought to be a threat to internal security and the revolutionary government. The committee influenced the

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government to adopt ‘terror’ as the order of the day and it meted out e­ xemplary punitive punishment to its targets by the spectacle of beheading through guillotines in public. Such use and open display of state sponsored terror invariably was dedicated to create a mass psychological impact and a sense of paranoia and such an application of systematic terror almost became a prototypical blueprint for future state powers in their tackling of dissenters. Townshend observes that it was “their adoption of terror which first imprinted the word ‘terrorist’ in the political lexicon, and transformed the Revolution in the eyes of most outsiders from a liberating to a destructive force” (Townshend 37). From the modern emergence during the French Revolution as state sponsored terror, to this present day, the ideas of terrorism and the terrorist, have undergone such changes and have been fraught with such a diverse range of complexities and viewpoints, that providing all-inclusive definitions of them is a near impossible task. With an all-pervasive rise in violence in multifarious forms in the contemporary world, it has become difficult to specifically mark a terrorist organization as distinct from other outfits engaged in acts of violence. Moreover, with the term terrorism carrying a negative baggage, the act of identifying a certain group as a terrorist body, presupposes a process of labeling1 as no group voluntarily accepts itself as being systematically involved in the use of terror as a means of achieving organization goals. This attempt at categorization then therefore has its own politics depending upon the agenda of the classifying external authority. Along with that, the parameters guiding the classification process are also subject to socio-historical forces of the time, which then again are subjective, leading to an ever-evolving, ever-changing idea of terrorism and the terrorist. Critics have gone on to identify some of the common fundamental characteristics2 of terrorism. Terrorism as distinct from any random acts of criminal ­v iolence is essentially political 3 in its aims and driven by a particular ideology that motivates to challenge the existing status quo of any society or nation. Terrorist attacks, which are always violent in spirit, therefore have a stronger ulterior motive of generating fear psychosis, insecurity and anxiety among the masses for gaining political leverage in societies, beyond the aim of just causing direct damage to the immediate physical target. Conducted by a structured organization with systematic planning of coercion and intimidation, acts of terrorism in most cases require the theatrics of public spectacle where through the path of graphic violence and atrocity, the terrorists seek out a larger audience and thereby intimidate or influence them.4

9/11, Terrorism and Hollywood With the occurrence of the 9/11 tragedy, however, terrorism has been seen to have further embodying newer meaning and definition.5 The terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in New York City and Washington, respectively, on September 11, 2001 has been perceived as a watershed moment

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with not only the “whole play of history and power… disrupted by this event (but also) the conditions of analysis” too (Baudrillard 4). The destruction of the Twin Towers especially, which occupied a distinct iconic space in the skyline of lower Manhattan, New York City, created a sudden void among the general public regarding the psychological imagination of the United States of America. The horrific theatricality of the airplanes crashing on the buildings, the explosion and the fall, engendered an image, potent and surreal, unlikely any other in recent memory. Habermas argues that not only did the spectacle of the planes crashing in those towers have a degree of unique monstrosity to it, what was also fundamentally new was ‘the symbolic force of the target struck’ (Habermas qtd. in Borradori 28). The terrorists attacking the Twin Towers, which had been symbols of American economic dominance in the global arena along with the attack on the Pentagon, which stands for American military might, sent ripples of shockwaves whose repercussions were to impact future geopolitics in unprecedented ways. Habermas further stresses on the massive never before seen presence of digital media, recording and covering the catastrophe in details, “transforming the local event simultaneously into a global one and the whole world population into a benumbed witness” making the 9/11 tragedy “the first historic world event in the strictest sense” (28). The unique coverage6 and the subsequent repeated play of the footages of the crash and the collapse, the burning skyscraper and the falling debris, the massive explosion and the fleeing terrified citizens, on television screens all across the globe, however, as Zizek argues, brought home to the audience a sense of their desire for the more pronounced real, transcending the limits of virtual reality.7 While glossing on the controversial comment of Karlheinz Stockhausen,8 Zizek notes, we can perceive the collapse of the WTC towers as the climactic conclusion of 20th-century art’s ‘passion for the Real’ – the ‘terrorists’ themselves did not do it primarily to provoke real material damage, but for the spectacular effect of it. (11) This spectacle of destruction in such a highly theatrical fashion which blurred the lines between the real and the reel for most people watching this global media event, would invariably go on to draw comparison with the set pieces of big budgeted Hollywood action and disaster movies with their penchant for unbridled carnage and mass destruction. Not only would the audiences accustomed to seeing the decimation of iconic architectures in films go on to draw such parallels, personnel associated with the filmmaking process too would experience unnerving sense of déjà vu referring back to earlier works. It would be further argued that such depiction and to an extent celebration of mindless violence in multiple movies of Hollywood would indeed act as a blueprint for the horrendous terrorist attacks.9 The subsequent reaction and retaliation of the American government against the terrorist attacks, more specifically the Bush administration’s ‘War on Terror’ agenda, further saw the involvement of Hollywood

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in a more direct way when the Pentagon solicited its collaboration. Within months of the 9/11 catastrophe, government officials met with film directors and ­technicians, ­specializing in big budget action and disaster spectacles to discuss probable chances and scenarios of future terrorist attacks and possible strategies to thwart them.10 Hollywood studios were further advised to strategically help the ‘war on terror’ cause by propagating the suitable ideological message among its vast worldwide audience.11 The politicization of Hollywood, though not a novel phenomenon, definitely gained newer nuances after 9/11. The initial reaction of Hollywood regarding the depiction of the catastrophe was considerably hesitant. Movies featuring direct references or even potentially triggering visuals that could evoke the trauma of the tragedy were censored and in some cases delayed for release. With time however, Hollywood opened up to exploring the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. Interestingly, superhero movies, which has been seen as a genre massively impacted by 9/11, witnessed a veritable renaissance with almost close to a hundred movies being released from then up till now, making it the most financially lucrative genre in Hollywood filmmaking of recent times. Not only do the movies earn in billions, their releases have gradually become highly anticipated global pop-cultural events with enormous fan bases spread throughout the globe. The phenomenon of this unprecedented popularity of superhero movies post 9/11 has been analyzed from various perspectives.12 One of the primary arguments has been that in the all-pervasive atmosphere of post-9/11 anxiety and fear, superhero movies have been seen to be having the potential of providing cathartic release to the repressed traumas of the audience by staging set pieces of crisis in identifiable yet distanced locations, in which the superhero protagonists use their superpower to control and intercept any real threat to the citizens from external terrorists. Reinstating the notion of American exceptionalism, superheroes in those movies tend to uphold the ideals of courage and determination against all odds posed by the villain.13 Jeffrey A. Brown, comments in this context, that one of the reasons for the strong appeal of superhero movies “is because they are fantastical, escapist metaphors for 9/11 without ever addressing it as an actual historical event” (Brown 64), reconfirming David Holloway’s concept of a distinct commercial aesthetic, the ‘allegory lite’. Holloway argues that this particular approach of filmmaking is essentially utilitarian in the capitalist vein, in which by maintaining a relatively neutral stance, the range of target audiences who can be engaged can be expanded to a massive spectrum, with the onus of any political reading of the films being shifted to the audience’s diverse individual faculties. Holloway comments: In Hollywood allegory lite, controversial issues can be safely addressed because they must be ‘read off’ other stories by the viewer; while the ‘allegory’ is sufficiently loose or ‘lite’, and the other attractions on offer are sufficiently compelling or diverse, that viewers can enjoy the film without needing to engage at all with the risky ‘other story’ it tells. (83)

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This has often led to a straight jacketing of the narratives, oversimplifying the political depth of the crisis that is represented, at least, to a certain degree and also that it stands in direct irony toward the fact that post-9/11 America had gotten highly politicized within an atmosphere of unfathomable grief, fearful anxiety and military nationalism. The subsequent politically charged response and retaliation of the Bush government against the 9/11 attacks, the ‘War on Terror’ agenda, ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’, the Homeland Security Act, among others, have informed and latently guided the superhero movie genre’s story lines and thematic concerns, but the politics of it all, if not totally lost, has been side lined in translation. Drawing parallels to Richard Maltby’s idea of ‘conscience liberalism’14 and his notion of the ‘allegory lite’, Holloway observes that “Hollywood’s commercial preference for ‘conscience liberalism’ allegory lite made for evasive filmmaking about 9/11 and the war on terror” (83). One of the most glaring instances of such an act of political evasion has been in terms of the representation of the antagonist in the superhero movie franchisee. As a nod to the continuing repercussion of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the standard villain of the post-9/11 superhero movies have been overwhelmingly presented as a terrorist figure indulged in nefarious activities against the country and by extension the world. While the ulterior motives of these villains have been shown to be varying from acquiring secret weaponry to causing political upheaval to total world domination in some cases, the core strategy of them have been presented as straightforward dissemination of terror. While the post-9/11 trauma and anxiety shaped the emergence of a more morally complex superhero, a being burdened by the awareness of his powers and shortcomings and trying to make sense in a world more vulnerable and insecure than ever before, the villain figure has mostly remained the proverbial other, an outsider to be engaged primarily as an external threat. He’s been upgraded to be a worthy foil to the new superhero, but mostly in terms of might. The superhero has to put in all of his heroics to counter the strength and theatrical ingenuity of the revamped super villain resulting in moments of spectacular cinematic action, but there is hardly any real attempt to understand such an adversary. While the movies have tried to lay bare the turbulent psychodrama of the post-9/11 superhero, the psychological machination of the super villain are left shrouded in obscurity and this sense of obfuscation deters any form of real dialogue with him resulting in different forms of further misrepresentation and stereotyping. In the following section, I would attempt to analyze how in spite of adhering to the formula of casting the villain in the same model of the terrorist ‘other’ through the gamut of the superhero movies produced under the stable of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there has been hardly any proper engagement in exploring the politics of the villains in these movies. I would first read Marvel Cinematic Universe or MCU’s debut movie Iron Man (2008) and see how selective representation, stereotyping and erasure of agency work in the case of the terrorist villain in the film. Next, I will study one of MCU’s latest offering, the TV miniseries The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021) and examine how the

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antagonist, initially presented as a politically motivated agent of resistance against the system is provided with an uneven character arc and ultimately, arguably and inadvertently, straightjacketed as a terrorist figure as a final result.

IRON MAN and the Terrorist Villain: Selective Representation and Stereotyping The superhero movie’s financial dream run began for Marvel Studios in the year 2008 with Iron Man kick starting the Marvel Cinematic Universe (or MCU) that would gradually become a multi-billion dollar worth franchise in the following decade or so. The choice of Iron Man as the first foundational film of MCU is telling as it successfully introduces and establishes the post-9/11 fractured superhero who is haunted by personal anxieties and fear of failure as he tries to make sense of the increasingly complex world around him. Iron Man’s course of action which go on to define him are often ethically questionable and his unbridled power even pose as potential threat to the society already gripped in post-9/11 paranoia. Though never making any direct references, Iron Man taps into this sense of vulnerability and constantly allude to ‘War on Terror’ agenda and its concomitant geopolitical ramification. The film opens with Tony Stark, the young mercurial successor of inventor and arms manufacturer, Howard Stark, who appears brazenly self-occupied with a tongue in cheek offensive sense of humor and a strong narcissistic trait almost bordering on god complex as we see him being escorted by a group of soldiers in a heavily armored Humvee in the very opening sequence of the movie. The soldiers are visibly impressed and even intimidated by Tony Stark’s charisma and celebrity status who as in a few sequence later would be revealed, is returning from a spectacular demonstration of Jericho, his company Stark Industries’ ‘freedom line’ missile, in front of a group of army personnel in the Kunwar province in Afghanistan. The rapid succession of visual and informative cues provided in the very first few minutes of the film are enough to jog one’s memory regarding Operation Enduring Freedom, the code name for the US-led war in Afghanistan against the Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. While the original Iron Man character was launched by Marvel Comics in the 1960s, with the backdrop of the ongoing Vietnam War, director John Favreau and producer and creative think-tank Kevin Fiege of Marvel Studios decided to recast the character in a more contemporary geopolitical context of the Afghanistan war. In the vehicle, as one of the soldiers asks for Tony’s permission for a photo with him and makes a peace hand gesture while posing for the photo, Tony quips: “Yeah peace, I love peace. I’d be out of a job with peace” (Iron Man 00:01:32–01:33), referring to his business of arms manufacturing and strategy of war profiteering. Incidentally, in a later sequence as the film would rewind to 36 hours ago, it would be shown how Tony Stark is felicitated for his meteoric rise as an industrialist and for changing the “face of the weapon industry by ensuring freedom and protecting America and her interests around the globe” (Iron Man 00:03:41–03:48) indicating America’s

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fascination with the military-industrial complex. Also during the earlier Jericho missile demonstration Tony would be bragging about the advanced technology of his company’s weapon suggesting that by the power of such intimidation tactics of having superior weaponry, America has worked out things in its way so far. He would declare: “Find an excuse to let one of these off the chain and I personally guarantee you the bad guys won’t even want to come out of their caves” (Iron Man 00:15:11–15:42) Ironically, after the demonstration while returning to base with the soldiers and army personnel, the convoy carrying Tony is suddenly attacked with heavy artillery killing most of the team. Clambering out of the vehicle Tony hides behind a cover to protect himself from the ongoing gunfire only to find a missile fly and land close to him. In a brisk cut, the camera zooms in to show the words ‘Stark Industries’ embossed on the side of the missile before it explodes knocking Tony off. This is indeed telling as it goes on to hint at the contested yet popular narrative of Osama Bin Laden, the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks, being hailed as the Frankenstein’s monster once created by America, now turning back on its own creator. Shell shocked and wounded, Tony is seen to be lying in rubbles with blood oozing out of his vest.15 The screen fades to white and the next shot cuts to Tony being held captive in a dimly lit make shift bunker surrounded by a group of armed men who seem to be Middle Eastern insurgents and would gradually be revealed to be members of the terrorist organization, The Ten Rings. The men with scarf covered faces threateningly declare in their native language, which appears to be a distorted mix of Hindi and Urdu, that it is they who have been pushed to the limits as their faith and their belief have been questioned and as they have been seen as ruthless and barbaric. The screen zooms out with the voices getting muffled and fades to black with the title card ‘Iron Man’ being flashed on the screen indicating the commencement of the story out of such a specific context. Richard Jackson while discussing how identity is represented in narratives of counterterrorism argues that it is a common practice to otherize the terrorists by portraying them as figures who are “endlessly demonized and vilified as being evil, barbaric and inhuman” ( Jackson 59). The language of such narratives try to drive home the point that “identity rather than deliberation is the basis of human action: terrorists behave as they do not because they are rationally calculating political actors but simply because it is in their nature to be evil” (59). Iron Man adapts this strategy of constructing identity from the very start as it presents the terrorists as war mongering barbarians not exposed to the enlightening ideas of justice and freedom which are virtues reserved for America, here represented by the titular character of Iron Man. The play of language establishes and reinforces such a binary with Tony being considered the upholder of ‘freedom’ and his super missiles like ‘the Jericho’ being produced under ‘freedom line’, while the bad guys are mentioned to be residing in ‘caves’ and thought to be ‘barbaric’ and brutish. Indeed, as if to prove the point, the insurgents who hold Tony captive are shown to be residing and operating from a cavernous terrain, speaking

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a language which is alien to Tony who now is seen to be wounded from the earlier missile explosion and has an electromagnet attached to his chest to stop the residual shrapnel from damaging his internal organs. When Tony is moved around through the place, the shocking self-realization that after everything he is an arms manufacturer dawns upon him as he finds out how the insurgents have amassed a huge stock of arms and ammunition manufactured mostly by none other than his own Stark Industries. As Tony refuses to their demand of making the latest Jericho missile for them, he is subjected to graphic torture by the terrorists. Ironically the visuals of torture which involve tactics similar to waterboarding invariably recalls the horrific images from the notorious US-controlled Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib, during the Iraq War where war prisoners were subjected to inhuman physical and psychological torture flouting major international human rights law.16 By reframing and reimagining the torture visuals in a reversed scenario, Iron Man appears to absolve the historical guilt of the perpetrating party and further provides justification for the systemic torture as a form of retributive vengeance unleashed upon the enemies. In the movie too, Tony exacts his vengeance in the most spectacularly incendiary fashion against the terrorists. Under the pretense of making the missile as directed, Tony instead covertly builds up a prototype of the Iron Man suit, the Mark 1 armor and burns down the entire terrorist base with makeshift flamethrowers attached to his suit and escapes. In the process, he also tries to destroy all the Stark Industries’ weapons and artillery the terrorists have hoarded for their use. This particular act inevitably foreshadows Tony’s future decision to opt out of the arms trade as a result of a seeming change of conscience and realization of the far reaching impact of a misguided military-industrial complex. What is noteworthy is that as Tony goes on in a rampage of destroying the terrorist base, the foot soldiers of the enemy camp hardly have a chance against the superior weaponry and suit of Tony. Their gun power offers no serious threat to Tony in his suit that almost casually decimates them in seconds. Beneath the flashy theatricality, the nonchalance with which Tony exacts his violent revenge is disturbing at a deeper level for in this punitive act delivered by a prospective superhero, there appears no slightest consideration for the lives that go heavily punished. In Frames of War, Judith Butler notes: “If certain lives do not qualify as lives or are, from the start, not conceivable as lives within certain epistemological frames, then these lives are never lived nor lost in the full sense” (Butler 1). Devoid of individuality and presented in hordes, the terrorists in the movie mostly occupy such precarious spaces where they could be casually expended without much consideration, for neither their lives nor their political agencies are recognized by the dominant structures of power. Interestingly, the violent experiences at Afghanistan and the realization of the fact that his weapons are being misused, seem to deeply impact Tony who has an apparent change of heart, represented literally by the arc reactor placed in his chest, as he comes back to America and declares in a press conference that he would be shutting down his company’s weapons manufacturing

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division. The reason, he states, for taking such a major decision is that he would like himself to be more responsible and accountable for his actions. He states: “I  saw young Americans killed by the very weapons I created to defend and protect them. And I saw that I had become part of a system that is comfortable with zero accountability” (Iron Man 44:05–44:39). The rhetoric of the rationale, however, betrays the politics behind such a step. Notes Terrence McSweeney in Avengers Assemble: Stark’s experience in Afghanistan has led to this epiphany and the recognition of the lives of others, but it is not the lives of all others that he has been compelled to recognize. In spite of his apparent sincerity, it is only the lives of young American soldiers lost that he mentions and not the hundreds of thousands killed or displaced in Iraq or Afghanistan during the ‘War on Terror’, a conflict in which he has been shown to have actively participated in. (51) The selective magnanimity on Tony’s part can be seen to be falling through further as he next decides to construct a new Iron Man suit, a superior and highly militarized version of the prototypical one that he made in the caves of Afghanistan. While opting out of the role of being the celebrated arms supplier to the government out of his seemingly humanitarian concerns, Tony instead chooses to weaponize himself. Once he perfects the icing flaw of his Mark II armor, the opportune battlefield testing ground for his revamped suit, the Mark III armor, becomes the village of Gulmira, once again in Afghanistan. Listening to TV reports of Gulmira, where members from the Ten Rings are found to be heavily terrorizing the locals with the help of residual Stark Industry weapons, Tony flies to Afghanistan to save the day. It can be argued that Gulmira holds a special place of importance in Tony’s trajectory of becoming Iron Man, for it is the native village of Ho Yinsen, the man who saved Tony twice, first by operating him out of the near fatal initial attack he suffered in Afghanistan and also by helping Tony build the prototypical suit and escape while sacrificing his own life. Tony’s concern with peacekeeping in Gulmira may appear to spring out of his social concerns, but it is understandably underlined by a desire for vengeance against the terrorists out of a personal vendetta. This notion gets validation by the fact that in the process of saving the villagers, Tony in his Iron Man suit goes on to kill multiple of the insurgents without any show of consideration or remorse. In The Long Shadow of 9/11: America’s Response to Terrorism, Brian Michael Jenkins and John Godges while examining what went wrong in the American “War on Terror” from diverse angles point out how a sense of hubris led them to such missteps. Referring to the observation made by the US Ambassador James Dobbins, Jenkins and Godges note how overconfidence and overreaction in Afghanistan and the Iraq War, respectively, were two major m ­ iscalculations (11). Jenkins and Dodges further refer to Arturo Munoz, counterterrorism official working with the CIA during that period, who in turn claims that the dissemination and

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application of resources in Afghanistan was another problematic issue. Observes Munoz: Instead of honoring Afghan terms of peace, utilizing village institutions to maintain security, and training Afghans to do most of their own fighting and rebuilding …, the United States and NATO tried to impose Western ways of doing things. (Qtd. in Jenkins and Dodges 12) Tony’s involvement with Gulmira only goes on to corroborate the above observations. Moreover, Tony’s extra-juridical involvement in a faraway land is in a way given strategic allowance and approval from the military as they cover up the whole incident and the following fighter plane fiasco as an unfortunate training accident. This would mark the beginning of Iron Man’s close gradual association with the military, reinstating, albeit in a different manner, the earlier structure of the American military-industrial complex. While Tony gets busy adapting to his new superhero identity, one of the more conspicuous faces among the hordes of insurgents, Raza, the leader of one faction of the Ten Rings, procures the exoskeleton of the Tony’s Mark 1 armor and plans to take on Iron Man. Raza and his men are however shown to be incapable of understanding and decoding the complex technology behind the construction of the suit reconfirming the oriental stereotype of the intellectual inferiority of the Middle East. In an interesting turn of events, Raza is met by Obadiah Stane, Stark Industry’s second in command, who is soon revealed to be a close collaborator with the terrorists as he has been the one arming them with Stark Industry weapons and also the one who had paid them to finish off Tony Stark. Raza proposes a deal to give the Iron Man armor and the salvaged design blueprints of the suit to Stane in exchange of a supply of future Iron soldiers for the Ten Rings. It is noteworthy, that Raza’s demand as shown in the film stems out of his desire for straightforward world domination rather than any deeper political engagement and such depiction flattens out all geopolitical complexities involved in between rather than addressing them. While talking about the deal involving the exchange of the armor, Stane double crosses Raza, paralyzing him within seconds with a sonic taser and points out how technology has been the weak point in Raza’s part of the world. This once again creates the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ binary and alludes to Samuel Huntington’s theory of the clash of civilizations. Stane orders his men to finish off Raza and his gang who are put away never to be seen any more in the film. It is indeed telling, how the representative terrorist leader as projected in the film is robbed of his agency and rendered as an inconsequential actor in the grander scheme of things. The film gradually goes on to depict a final showdown between Iron Man and Stane sacrificing the entire terrorist angle, thereby also absolving itself of any responsibility to engage with further discourses on terrorism. The selective representation therefore overall impacts and limits the understanding of the complex factors behind the terrorist activities as depicted in the film.

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The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and the Terrorist Villain: Delegitimizing and Straightjacketing In one of MCU’s latest offerings, the seven-part television miniseries The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021), the viewers are introduced to a new type of antagonist going by the name of the Flag-Smashers. The series deals with a vulnerable world still coming to terms with the aftermath of the cataclysmic events of ’the Snap’, where Thanos, one of Marvel’s ultimate super villains, wiped off half the population of the planet as depicted in Avengers: Infinity Wars (2018) and ‘the Blip’, where the Avengers subsequently restored order and brought back the departed by defeating Thanos as shown in Avengers: Endgame, respectively. In such circumstances, the international council known as The Global Repatriation Council, or the GRC was formed whose objective was to manage resources for the refugees displaced by the events of the Blip by reactivating their citizenship, ensuring healthcare, social security and so on. With the sudden return of the victims of the Snap, the world got once again thrown into chaos as the new status quo was put off balance. People who had been given refuge by the GRC were suddenly being evicted by the governments as they came under pressure of managing and reinstating the earlier populace who came back post Blip. The poor management of the GRC naturally led to growing resentment among the refugees who were anyway not provided with proper schemes of relocation. Moreover, as the GRC decided to deport the refugees to their origin countries once the victims after Blip returned, the resentment and tension escalated in intensity, ultimately leading to the formation of the Flag-Smashers, an anti-­nationalist group that was opposed to the ways of GRC’s treatment of the refugees. With the motto of ‘One World, One People’, the Flag-Smashers aimed at reinstating the world as it was before the Blip without no borders and no sectarian governmental policies defining nationhood and citizenship, providing material aids and support to the less fortunate people and refugees. Their seemingly noble and humanitarian goal soon attracted loyal and dedicated followers from all over the globe who rallied behind their mysterious leader, Karli Morgenthau, aka the Flag-Smasher. It is gradually shown however, that Karli, who herself is displaced and relocated to the city of Madripoor owing to the policies of the GRC, has been using questionable means to achieve her organizations’ ends. Stealing multiple vials of the Super Soldier Serum and using it on herself and some of her close team members to enhance physical strength and abilities, Karli is soon seen to be resorting to extreme and violent measures in order to succeed in her plans of thwarting the GRC. With her repeated attempts of jeopardizing the GRC’s plans, Karli and her group are soon identified as public enemies, outright delegitimizing their agency and capacity as political opponents and gradually labeled and presented as terrorists, thereby robbing them the chance of pursuing their demands. By delegitimizing and straightjacketing the dissenting other, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier takes recourse to the same MCU formula of presenting the antagonist as a terrorist figure.

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In his incisive study, Daniel Bar-Tal argues that delegitimization is the “­categorization of groups into extreme negative social categories which are excluded from human groups that are considered as acting within the limits of acceptable norms and/or values” (Bar-Tal 170). Delegitimization in its process often involves negative categorization of groups into ‘terrorists’, ‘enemies’ ‘carriers of infectious political and physical diseases, primitives, and savages’ (170). Delegitimization is often reliant on “institutionalized support” and “sometimes enforced by political institutions or by legal code” (171). While commenting on the means of delegitimization, Bar-Tal points out among other, the process of ‘dehumanization’ where members of the delegitimized group are often labeled as “possessing inhuman traits, different from the human race” (172) and ‘out casting’ where they are marked as “violators of pivotal social norms” such as “murderers, thieves, psychopaths, or maniacs”. Bar-Tal farther argues that when groups are antagonistic to each other, and especially when such antagonism leads to violence, the opposing groups tend to delegitimize one another “in order to justify their negative attitudes, and especially their actions of killing and destruction” (174). The Falcon and the Winter Soldier adopts all such discourses of delegitimization to frame the antagonists and ultimately manipulate its narrative to straightjacket them as terrorists. Chronologically distanced from the events of 9/11 by almost two decades, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier set in the second decade of the 21st century and tackling with many contemporary political issues, still bear in its narrative, impacts of the tragic events of September 11, 2001. Though the MCU have never gone on to present the occurrences of 9/11 nor even directly refer to them, there have been multiple indirect allusions to the tragic and violent attacks and their aftershocks. For example, in The Avengers (2012), the attack on midtown Manhattan by Loki and the alien others, the Chitauris, was MCU’s dramatized parallel of the terrorist attack of the Twin Towers in Manhattan. Similarly, the Snap by another alien other, Thanos in Avengers: Infinity Wars, which led to the obliteration of half of the globe’s population echoed the sudden tragic deaths of thousands owing to the 9/11 attacks by the terrorists. The post-Snap MCU world trying to cope up with the tragedy and trauma of the great loss could also be understood as an attempt at mirroring the post-9/11 scenario of America. As the grave events of 9/11 made an indelible impact on the American society and changed it in unprecedented ways, the world of MCU also was altered by the defining events of the Snap and the Blip. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is set up in such a transformed and volatile world, where the celebrated heroes of yesteryears like Iron Man and Captain America are either absent, or retired or dead to save the day and the onus of responsibility comes down to the close associates of Captain America Steve Rogers, namely upon Sam Wilson, Falcon and Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier. Both Falcon and the Winter Soldier are in turn fractured individuals, dealing with personal demons of their own in an increasingly chaotic world which no longer nurtures or encourages the idealistic worldview championed by their now gone but longtime partner and leader Steve Rogers aka

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Captain America. While Sam Wilson aka Falcon, whom Captain America has left his shield with, tries to make sense of the layered identity of a black man with such national responsibility in present day America, Bucky Barnes or the Winter Soldier is dealing with immense post-traumatic stress disorder and tries to make amends for the past acts of violence he was involved in. Though the show’s governing concern is the psychological exploration of both of its titular characters, the duo’s mission of thwarting the prime antagonist Karli and her group the Flag-Smashers, becomes the prime narrative drive for the show. While Torres makes aware of Sam about the Flag-Smashers, the direct introduction to the Flag-Smashers comes in the form of them looting a bank in Switzerland in the very first episode of the show establishing them as deviants from the very start. This is closely followed in the next episode with them having a direct confrontation with the heroes in Germany where they with the display of their super strength easily dominate and defeat the Falcon, the Winter Soldier, new Captain America John Walker and his partner Battlestar, Lemar Hoskins and escape. As the humiliated heroes discuss strategies during their return, John Walker proclaim how the antagonists appear to be violent revolutionaries who aren’t good for any one’s cause. The process of delegitimization thus begins categorizing the Flag-Smashers as specifically categorized group from the very start. Karli and the Flag-Smashers are next shown to be going to a safe house where they are welcomed like heroes and are informed how they are gradually seen to be more as liberators for the dispossessed than as terrorists by a section of the people and are told how they have been fast gaining popularity and followers. This hailing of the Flag-Smashers as freedom fighters directly puts forward the discourses involving the shared common domains of terrorism and revolutionary political violence in the show and harks back to the debates revolving around the controversial popular saying that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. While Karli and her group go on indulging in the application of strategic violence jeopardizing the functioning of the governmental institutions and systems, they are also, at least initially, seen to be aiding the refugees with food and supplies and working for their cause of liberation from the dictates of the GRC. This in turn makes them more aligned and identifiable with guerrilla soldiers, or more specifically the urban guerrilla,17 who as noted by the Brazilian politician, writer and guerrilla fighter, Carlos Marighella is essentially a friend of the people and of freedom. What is jarring in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is that though Karli is initially modeled as an urban guerrilla leader and the face of resistance against an unsympathetic system, all of a sudden she is made to veer track and resort to brutal violence against whosoever opposes her in her mission and belief. In one instance of unmitigated violence, she after looting the Lithuanian GRC depot sets the facility on fire with explosion while there are still people in there. When one of her own team members, shocked by such action questions her, she claims that violence is the only language that the system understands. It is noteworthy that while both often might have similar political goals of disrupting the system, the means employed by guerrilla war fighters and terrorists differ

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in character. Guerrilla warfare does include in its strategy, the use of systematic violence but it is mostly directed toward military targets, unlike terrorism which involve unleashing of violence even against innocent civilians. Paul Wilkinson finds this an important determining distinction. He states: Guerrillas may fight with small numbers and often inadequate weaponry, but they can and often do fight according to conventions of war, taking and exchanging prisoners and respecting the rights of non-combatants. Terrorists place no limits on means employed and frequently resort to widespread assassination, the waging of ‘general terror’ upon the indigenous civilian population. (Qtd. in Schmidt 42) Karli’s violent spree continues and takes another dramatic turn as she and her team of Flag-Smashers are once again confronted by the team of superheroes. Gathered for the mourning of the passing of one of their own Karli notices Sam aka Falcon present in the place. Sam approaches Karli and tries to sympathetically reason with her about the fatality Karli’s plans are causing all around. Karli stating that she is the hope for the millions disposed due to the Blip and in turn asks, “So you want me to stop because people are getting hurt, right? But Sam what if I am making the world a better place?” (“The Whole World is Watching” 21.53–22.05). When Sam states that it can never be a better place if it is achieved through killing people and Karli is indeed killing innocent people, Karli declares: “They are not innocent. They are roadblocks in my journey and I’d kill them again if I had to” (“The Whole World is Watching” 23.20–23.32). Though Karli immediately clarifies that she didn’t mean what she said and in actuality she is fighting for the less fortunate, the show makes her supremacist tendencies becoming apparent. Their conversation is suddenly interrupted by the arrival of John Walker, the newly designated Captain America who tries to confront and capture Karli, who however manages to escape. In a couple of sequences later, as the team of the superheroes again come face to face with Karli and her team, their confrontation escalates leading to the death of Battlestar Lemar Hoskins from a sudden accidental blow by Karli. The killing of his partner infuriates John Walker to the degree that he chases down Mathias, one of the Flag-Smashers and brutally kills him off by battering him with the iconic Captain America shield even when Mathias pleads before him in front of multiple on looking civilians, many of whom records the shocking incident in their phones. This highly charged moment is bound to jog one’s memories regarding the brutal death of George Floyd, a man of color who died begging for life while being physically restrained by white police officers from Minneapolis Police Department. Moreover, the symbolic shot of Captain America’s shield tainted with the blood of the killed goes on to throw light on the issues of government culpability in terms of casualties and war crimes committed during the prolonged War on Terror.18 This pivotal event in the series shifts the attention of the narrative to the idea of toxic white supremacy from Karli and

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the Flag-Smashers for a while, who are seen to prepping up for an all-out assault on the GRC in the background. But the transition in Karli’s character seems to get starker as she is seen to be accepting weapons from one individual, Georges who has personal vendetta against the Falcon. When Dovich tries to reason with Karli asking whether their mission now allows them to work with criminals, Karli refutes Dovich’s objection stating that they themselves are being considered “criminals” by the system (“Truth” 49:01–49:52). In a couple of sequences later as the GRC move toward their decisive and controversial policy making vote about the deportation of the refugees, their headquarters in lower Manhattan, NYC is infringed by the Flag-Smashers who sabotage the voting and hold the GRC officials hostage. With Falcon and the Winter Soldier arriving at the scene and attempting to thwart their plans, the Flag-Smashers decide to make a move as they round up and put the GRC officials in vans and escape with the superheroes on their tails. Seeing that their entire plan might be jeopardized, Karli states that if needed, they got to kill off the hostages, another extreme idea that startles even her fellow teammates. The subsequent showdown that follows shows the superheroes fighting Karli and the Flag-Smashers who try to execute their plan of putting down the hostage GRC officials. Bucky and Sam both try to reason with Karli about the futility of her way if not her goal, but Karli, committed to her goal, argues that her objective is far superior to her life, and how both Bucky and Sam, the modern conflicted superheroes of their age, are fighting for a system which ultimately has exploited them too. In an important change from standard MCU plotlines, the heroes of the show attempt to have a dialogue with the antagonist which helps to properly illumine if not the villain’s motivation, at least her sense of frustration and dejection. This is why Sam decides not to fight Karli back, but rather resist and continue attempting to have a dialogue with her as she goes on fighting with him out of sheer desperation. Karli, however, is shot down and in one of the moving moments of the show Falcon sympathetically carries and brings her body for medical attention. As one of the senators and one GRC official congratulate Falcon on stopping the ‘terrorists’, he urges them not to call them one, since these labels are loaded and are depended on multiple factors and viewpoints, leading to their delegitimization. With real life crises surrounding refugees all around the globe escalating as millions of helpless people are stranded without homes, Karli’s objective of fight can hardly be questioned, though her strategies definitely raise objections. Karli’s mass mobilizing ability also parallels techniques by forces of resistances all around the world against fascist governments and unfair systems. The use of technology to connect to others in the fight for resistance also echoes modern day social media campaigns which have often proved to be highly successful against authoritarian states. In recent time, such resistances worldwide, has indeed lead to delegitimization of the groups by the stronger political actors of the regimes thereby fueling more violence instead of trying to mitigate it. Bar-Tal has argued that “delegitimization provides a conflict support mechanism, and it is very difficult to resolve a conflict as long as delegitimization continues” (Bar-Tal 174).

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It is indeed sad then, how the show fails to properly draw the character arc of Karli, whose transformation from being the face of resistance to the face of a ­terrorist organization seems jarring and falls under the same structure of bracketing the antagonists as terrorist figures, delegitimizing them without really trying to understand their cause.

Conclusion One of the most shocking visuals to have come out recently in 2021, almost 20 years apart from the iconic image of the Falling Man19 moments after the airplane crashed in the WTC in 2001, also involves an airplane and two other falling men, but this time from the other part of the globe, Afghanistan. In a desperate attempt to flee the Taliban occupation, people tried to cling to the wheels and wings of an US aircraft flying out of Kabul airport after President Joe Biden decided to call back the American troops posted in Afghanistan ending the almost two decade War on Terror which among other things has so far resulted in the loss of millions of lives and billions of dollars spent in expenses. The futility of war is nowhere more glaring than here as the withdrawal of US troops leaves Afghanistan in even worse condition than before the war started, with the fundamentalist Taliban once again taking over the country. It is further ironical that with the end of a war on terror that began as a retaliation of the September 11 terrorist attacks, reports suggest that there may be future terrorist attacks in the likes of 9/1120 with the military forces being withdrawn and the international community abandoning Afghanistan to what looks like a very grave future Taliban rule. Giovanna Borradori notes that according to Habermas, violence can be seen as a result of distorted communication (Borradori 63). Our daily lives are guided by practices of communication that aid in our understanding of the other. Similarly we accept and function within the limits of certain common rules of society, culture and community and such shared common rules and background help us to understand the perspective of the other, which Habermas sees as “symmetrical conditions of mutual perspective-taking” (Borradori 64). In cases of failure in such understanding, fellow beings grow distant and indifferent to each other’s perspectives. This as Borradori understands Habermas is “the beginning of a distortion in communication, a misunderstanding or a deception, of which terrorism is the most extreme version” (Borradori 64). Terrorism which involves a “spiral of violence begins as a spiral of distorted communication that leads through the spiral of uncontrolled reciprocal mistrust to the breakdown of communication” (Habermas qtd. in Borradori 64). Superhero movies post 9/11, especially movies from the MCU in their pattern of recasting the antagonist as the violent terrorist and delegitimizing them go on distancing the veritable other without allowing room for shared trust and communication. Such recasting leads to stereotyping too, with the portrayal of the villain done mostly in terms of brute might, lacking independent political

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agency and sufficient intellectual capital and therefore rendered mostly incapable of participating in a dialogue. While Iron Man, one of the MCU films to comprise direct echoes of 9/11 and its aftermath, not only presents the villain as a Middle Eastern terrorist stereotype but also makes him inconsequential even in that capacity, in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the villain though initially presented as a leader of resistance and mass movement, is successively delegitimized as the other and is soon made to adopt the guise of a violent terrorist with confused political goals. Not until there are attempts made both in films as well as real lives to initiate and sustain an unbroken communication with the other, thereby establishing of trust, would there be any chances of mitigating the possibilities of violent terrorist repercussions in the future.

Notes 1 See Townshed p. 3. 2 See Whittaker, Terrorism: Understanding the Global Threat, pp. 22–23. 3 It is often seen to be distinct from revolutionary guerrilla warfare, though that too has distinct political undercurrent. See Laquer (2001, p. 5). 4 See Gupta, Who Are the Terrorists? 2006, p. 6. 5 Borradorri 28. 6 Dan Hassler-Forest remarks that the distinct pattern of media coverage of the event “strengthened the perception of 9/11 as a singularity”. See Hassler-Forest, Capitalist Superheroes: Caped Crusaders in the Neoliberal Age, 2010, p. 27. 7 Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 2002, p. 11. 8 German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen created much public uproar with his provocative comment equating the 9/11 attack as the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos. 9 Late American film director Robert Altman commented: “The movies set the pattern, and these people have copied the movies. Nobody would have thought to commit an atrocity like that unless they’d seen it in a movie. How dare we continue to show this kind of mass destruction in movies? I just believe we created this atmosphere and taught them how to do it.” 10 Tim Gruenewald notes how Karl Rove, senior advisor and assistant to George Bush met with almost 50 top Hollywood executives. See Laderman and Gruenewald, Imperial Benevolence: U.S. Foreign Policy and American Popular Culture since 9/11, 2018, p. 141. 11 Zizek observes this phenomenon as the ultimate empirical proof that Hollywood does in fact function as an ‘ideological state apparatus’ (16). 12 See Dan Hassler Forest; Brown; Laderman and Grunewald. 13 Brown, The Modern Superhero in Films and Television, 2016, p. 64. 14 See Richard Maltby’s Hollywood Cinema. David Holloway elucidates Maltby’s idea of Hollywood’s ‘conscience liberalism’ as “a filmmaking practice that gestures towards political conflict and controversy, but only to marginalize, obscure, override or resolve it, helping generate maximum audience share by depoliticizing what begin as ostensibly political interventions” (Holloway 83). 15 Frances Pheasant-Kelly comments on Tony touching his blood from his chest “as if to test its realness, the scene exemplifying Žižek’s notion of “the direct experience of the Real as opposed to everyday social reality—the Real in its extreme violence as the price to be paid for peeling off the deceptive layers of reality”” (Kelly 147). 16 The 1949 Geneva Protocol on the Treatment of Prisoners of War. The argument was often that the War on terror had almost created a paradigm shift in the understanding

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and implementation of strategies of warfare which needs to function transcending such protocols if necessary. 17 Urban guerrilla as the nomenclature suggests are guerrilla soldiers who are operational mostly in cities, unlike traditional guerrillas who use the countryside terrains as their operational bases. As a result of rapid urbanization, there has been shift of a large part of the populace from the rural areas to the cities, which in turn has led to the shifting of the bases from the rural areas to the urban ones for the guerrillas. Moreover, the tactical advantage of anonymity and camouflage provided by crowded metropolises has proved beneficial to their strategies of warfare. Urban guerrillas in their planned activities of subversion and sabotage of governmental institutions and forces, make use of the urban environment and in most cases they seek popular mass support for the functioning of their strategies. 18 Watson Institute, Brown University estimates a staggering amount of civilian deaths and total war casualties in post 9/11 wars. 19 Associated Press photojournalist Richard Drew clicked the iconic image of a still unidentified individual jumping headlong from one of the towers of WTC as it is rocked by explosion after the plane hit it. 20 Abigail Ng from CNBC reports: “A repeat of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks could happen if the international community abandons Afghanistan, said Khalid Noor, a member of the former Afghan government’s peace negotiating team.”

Works Cited “Altman Says Hollywood ‘Created Atmosphere’ for September 11.” The Guardian, 18 Oct. 2001, www.theguardian.com/film/2001/oct/18/news2. Accessed 7 Aug. 2021. Avengers: Endgame. Directed by Anthony Russo, and Joe Russo, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, 2019. Avengers: Infinity War. Directed by Anthony Russo, and Joe Russo, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, 2018. Bar-Tal, Daniel. “Delegitimization: The Extreme Case of Stereotyping and Prejudice.” Stereotyping and Prejudice: Changing Conception. Springer, 1989, pp. 169–182. Baudrillard, Jean. The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays. Verso, London. 2003. Borradori, Giovanna. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. U of Chicago P, London. 2013. Brown, Jeffrey A. The Modern Superhero in Film and Television: Popular Genre and American Culture. Routedge Taylor & Francis, New York 2016. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? Verso Books, London. 2016. Chaliand, Gérard, and Arnaud Blin. The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to ISIS. U of California P, California 2016, p. 95. Crawford, Neta C., and Catherine Lutz. “Human Costs of U.S. Post-9/11 Wars: Direct War Deaths in Major War Zones | Figures | Costs of War.” https://watson. brown.edu/, Watson Institute, Brown University, 1 Sept. 2021, watson.brown.edu/­ costsofwar/figures/2021/WarDeathToll. Accessed 4 Sept. 2021. Gupta, Dipak K. Who Are the Terrorists? Chelsea House, New York 2006. Hassler-Forest, Dan. Capitalist Superheroes: Caped Crusaders in the Neoliberal Age. John Hunt Publishing, Alresford 2012. Holloway, David. 9/11 and the War on Terror. Edinburgh UP, Edinburgh 2008. Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Simon & Schuster, New York 2007. Iron Man. Directed by Jon Favreau, Paramount, 2008.

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Jackson, Richard. Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics and Counter-Terrorism. Manchester UP, Manchester. 2005. Jenkins, Brian M., and John Godges. The Long Shadow of 9/11: America’s Response to Terrorism. Rand Corporation, 2011. Laderman, Scott, and Tim Gruenewald. Imperial Benevolence: U.S. Foreign Policy and American Popular Culture since 9/11. U of California P, California 2018. Laqueur, Walter. A History of Terrorism. Transaction, New Jersey. 2001. Law, Randall D. Terrorism: A History. Polity, Cambridge 2009. Maltby, Richard. Hollywood Cinema. Wiley-Blackwell, New Jersey 1995. Marighella, Carlos. “Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla.” Marxists Internet Archive, June 1969, www.marxists.org/archive/marighella-carlos/1969/06/minimanual-­u rbanguerrilla/. Accessed 7 June 2021. McSweeney, Terrence. Avengers Assemble!: Critical Perspectives on the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Columbia UP, New York 2018. Ng, Abigail. “The World Could See Another 9/11 if It Abandons Afghanistan, Peace Negotiator Says.” CNBC, 31 Aug. 2021, www.cnbc.com/2021/09/01/­a nother-9/11will-happen-if-afghanistan-is-abandoned-negotiator.html. Accessed 4 Sept. 2021. Pheasant-Kelly, Frances. Fantasy Film Post 9/11. Springer, New York 2016. Schmid, Alex P. Political Terrorism: A Research Guide to Concepts, Theories, Data Bases, and Literature. Transaction Publishers, New Jersey 1988. Taylor, Robert. The History of Terrorism. Lucent Books, 2002. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Created by Malcolm Spellman, Disney+, 2021. Townshend, Charles. Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, Oxford. 2002. Whittaker, David. Terrorism: Understanding the Global Threat. Routledge, New York. 2013, pp. 22–23. Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. Verso, London 2002.

13 POST-9/11 DIGITAL MARTYRDOM – DIGITAL EPHEMERA OF IRELAND AND DIGITAL PROTEST MOVEMENT OF BANGLADESH Kusumita Datta

Post-9/11 and Religious Martyrs of Ritual Media The surge of martyrs after the attacks on the Twin Towers and Pentagon in New York, America on September 11, 2001, was a worldwide phenomenon. The proliferation was all the more perceptible in the digital media space. To hunt down the perpetrators of 9/11, President George W. Bush initiated the War on Terror, which had its fallout in the world including Ireland and Bangladesh. This study does not only focus on Irish-Americans and Bangladeshi-Americans who lost their lives during the attacks and were mourned as martyrs in their native country. This study focuses on how America dealt with an increasing potential rise of martyrs in Ireland and Bangladesh post-9/11, through the generation of digital martyr ephemera and how it influenced the martyr narratives of the IrishAmericans and the Bangladeshi-Americans. Danny Kuhn, posted in a public Facebook group, Love Ireland, based in Dublin, Ireland about the seven Irish-born, hundreds of Irish-Americans, and all other victims of 9/11. What was significant about this post is the image of an angel in several comments to this post which mentions the regional identification of these seven people. Media simulations of religious motifs rendered the victims of 9/11 as God’s beloved children, blessed by the angels. Commemoration ephemera like memorial cards are now circulated as remembrance gifs on social media platforms. What makes this post a significant martyr narrative is not only the note of bereavement which continues till date, or the sharing (with over 245.3 K viewers of the group, 971 responses, 97 comments and 50 shares) of religious motifs but how it makes the victims come alive years after their death. They are not just subsumed under the broad category of people as ‘martyrs’ but are humanized. Their sacrifice becomes specific, their religious reification part of a common ‘rest in peace’ line of response but also much more (2021). DOI: 10.4324/9781003362999-17

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The 9/11 rhetoric of religion, ritualism and martyrdom does not fall into the category of ‘us’ verses ‘them’ which President Bush instilled as the acceptable narrative after the September 2001 attacks in New York. In an article written 18 days after the attack, writers commented on the ritual similarity of the religious refrain: ‘Now Bush and Bin Laden have even begun to borrow each other’s rhetoric. Each refers to the other as “the head of the snake”. Both invoke God and use the loose millenarian currency of good and evil as their terms of reference’ (Roy 2001). The deaths are simultaneously acts of martyrdom for the cause of American freedom and the freedom of the desired pan-Islamic state.

Post-9/11 and the Intensification of Martyr Binaries through Digital News Ephemera This is not to say that martyrdom, and its more radical and violent counterpart terrorism was a 2001 phenomenon, but it became a more contested narrative post-9/11. In Ireland, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) is seen as the face of a terrorist struggle against the state authority of Britain. While the predominantly Catholic IRA are hailed as ‘martyrs’ in Ireland, namely the iconic hunger striker Bobby Sands, they were labeled as ‘terrorists’ by the Bush administration. Their secessionist tendencies for Northern Ireland and their desire to be united with Republican south Ireland which has an independent government made them political opponents to the unison of the British cause. Hence martyrdom for Irish independence was deemed as terrorist defiance to British statehood. This framework was also appropriated by America, age-old allies of the British. Even before the 9/11 attacks, the USA’s State Department added the Real IRA (a more radical wing of the IRA) to its list of terrorist organizations for a campaign of violence in Northern Ireland and Britain in recent years (Lacey). Irish newspapers like the Belfast Telegraph (6 September 2011 issue) emphasized that the threat of more martyrs for the Irish cause would only breed terrorists for the American cause. Hence the decommissioning of the weapons of the terrorist IRA began in earnest immediately after 9/11. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 reached a fruitful culmination in September 2001. From sectarianism to decommissioning, 9/11 has its variant contributions. Similarly in Bangladesh, religio-political associations like a group called Bangladesh Jihad came into notice when one of its members signed a fatwa issued by bin Laden in 1998, calling for a jihad against the US and Israel (Raman 2004). While ‘fatwa’ is a religious mandate ephemera, constituted in a moment and expected to generate an immediate response, its acceptance by groups in other countries brings about a solidarity movement. These enable us to understand how attacks in America would influence the socio-political scenario of Bangladesh in 2001. Beyond reports on political support for terrorism, the circulation of such ephemera among the masses adds to how the common people viewed these fatwas as mandates for freedom. Hence the 2001 attacks enabled the viewing of Laden as a martyr. With the attacks, such discussions became common in the

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digital sphere, appropriated by political parties of the new age like the Amar Bangla Party, ostensibly supported by the Jamaat-e-Islami reformists who felt that the US War on Terror was futile and contributed to a rising fear for Islam. Such a feeling was felt both by citizens of Bangladesh and the Bangladeshi immigrant community in America, and online news sites streamline information from various digital sources like reports from Bangladesh news agencies, blogs featuring personal narratives of survivors of victims. The ‘In Memoriam’ section1 narrativizes the range of martyrdom as well as foregrounds how victims were deemed as perpetrators, as hate crimes targeted Muslims post-9/11. When survivors could not go to ground zero where the attacks had taken place to pay their tributes, they watched memorial services on television. Media thus enables the continuance of martyr legacy and these snippets of televised audio-visual ephemera will remain more important in the lives of the survivors, much more important than official reports.

Post-9/11’s Martyr Hype and Social Media Ephemera While in Ireland, raging digital controversy continued for years later, like IRA’s political wing’s, Sinn Féin TDs Martin Browne and Patricia Ryan shared December 2015 Facebook posts about a ‘hologram of a plane [which] was used to fake the Twin Towers attacks’ (O’Connell 2020) and such conspiracy theories; in America, a Brooklyn radio show for Irish-American voices which the US government recognized as ‘foreign terrorist organizations’ was put under pressure only in September 2001 (Smith 2014). Media communication in Ireland matched the hype of terrorism post-9/11, while in America organizations dubbed ‘terrorists’ for long were subject to scrutiny. It is significant that terrorist activities did not rise but decreased with the decommissioning of weapons in Ireland but ‘dissident’ Irish-Americans continued to uphold the martyrdom of H-Block martyrs and those who sacrificed their lives for a united Ireland. Two days after the IRA decided to decommission, on 21 September 2001, U2, the world-famous Irish rock band, sang at a concert in New York, where singer Bono said something he has never said during 20 years on stage: ‘The IRA has chosen to disarm,’ he roared. ‘And I would like to pay tribute to the men and women of that organization. No going back. No going back’ (McDonald et al.). This concert is an instance of a global Irish voice paying tribute to the martyrs of 9/11 on American soil. The huge crowd gathered barely after a month after the attacks, stood witness to this people’s narrative of martyrdom. What is more pertinent is the use of ephemera in the concert – a glass projector where the names of all those who had to sacrifice their lives on 9/11 were displayed. Images of the concert and short videos circulated widely on television screens and social media at that time and constituted the digital ephemera where the martyrs are named. Millar writes about how digital platforms, as a medium of circulation, adds to the validity of the ephemera all the more. Individual tweets or Facebook posts, the digital equivalent to print ephemera like posters, flyers, pamphlets, tickets, have

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more evidential value,2 when a poster of a musical concert is disseminated over webpages, with photographs of performances and soaring crowds or short video clips shared with others through blogs or comments (28–29). What is more significant about the digital ephemera of martyrdom is how it comprises different media modes to generate an interjectional narrative of martyrdom. Kennedy writes about how the concreteness of digital ephemera is constituted through ‘the affordances of other objects’ (48). From television broadcasts (Facebook Page: The Joshua Tree), to clipped videos (Facebook Username: Peter Keramas), all became part of social media posts. Even as the Irish martyrs were enlisted as terror groups, the global Irish voice is hailed in social media for generations through such ephemera, disseminating the names of martyrs by evoking all media modes. Writers have focused on the 9/11 martyr memorial ephemera created in the digital space like the virtual memorials constructed by the players in the online game world of Second Life, launched in 2003 (Arnold et al. 86) but did not focus on such divergent media modes or specific communities in America. Martyrdom, even digital martyrdom, thrives on replication and historical interjection. This study attempts to direct our attention to a need for the preservation and archiving of such digital ephemera because it has not been possible to retrieve posts of 2001 in many instances for this study, to highlight the immediacy with which the friend-enemy narrative on which the martyr-terrorist narrative is based, began. Hence, this study also uses archives of newspapers to tap voices of the popular reactions post-9/11 on the creation of these binaries. While mostly they are dubbed as ‘victims’ of terrorist attacks, the concert named the common people killed on 9/11 as ‘heroes’, with the concert being aptly named ‘U2 – America: A Tribute to Heroes (21 Sept 2001) – Peace on Earth & Walk On’. It was dedicated to fundraising for firefighters, many of whom were from the Irish-American community.

Post-9/11 and People’s Martyrdom in the Democratic Digital Space The digital space may be more accessible and democratic but it generates more contestations. What constitutes people’s voices is itself a debatable narrative in the digital space. Post-9/11 martyrdom for both the Irish-Americans and the Bangladeshi-Americans constituted more of a people’s martyrdom, which do not develop under the influence of the historical martyrs of Ireland or Bangladesh. The digital archives of the leading national publication Irish America magazine highlight the sacrifices of firefighters of this community who were martyred on 9/11. The memorial will be constructed on the Michael J. Quill Irish Cultural & Sports Center’s grounds in the Catskill Mountains, a park shaped significantly like Ireland ( Johannessen 2004). Facebook posts especially comment on how IrishAmerican neighborhoods and communities were affected by the 9/11 attacks. Uploaded videos represent the martyrdom of the people through ephemera or minor object stories. We see the roster of 9/11 where the name of Irish-American

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Mike Lynch was assigned to serve as the nozzle man who would take the water hoses to the high-rise building of the Towers after it was on fire as the planes rammed into it. Mike’s death was emblematic of the death of the Irish-American families who served in New York’s police and fire departments. Through such ephemera available on the digital platform, viewed over 152,000 times with over 280 comments, the Irish-American martyrs of 9/11 come vibrantly to the fore. The video was not specifically shot for Facebook but posted by the social media handle of The Irish Post, a national newspaper of the Irish community in Great Britain, on September 11, 2001. In this way, the world of the digital dissemination of people’s martyr narratives highlights the specific sacrifices of a ­community rather through 9/11 digital creations. With media dissemination, is associated the larger concept of media remembrance, which structures the narrative of people’s martyrdom. Rahman explains the specific situation of the 9/11 media narrative in the Bangladesh political scenario: Bangladeshi media, largely secular, use the spirit of the country’s liberation war, a culmination of the nation’s ethno-linguistic identity aspirations, to offset the influences of fundamentalist Islamist political elements. However, unlike western media, mainstream Bangladeshi media construct the narrative of Islam and terrorism, focusing on the political aspect of terrorism. (63) With over 9,700 views, a video discussion on the 20th-anniversary remembrance of the 9/11 attacks during the Covid-19 pandemic, generated by the voice of political opposition Bangladesh National Party, explores the reality of the 9/11 situation in present Bangladesh. This is not just an example of commemoration ephemera but one with a remarkable significance during the period of the return of the Taliban in power in Afghanistan in August 2021. Digital ephemera, in its immediacy, in its wide circulation can bring in a remarkable range of voices with their contestations. Observations range from Awami League (the present ruling party in Bangladesh) presenting the blood from animal sacrifice during an Islamic festival as a marker of the bloodshed that terrorist activities perpetrated in Bangladesh, to the Taliban as a legitimate government which was ousted from power by the US forces 20 years ago. Such discussions on the eve of a 20th-­ anniversary do not only constitute a commemoration ephemera but generate multiple ephemeras of contestation. Video discussions during the pandemic, makes a greater inroad into household debates, as family members and acquaintances view and review the martyr-terrorist contestations.

Post-9/11 Martyr Media Wars in Bangladesh Media simulations of martyrdom in Bangladesh gaining new heights post-9/11 comprised cover stories circulated over print and digital spaces and contestations

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therein. Hashmi writes about the ‘excerption of the Internet version’ (63) of a cover story on rising Islamic fundamentalism in Bangladesh, reporting Maulana Ubaidul Huq, the cleric of Bangladesh’s national mosque castigating US President Bush as a ‘terrorist’ while addressing thousands of Muslims—including Prime Minister Khaleda Zia (newly elected in October 2001) and several cabinet ministers of Bangladesh at the Eid congregational prayer in Dhaka in December 2001. It is significant that such politically polemical statements are made in the presence of governmental officials, even as the official version is to condemn the perpetrators of the attacks, thereby dubbing the American government as ‘terrorists’ and the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks the ‘martyrs’. News channels however toe the official line in media remembrances like News18 enlisting many iconic photographs in the wake of 18 years of the 9/11 attacks around the world. One such photograph (2019) taken of crowds outside the US embassy in Dhaka as Bangladesh beefed up security around it following the terrorist attacks in Washington and New York, is of common people in Bangladesh holding placards condemning the attack on America and terrorists of the world. On placards, on glass windows and the bodies of the car, the hand-painted comments constitute the voices of the people who were supporting the official line of response. While these constitute ephemera, it is their digital archiving in the websites of news channels that make them digital ephemera. This is not to say that there were no popular newspapers in Bangladesh, who considered this glorifying American narrative as fabrications. The Daily Star, a leading English daily in Bangladesh, analyses speculative narratives, which argued that the official narrative was not believed by 84% of the Americans in 2001. Speculations ranged from spy theories hinting that the US government may have mobilized the attack to bring about “revolutionary changes” in the Middle East and “secure energy supplies” for the US (2007). Such e-versions of leading newspapers circulated a narrative of denouncement of America’s ‘War on Terror’ and made the victims of 9/11 a martyr to the economic ambitions of the state and not religious fanaticism. While internet versions spread by America are denounced by the country’s own media persons, exposing the propensity for media sensationalization post-9/11, in Bangladesh, they gain new media audiences. The Bangladesh Telecommunications Act was enacted in 2001 which enabled a national telecommunication infrastructure so that transmission of information over ­telephone, television, cable could be made accessible and regularized. This started media dissemination which culminated in the Information and Communication Technology Act of 2006, and a media-bashing in the Bangladesh Digital Security Act (BDSA), passed into law by Bangladesh President Abdul Hamid in October of 2018. Bloggers are termed ‘atheists’ and killed, even as the actions are extolled on social media, like posts by an online news portal of Bangladesh (Somoyerkonthosor 2015). Facebook groups like Blogger and Online Activist Network – BOAN, a national platform of progressive bloggers and online activists hailed the bloggers as ‘martyrs’, both within the country and abroad, where they are forced to seek asylum. Niloy Neel, a Bangladeshi blogger who was

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hacked to death has been claimed a media martyr of the recent decade (Fredrick & Cohen 2017).

Post-9/11 and Digital Merchandise and Pop Culture Creations Martyr narratives are also created and disseminated through digital ephemera like the marketing and sale of merchandise on online merchant sites. Zazzle is an American online marketplace formed in 2005 where independent artists have designed ‘Bobby Sands’ resistance T-shirts, tote bags, trucker hats, aprons and button keychains. The 1981 hunger striker’s narrative of resistance is appended as an image in these objects used by people in their everyday living (Irish32store). Digitally created and accessible, these items are also personalized and customized while entering the homes and the lives of American people. Redbubble is a similar global online marketplace operating from 2006 – with its headquarters in Australia but outlets in San Francisco, USA – where IRA merchandise are sold.3 Its designs are customized according to customer preferences. The range of ephemera from ‘British out of Ireland’ sticker, ‘Sniper at Work’ classic T-shirt, ‘Hunger Strike 1981 – Ireland – Roll of Honour’ Essential T-shirt to ‘Grab it Fast’ flat mask emphasizes the perennial means through which ephemera are recreated. These objects, or customized products, are not objects of the past, but the present. The designs are hand-painted or digitally designed and reach out to an audience, reflecting the political mood of the time. And martyrdom exists in a contested political world. While the post-9/11 world witnessed such a surge in online sales of IRA’s martyr ephemera, it also saw a banning of similar martyr figurines on eBay in 2007. An IRA volunteer from the 1921 War of Independence in Ireland figures in the ‘prohibited item policy’ of the company because it promotes violence and aggression (Bonner 2007). Whether sales of martyr ephemera is promoted or banned through digital platforms, it nevertheless sustains controversies regarding digital ephemera enabling people’s martyrdom. Except that what entails ‘people’s martyrdom’ in designer digital platforms is elusive. High prices, elite customization, party accessories transmute much of these martyr ephemera into posh commodity items which belittles the martyrs’ hunger strikes and sacrifice of common people for their country. Post-9/11 America transforms martyr ephemera into commodity ephemera, simultaneously unique and utilitarian. The Sinn Féin online shop showcases revolutionary ephemera of Palestinian ‘martyrs’ like that of the IRA ‘martyrs’, and Cusack (2014) pertinently points out that the Irish-American buyers of such products would not accept Palestinian fighters as ‘martyrs’ at all. Products like the “free Gaza/Palestine” T-shirt for €14.99 has few buyers in the American market and reflects the political mood discussed earlier. People do not participate in policy debates but it is through such ephemera that their narratives regarding martyrdom are reflected. Dissemination of martyr print ephemera like the 40th-­ anniversary edition of the Diary of Bobby Sands, by the IRA’s political business wing, Sinn Fein shop, on Facebook also enables comments of people’s dislike of

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the socio-political agendas of the party to come to the fore.4 The post-9/11 surge of martyr debates in the digital space accommodates the most wide-ranging views on a contemporary take on those premises which structure these martyr debates. Digital creations extol and parody. A popular culture repository showcases a digital ephemera collection which is defined as disposable materials like a state or county fair winner’s blue ribbon, whose photograph has been altered to represent Osama Bin Laden with his ‘mother’. Motherhood in American culture is held in high esteem, and it is a low blow to say she is a pig. Ephemera are populist and propagandist in nature. Such collections tap the emotions behind the hate crimes that increased post-9/11 to show us how everyday objects create structured prejudiced responses (like, if the artist of this image knew that Muslims consider pigs unclean anyway and do not eat pork) and expose the War on Terror as not just an official mandate. It became a community sectarian response as cloth flags, stickers, T-shirts, bandanas, hats with “United We Stand” and “God Bless America” slogans displayed everywhere. Popular culture digital repositories feature martyr contestations through ephemera.

Conclusion From digital language, to digital modes, to digital solidarities, to digital creations to digital merchandise, digital ephemera as a structuring narrative of martyrdom becomes a seminal approach of understanding post-9/11 martyr contestations. The study delineates not only the boundaries of an act of martyrdom but trace its percolation to the masses. Furthermore, representational modes of the digital will enable an understanding of martyrdom at the level of the grassroots in the wake of the 9/11 War on Terror through ritualistic martyrdom, simulated martyrdom, cyber martyrdom, world martyrdoms, cultural martyrdom and solidarity martyrdom.

Notes 1 This citation from the Indian English daily Business Standard’s online edition includes brief descriptions for the officially recorded Bangladeshi-Americans, other than Yasmin and Miah, who were killed in the 9/11 attacks which were collected from an online blog authored by M Tawsif Islam and a The Daily Star publication authored by Syed Muazzem Ali and CNN. The full article may be accessed at https://www. tbsnews.net/features/panorama/20-year-old-scars-and-trauma-remembering-­ bangladeshi-americans-who-died-911-300811. 2 The matter of evidential value is subject to the individual politics of people exerting admin controls and filtering of comments. Such debates, and their relation to the dissemination of digital martyr ephemera, is beyond the scope of this study. The reason why Facebook has been chosen for this study is that it began its journey in 2004, earlier than Twitter’s 2006 initiation, and therefore is closer to the 2001 attacks, which is the focal event in this study. 3 Redbubble’s designs are variant and continually updated. To access the range of ephemera, please see https://www.redbubble.com/shop/irish+republican+army. 4 Comments condemn the Sinn Féin for pressing the UK government to introduce abortion laws in Northern Ireland. This study does not comment on the ethicality of

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this law or justify the party’s role in it. It states how the distribution of martyr reflects the common response to policy decisions. Martyr ephemera, in this regard, generates a people’s narrative. Sinn Féin shop – Posts | Facebook.

Works Cited 9/11: Post-Mortem of the “Official Story” | The Daily Star. Accessed 25 Jun 2021. “18 Years Since 9/11 Attacks: The 101 Most Iconic Photos.” Photograph 81. New18. 11 Sep 2019. https://www.news18.com/photogallery/world/18-years-since-911-­ attacks-the-101-most-iconic-photos-805219.html. Accessed 14 Mar 2021. Arnold, Martin Gibbs, Tamara Kohn, James Meese and Bjorn Nansen. “Mixing Repertoires: Commemoration in Digital Games and Online Worlds.” In Death and Digital Media. New York & London: Routledge, 2018, pp. 75–97. Bonner, Kelly. “IRA Figurine Banned from eBay.” BBC Northern Ireland. 12 Jun 2007. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/6742171.stm. Accessed 21 Jul 2021. Cusack, Jim. “Sinn Fein Cash in on IRA Links as It Sells Bobby Sands Portraits for €199.” Independent.ie. 4 Oct 2014. https://www.independent.ie/tablet/news/sinn-fein-cashin-on-ira-links-as-it-sells-bobby-sands-portraits-for-199-30638789.html. Accessed 25 Aug 2021. “Digital Ephemera (Disposable Materials): Osama Bin Laden.” The 9-11 Pop Culture Repository. https://septterror.tripod.com/binladen_1.html. Accessed 20 Jun 2021. Fredrick, Yaffa and Annie Cohen. “Media Martyrs: Among Those Who Died While Working as Journalists in the Past 15 Years.” CNN. Nov 2017. Media Martyrs: Among Those Who Died While Working as Journalists in the Past 15 Years – CNN. com. Accessed 4 Jul 2020. Hashmi, Taj. “Islamic Resurgence in Bangladesh: Genesis, Dynamics and Implications.” In Religious Radicalism and Security in South Asia. Edited by Satu P. Limaye, Robert G. Wirsing and Mohan Malik. Honolulu, HI: Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, 2004, pp. 35–72. “How 9/11 Gave the IRA an Exit Route from ‘War’.” Belfast Telegraph. 6 Sep 2011. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/news-analysis/how-911-gave-the-iraan-exit-route-from-war-28654323.html. Accessed 10 Jul 2021. Humans of BNP. “Focal Point: 9/11 in World Politics and its Present Reality.” Facebook. 11 Sep  2021. https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?­ref=search&v=325418322668944. Accessed 20 Sep 2021. Irish32store (Designer). “Bobby Sands – Resistance T-shirt.” Zazzle. Bobby Sands – Resistance T-shirt | Custom Gift | Zazzle.com. Accessed 8 Feb 2021. Jamal, Eresh Omar. “9/11: Post-Mortem of the “official story”. The Daily Star. 11 Sep 2017. Johannessen, Jennifer. “9/11 Memorial Planned for Irish Catskills.” Irish America Magazine. Oct/Nov 2004. https://www.irishamerica.com/2004/10/9-11-memorialplanned-for-irish-catskills/. Accessed 12 Jun 2021. Kennedy, Jenny. “Practice-Centred Approaches to Sharing.” In Digital Media, Sharing and Everyday Life. New York: Routledge, 2020, pp. 35–55. Keramas, Peter. [Username] “Walk On U2 Sept 2001 – America: A Tribute to Heroes.” Facebook. 12 Sep 2021. https://www.facebook.com/peter.keramas/­ videos/4277526642343384. Accessed 12 Jun 2021. Kuhn, Danny. [Username] “In Loving Memory…” Facebook. 12 Sep 2021. Love Ireland: In Loving Memory of the Seven Irish-Born, Hundreds of Irish Americans, and All

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Other Victims of 9/11, On the Twentieth Anniversary: Michael James Stewart from Belfast; Ruth Magdaline McCourt, from Co | Facebook. Accessed 25 Sep 2021. Lacey, Marc. “State Department Adds the Real I.R.A. to List of Terror Groups.” The New York Times. 17 May 2001. https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/17/world/statedepartment-adds-the-real-ira-to-list-of-terror-groups.html. Accessed 20 Jul 2021. McDonald, Henry, Kamal Ahmed and Ed Vulliamy. “How America Held the IRA over a Barrel.” The Guardian. 28 Oct 2001. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/ oct/28/northernireland.colombia. Accessed 25 May 2021. Millar, Laura A. “The Nature of Archives.” Archives: Principles and Practices. Second Edition. London: Facet Publishing, 2017, pp. 23–36. O’Connell, Hugh. “Sinn Féin TD Apologises for Old Facebook Posts Linking to 9/11 Conspiracy Theories and Comparing NATO to Nazis.” Independent.ie. 10 Dec 2020. https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/sinn-fein-td-apologises-for-old-facebookposts-linking-to-911-conspiracy-theories-and-comparing-nato-to-nazis-39848887. html. Accessed 26 Aug 2021. Rahman, Shafiqur. “Imagining Life under the Long Shadow of 9/11: Backlash, Media Discourse, Identity and Citizenship of the Bangladeshi Diaspora in the United States.” Cultural Dynamics, 22(1), 2010, pp. 49–72. Raman, B. “Amra Sobai Hobo Taliban Bangla Hobe Afghanistan.” Outlook. Jan 2004. https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/amra-sobai-hobo-taliban-­b anglahobe-afghanistan/222548. Accessed 10 Aug 2021. Roy, Arundhati. “The Algebra of Infinite Justice.” The Guardian. 21 Sep 2001. https:// www.theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/29/september11.afghanistan. Accessed 20 Mar 2021. Smith, Andrew Coffman. “The Brooklyn Radio Show for ‘Dissident’ Irish Republicans.” Vice.com. 19 Aug 2014. https://www.vice.com/en/article/5gezq5/radio-free-eireannirish-republican-john-mcdonagh-179. Accessed 15 Jul 2021. Somoyerkonthosor. [Username] “Blogger Niloy Hottyar Dai Shikar Al-Quaeda r.” Somoyerkonthosor. 7 Aug 2015. Facebook. Accessed 22 Mar 2021. The Joshua Tree. [Username] “U2.WALK ON..2001.” Facebook. 11 May 2019. Watch | Facebook. 12 Jun 2021. Accessed 22 Mar 2021.

PART IV

Locating “Other” Lives and the Unmappable Registers of Precarity in Post-9/11 Novels

14 POSSIBLE LIVES, IMPOSSIBLE TIMES The Tragic Queer Diasporic Muslim in Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla’s The Exiles Anil Pradhan

There are no lengths to which you won’t go to protect your loved ones […] there will be no boundaries, moral or ethical, that you will not cross to protect what you love […] So, you see, in the end, that’s what everyone’s fighting for, isn’t it? What they love. You must think about this kind of love when you hear about jihad and suicide bombers … There are no compromises when it comes to love and war. (Dhalla 223) The implications of these words have deep and rather ironic effects upon the lives of both Atif Rahman – an illegal, Muslim, Indian gay immigrant living without a family in Los Angeles – and Rahul Kapoor – a closeted Hindu, Indian banker who is married to a woman. Narrating the tale of the same-sex romance between Atif and Rahul, Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla’s novel The Exiles (2011), which was published in the US as The Two Krishnas, has protagonists who not only have to traverse across religious and racial boundaries in sustaining a queer Hindu-Muslim romance in the diasporic space but also have to negotiate the various problems that are entailed in such identities and relations in the time of proliferating phobias for the various ‘others.’ Dhalla’s second novel, The Exiles, narrates the lives of protagonists who are caught in an entangling flux of finding home, love, and the self. As the omniscient narrator allows us to delve into the many aspects of losing the notion of the homeland and of not completely finding a new home elsewhere, complicating this core theme is the major plot of non-­normative sexuality that challenges not only the socio-cultural proprieties of the Indian American but also the tenets of personal relationships that refashion themselves in the diasporic milieu. Read by most as a tale of infidelity where Pooja, the betrayed wife of Rahul, is forced to reconsider her marriage and question her faith upon the discovery of Rahul’s romantic relationship with Atif, the narrative provides reasons to not DOI: 10.4324/9781003362999-19

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reduce itself into a tale of family drama. Divided into four sections that take the readers from California to Kenya and back, it is a complex tale that speaks of the tragic beauty of transnational lives, through its narrative poetry. Added to the intersectional contexts of revealing the intricacies of events that follow when a married Hindu man falls in love with an illegal Muslim immigrant in the US, the novel also reveals how lives left behind return to haunt the perpetual immigrant grappling with unconventional ideas of home, family, and relationships. The relationship between the queer protagonists presents to its readers a narrative that is both problematising and problematic – problematising because it represents a possible romantic liaison between two queer diasporic Hindu and Muslim men and problematic because its abrupt and tragic conclusion points at the underlying politics of queer transnational impossibility. The intersection and fusion of these two aspects in Dhalla’s narrative provides for an entry point towards understanding what to be queer, Muslim, and immigrant entails in contemporary times. From Atif attempting to make sense of his queer identity through his own reinterpretations of the Quran to finding sustainability in a queer hermeneutics of tawhid in Rumi, Sufism, and mystic Hinduism; through him and Rahul navigating the queer immigrants’ struggles towards belonging to their mutual contestations with the concept of contemporary terrorism; and towards negotiating queer desires across multiple barriers to addressing the reality of tragic impossibilities of being located in states of exception, The Exiles paints intricate journeys of the queer diasporic Muslim. This chapter attempts at explicating the intersections of the religious, the racial, the non-heteronormative sexual, and the transnational in order to explicate Dhalla’s literary politics of the possible lives and/but the impossible times that narrativise negotiations in post-9/11 North America.

The Rise of the Queer Diasporic: A Brief Introduction With increasing socio-political concerns regarding diasporic movements and queer1 activism across transnational spaces, academic enquiries into the identity politics of and by the queer diaspora have become more timely, relevant, and necessary. In recent years, academic enquiry into the literature dealing with queer diaspora has provided literary studies with multifarious insights into the interconnections of race, gender, sexuality, migration, and transnationalism. In the context of the discursive shift from the national to the transnational, Elizabeth Povinelli and George Chauncey note that with the turn of the century, “there has been a small but discernible ‘transnational turn’ in lesbian and gay studies and queer theory” that has aimed at interrogating and problematising “the effect of the increasingly transnational mobility of people, media, commodities, discourses, and capital on local, regional, and national modes of sexual desire, embodiment, and subjectivity” (439). Subsequently, critical focus has been accorded to texts emerging out of transnational dislocations and displacements with accompanying

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tropes of conflicts, accommodations, and negotiations, especially in the North American contexts of globalisation, international exchange, and immigration. To this end, a sizable amount of critical work has been carried out regarding the Asian-American queer narratives and experiences by David L. Eng, Alice Y. Hom, Sau-Ling C. Wong, Jeffrey Santa Ana, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Russell Leong, Dai Kojima, etc., and some research has been devoted to the queer South Asian in the North American context in the critical insights provided by Gayatri Gopinath, Gita Ranjan, Shailja Sharma, Roksana Badruddoja, Geoffrey Burkhart, etc. However, very little has been achieved towards investigating the dual problematic inherent in being queer and being diasporic in the IndianNorth American context vis-à-vis the problem of conflict vs. reconciliations that such temporal and spatial displacements and journeys inhere in them. This article is an attempt towards interrogating the intersectional 2 problematic of what being an Indian queer diasporic subject in North America entails. Contemporary fiction dealing with the problematic identities, experiences, and negotiations of the queer Indian diasporic and/or immigrant subject in North America have portrayed the multi-facets of queer lives that, earlier, were not adequately represented in English literary texts. Among these, many focus on narratives of homosexual men and their negotiations with locating themselves in the diasporic setting. Early on, Shyam Selvadurai’s The Funny Boy (1994) portrayed queerness placed in problematic contexts of home and belonging, bringing to the fore a complicated relationship between displaced subjectivity and spatial dislocation, vis-à-vis identity and nation in a diasporic Canadian context. Similarly, in Rakesh Satyal’s Blue Boy (2009), the protagonist retraces the ideas of queerness in the Indian religious imaginary of ‘otherness’ and conflates the two to construct a sustainable re-affirmation of his diasporic queerness, encompassing the problematic of queer identity, desires, and relations in a transnational context. Rahul Mehta’s No Other World (2017), like Kunal Mukherjee’s My Magical Palace (2012), complicates discursive intersectionality through the gay Indian-American subject’s state of in-betweenness and problematic belonging in contemporary transnationalism, where diasporic queerness renders the Indian diasporic individual as perpetually other-ed, and thus, re-writes itself like a dynamic palimpsest of sexual and transnational otherness. However, very few texts provide narratives of the queer Indian men’s same-sex, cross-religion and cross-age experiences with/in the diasporic contexts of the American nationspace. Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla’s The Exiles (2011) is an exception that portrays this important aspect of the queer diasporic subject in America.

The Intersectional Transnational Queer Muslim in The Exiles While most novels concerning South Asian and Indian diasporic and transnational lives focus on issues of transnational identities and homes and portray the complicated relations that immigrant and diasporic subjects must negotiate with in terms of socio-cultural, familial, and personal implications, Dhalla’s novel

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portrays lives that are rarely represented and made accessible in fiction – the queer Muslim immigrant man and his problematic romance with a queer Hindu immigrant man in contemporary North America. Further rare is substantial critical investment in the reading, analysis, and discussion of such texts and cultural representations in the context of the problematic of contemporary transnational experiences and lives of queer diasporic Muslim subjects; this article attempts at producing a critical insight into these very contexts. Gayatri Gopinath, in Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, contends that the term ‘queer diaspora’ refers to the discursive networks of affiliation and negotiations that are constantly being produced and reproduced along the lines of race, sexuality, transnational space, and memory.3 This article uses Gopinath’s formulation regarding the queer in the diaspora to locate how they mutually influence and negotiate each other through conflicts and towards possible (?) reconciliation in the case of the queer diasporic Muslim man and his relationship with a queer diasporic Hindu man in the context of the multicultural American society. The Exiles concerns itself with narratives of loss, trauma, displacement, and struggles of the immigrant in an adopted host-land; added to this are the intertwining narratives of queer identities and subjectivities that find themselves in states of constant negotiations. Like other novels on queer South Asian diaspora, it presents the intersectional politics of race, religion, sexuality, nationality, and ideologies that the queer diasporic subjects must manoeuvre to exist between arrivals and departures. However, unlike Selvadurai’s The Hungry Ghosts – where Shivan must retrace history to arrive at the queer diasporic present – the option of any possible return is unavailable to the queer protagonists in The Exiles. As the title itself suggests, both Atif and Rahul are perpetually exiled in a land – the United States of America – that they struggle to make their home and which renders their desires both possible and impossible. Atif is a young Muslim immigrant from Bombay who has decided to stay on as an illegal entity because his parents back in India will not accept their gay son in their Islam-informed home. Therefore, he takes on the job of a book-shop attendant and leads a life that is at once secluded in fear of deportation and also accommodated in the queer nightlife of the west coast. On the other hand, Rahul is an older Indian-Kenyan double diasporic banker who not only has a doting and devout Hindu wife – Pooja – but also an Americanised and homophobic son – Ajay. He is unwilling to return to either Kenya or India due to the traumatic history of his expulsion from the homeland during the tragic events in East Africa in the 1970s–80s and due to the too-far-away imaginary of an original Indian home. Therefore, he too stays on as a hard-working professional who finds it increasingly difficult to balance his married public life and his closeted personal life. The crux of the narrative’s exilic portrayal lies in the queer romance and relationship between Atif and Rahul – at first sexually clandestine, soon after amorously invested, later scandalously revealed, and in the end, tragically disrupted. Overall, the novel, through its problematisation of homosexual and transnational elements and their

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contrasts in/of the South Asian diaspora, “serves to undo dominant ideologies of race, ethnicity, religion, and sexuality in a productive manner” (Meghani 183). Anjali Arondekar informs that in recent queer scholarship, there has been “a perceptible shift in queer studies to include questions of transnationalism, and its effects on the impact of queer movements globally” (246). Evidently, such shifts have been “in response to the growing sense that the proliferation of transnational sexual diasporas is challenging the ways in which we understand and disseminate categories of the sexual, the nation, and the subject” (Arondekar 246). However, where does 9/11 feature here? My reading of Atif ’s life and his relationship with Rahul is situated not in a direct political framework of the relevance of 9/11 but rather in the implicated intersection politics of framing queer Muslim lives in post-9/11 North America. The negotiations that the immigrant and diasporic Muslim identities have undergone in the past and undergo more critically in the contemporary times of the ‘war on terrorism’ are always already located within a discourse of confrontation where the other-ed Ummah4 attempts to accommodate in the American mosaic of socio-cultural, religious, political, and sexual expectations of a modern multicultural society.5 In the context of the negotiations towards this queer diasporic Muslim identity, “the complex question of competing, closeted and performed sexual identities of queer Muslims […] challenge both the notion of the universality of contemporary Western sexual categories” (Abraham 140). Critical discussions on transnational queer Muslim cultures in the diaspora have emphasised upon the need to interrogate, problematise, and move beyond the ‘clash of cultures’ theory of transnational relations theorised by the likes of Samuel Huntingdon,6 towards a more intersectional understanding of queer Muslim cultures, especially in diasporic spaces.7 Contending with Tariq Modood and Fauzia Ahmad, I consider sexual diversity as a key area of conflict and reconsideration, as “one of the pivotal points of contention between secular liberals and ‘mainstream’, practising Muslims within Western multicultural societies, and among Muslims themselves” (199). As Ibrahim Abraham rightly points out, the exploration of queer Muslim identity and experience critiques the increasingly complicated and conflicted queer politics of the West, where the dual impulses of globalised sexuality and so-called homonormativity are being fought out in relation to the non-Western Other—specifically, the Muslim Other. (138) I look at the negotiations of the queer diasporic Muslim Atif and his relationship with Rahul through a theoretical lens of ‘queer as intersectionality,’ that according to Momin Rahman, places “gay Muslims illustrate [in a] nexus of oppression, caught between cultural and political Islamophobia and homophobia” (946). In this context, I interrogate how the notional idea of the impossible queer Muslim is both problematic and also problematises Western constructs of non-normative sexuality, belonging, and inter-relational politics, especially and specifically in post-9/11 US.

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Possible Lives: In-Between Progressive Ijtihad and Queer Jihad At the outset, I consider the various ways in which Atif negotiates the multiplicity of his otherised reality through positive re-visioning and sustainable reconciliation of his Muslim and his homosexual identities. Atif employs several allusions – direct and indirect – related to the teachings and practices of Sufism, especially the poetry of Rumi. In his reference to the works of the Sufi mystics like Jelaluddin Rumi and Farid ud-Din Attar, Atif recognises a similarity of exile and rejoices in the poems’ “evocativeness of the love between two men” (Dhalla 50). In fact, Atif ’s reading of Rumi’s verses ensures in him a confidence about the broader and universal aspects of Islamic and Quranic interpretations, depicted as such: To Atif, there was nothing ambiguous about who was crying out for whom, whether the soul to God or the lover to the beloved. Rumi’s verses were addressed to Shams, the wandering mystic who introduced him to Sufi mysticism and with who he lived for several years … It was people’s inability to digest such relationships that compelled them to unnecessary interpretation. It seemed to Atif that in doing so, they had completely missed the point: that loving another person, regardless of his sex, was a way of loving God after all. (Dhalla 51) It is not just the Sufi poems that Atif accesses to assert the validity of his queer desires and identity; his idea of love being unbridled and passionate finds its way back to the many stories of love in the Islamic traditions of the Indian past: “Subtle nuances and complexities may be the stuff of Western literary classics, but for him, the stories of Anarkali and Salim, of Laila and Majnooh, of Shah Mahmoud and his slave Ayaz were the standard … he saw love as epic” (Dhalla 81). This transnationalisation of love stories entailed in the queering of romance represents a politics of queer diasporic transgression – one where a returning to the past traditions of the Indian sub-continent fuses the desire for same-sex intimacy and also challenges notions of heteronormative claims on traditions and heritage. In doing so, Atif reclaims his homosexual identity, same-sex desires, and transgressive love for Rahul by re-visioning them in a transnational framework of reference that, while locating him in the diasporic other, also helps him situate himself in a dynamic and agential web of intersectional identities. In addition to seeking shelter in the teachings of Sufism, Atif also presents a complex and mystic worldview of his interpretation of queer love, as opposed to the misunderstood and prescriptive nature of conservative Islamic beliefs about homosexuality. Atif ’s initial access to the references of homosexuality or queerness in the Quran is informed by an unresolved duality, mentioned as such: Allah seemed contradictory and wily. Verse 4:16 said: ‘If two men among you is guilty of lewdness, punish them both.’ Yet in Verse 76:19 God

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promised: ‘And round about them will serve boys of perpetual freshness: if thou seest them, thou wouldst think them scattered pearls.’ So it was prohibited on earth but Muslims could look forward to homosexuality in Paradise. The word of Allah made him more confused than he already was. (Dhalla 50) However, Atif ’s relation to his faith is presented as a more personal and a more conversational belief: “I’ve prayed, … not with a salat or namaz, but with the sincerity of words that need no translation, a dialogue between friends, yet I am without love” (Dhalla 200). When he does find love in the form of Rahul, Atif rejoices in the possibilities and fulfilment of queer romance, and at one point, asserts this: [t]he damned fools would never understand that love – that fatalistic, inexplicable attraction between two people – was not just the virtuous, purgative ingredient of some hackneyed fairy tale … Passionate, archetypal love, the kind that had inspired great art and endured through time, never came in decorous, predictable packages. (Dhalla 44) I contend that Atif ’s attempts at making sense of his queer identity through his own non-monolithic reinterpretations of the Quran and celebrating the queer-positive and homo-erotic plurality in the mysticism of Sufi poets employ a tactic towards finding sustainability in a “queer hermeneutics of tawhid” (Music 332–333) located in what Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle terms “tawhidic pluralism” (Kelly 254). Rusmir Music, in his exploration of the possible queer visions in/of contemporary Islam, asserts that the text of the Quran is always already subject to a multiplicity of interpretations. Music draws upon Amina Wadud’s proposal for a hermeneutics of tawhid (meaning unity) emphasising “how the unity of the Quran permeates all its parts” and proposes a queer hermeneutics of the Islamic idea of tawhid “asking that the law reflect the needs of the people it governs” (330). Specifically questioning the validity of the hadith over that of Quranic principles, he contends that the foundation of conservative Islam’s homophobia vis-à-vis the traditional exegesis of Lot/Lut’s story (that connects condemnation of same-gender sex with God’s punishment of the citizens in Lot/Lut’s story) is suspect to and should be subjected to more Quran-based Islamic interpretations. He provides alternative readings of Lot/Lut’s story to show how the wrath of God that fell upon the people was because they “rejected their call toward Islam— in its original form, meaning submission to God—and consequently paid the price, not for same-gender sex, but for their ignorance,” (Music 334) inhospitality, and their “use of bodies to worship false gods” (Music 335). Music’s re-interpretation of the Quran and the hadith towards a more queer-positive reception in Islam also reflects the efforts carried out by scholars like Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle,8 Muhsin Hendricks, and Christopher Kelly that “criticize classical interpretations for analyzing the Quran in a literal, decontextualised manner and suggest that

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semantic and thematic analyses of the text would be more appropriate” (Kelly 252). In a similar manner, Atif seems to be employing a modern form of ijtihad (independent reasoning) to make positive sense of sustainable queer Muslim realities.9 Furthermore, in the realm of the political, Atif ’s views on the fundamental aspects of an Islamic life are portrayed in a problematic, albeit reasoned, manner with respect to the question: who is a terrorist and who is not? While they are away in the mountains of north-west US for their clandestine get-away holiday, the realities of the American ‘war against terror’ in the Middle East invades their privacy in the form of a newspaper report and makes them rethink their positions on the on-going American state-sanctioned terrorism against the elements of terrorism in Islamic countries. This is projected through their debate on the Israel-Palestine conflict in which Atif asserts that notwithstanding the act of terror, it is the human that suffers in the end – all humans. When Rahul objects upon Atif ’s problematic take on terrorism, Atif questions him about the culpability that all Americans have in the violence that the US unleashes upon the Middle East for vested economic and political interests. Here I refer back to the episode that I began the article with – Atif ’s take on “terrorism as an act of love” bewilders Rahul, and his explanation in terms of the essentialism of love evades Rahul’s thought process (Dhalla 232). Though Atif and Rahul recognise the news as incongruent to their romantic get-away, the implications that this episode makes with regard to the post-9/11 state of affairs in the US are pretty clear about the relevance issues of religion and terrorism have in the lives of North American Muslims. This issue also reflects larger implications that the personal beliefs of Atif have on his worldview of love and his faith. It can be considered that Atif revisions the Islamic principle of jihad and refashions its understanding in a queer-positive manner. This seems related to the ‘queer jihad’ principle that is being explored by various diasporic Muslim individuals. In fact, there is an online community called Queer Jihad that introduces their ideology in this manner: ‘Jihad’ is a misunderstood word: it means to struggle, to endeavor. Traditionally, the first and most important jihad is the struggle with one’s self, […] to put into practice the beliefs and values we claim to possess. ‘Queer jihad’ is our own struggle with sexuality, with accepting it and dealing with it, and moving on, but it is also an endeavor to provide knowledge and foster understanding within the larger community. (“About Queer Jihad”) Furthermore, Parvez Sharma’s documentary film A Jihad for Love (2007) also records and archives such positive struggles by Muslims towards a more queer-positive interpretation, reception, and implementation of Islamic principles and ideals. Another outcome of a similar politics of the conflation of race, religion, and sexuality in the transnational post-9/11 American context has been

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what Anjali Arondekar discusses as an emergence of the ‘Gay International’ where the institutionalisation of the linkages of queer and race studies in current geopolitical formulations has resulted in the rise of groups like Al-Fatiha.10 Al-Fatiha (1997–2011) was an international organisation “dedicated to Muslims who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, those questioning their sexual orientation and/or gender identity,” aiming “to support LGBTQ Muslims in reconciling their sexual orientation or gender identity with Islam” (Arondekar 241). After Al-Fatiha’s closure, several others have carried forward the cause, such as the Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity. The “About” section on their website states this: The Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity (MASGD) works to support, empower and connect LGBTQ Muslims. We seek to challenge root causes of oppression, including misogyny and xenophobia. We aim to increase the acceptance of gender and sexual diversity within Muslim communities, and to promote a progressive understanding of Islam that is centered on inclusion, justice, and equality. (“About MASGD”) In the ‘progressive’ politics of groups such a Queer Jihad, Al-Fatiha, and MASGD, especially the first two, can be found that “the confusions of communalism, bigotry and terrorism collude to produce the gay Muslim as the modern revolutionary, fighting against the absolutism of competing systems of intolerant whiteness and Islamic fundamentalism” (Arondekar 244).

Impossible Times: The Tragic Irony of the Queer Diasporic Muslim As discussed in the earlier section, Atif, in Dhalla’s narrative, seems to ideologically propagate a revisionist outlook on sexuality, religion, and race in the context of his transnational location as a queer immigrant in post-9/11 North America; however, in conflating and oscillating between ijtihad and jihad visà-vis the politics of queer identity, desires, and relations in cross-religion and cross-age contexts, Atif ’s politics gets deeply fraught with a problem of being viewed as a dynamic transnational transgressor that post-9/11 North America cannot sustain in its nationalist politics. I read this as such: due to its problematic politics, the non-normative, queer, transnational subject cannot be or isn’t allowed to exist in the nation-space apart from being made or constructed as the queer diasporic or immigrant ‘other.’ The identity politics that Atif finds himself debating about and re-fashioning, with respect to his own queer Muslim immigrant realities, is rendered deeply conflicted in a game of possibilities and impossibilities that his intersectionality implicates him in. Jasbir K. Puar, in Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, claims that in the post-9/11 North America, the conjectures of the Muslim and

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the queer in the diasporic nexus have challenged the Orientalist ­framework that presumes their mutual exclusivity. Located within this nexus, per Puar, is a c­ urious problematic constitutive of the praxis of a sexual exceptionalism and discursive queer secularity that creates the curious case of double standards; she terms this phenomenon as homonationalism. Noting the proliferation of racist, sexist, Islamophobic, and homophobic Western imagery surrounding conflicts with the Islamic world, Puar argues that, within the context of transnational politics, in the ‘war on terror,’ the stereotyped image of the Muslim terrorist is constructed as the “queer, non-national, perversely radicalised other” (“Mapping US Homonormativities” 67).11 An example that Puar provides a detailed analysis on is the infamous and inhuman sexual torture conducted by the US armed forces at the Abu Ghraib detention centre in Iraq in 2003.12 The homophobic nature of the conflation between the identity categories of the Muslim Arab and the Terrorist Other stands in stark contrast to the US’s policies and actions at home where, in the very same year, consensual same-sex sexual activity between consenting adults was made legal nationwide. The double standard, as Puar contends, showcases the terrorising sexual exceptionalism that makes it, on the one hand, the land of freedom and, on the other hand, perpetrator of the image of the Muslim as ‘monster-terrorist-faggot.’13 However, Atif problematises this reading of the queer Muslim as an implicated terrorist and showcases Dhalla’s attempt to revise and re-present the identity of someone like Atif as positively manoeuvering the constructs that label him as the immigrant other, to the best of his abilities, as a transnational queer immigrant Muslim man in post-9/11 North America. Puar finds limitation of the queer intersectionality theory in terms of the identitarian trap that it gets into, despite its anti-identitarian intentions,14 and how it “consolidate[s] the fiction of a seamless stable identity” (Terrorist Assemblages 212). I find that locating Atif ’s narrative in the theoretical framework of queer assemblages needs to be further problematised in terms of how, specifically, his queer Muslim narrative challenges notions of the othered terrorist and presents a disrupted idea of queer intersectionality located in multiple and perpetual disruptions and transnational displacements. In fact, this becomes conspicuous in the last chapter of the novel where it is Atif – the queer Muslim immigrant – who is subjected to terror in all of its abruptness, fear, and eventual horror. The constant fear that the queer diasporic Muslim subject must negotiate in post-9/11 North America – in this case, the illegal queer Muslim immigrant – is stated in the realisation that Atif has about his ironic existence in the American host-land. The narrative informs as such: Atif thought about this status as an illegal alien, of his social security card. He thought about the constant fear that assailed him, that at any moment, even the little he had could be expropriated because he wasn’t born American. He considered how he had lost his freedom, or rather, sacrificed

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it, to remain … in America, the iconic land of the free. The irony struck him as sharply as if he had been slapped. (Dhalla 235) This constant fear that assailed him eventually grips Atif in a manner that is not only violent but also terrorising. Mad with the thirst for revenge from the person who destroyed the family and ruined his mother’s life, Ajay – Rahul’s homophobic son – finds himself at Atif ’s house to put things at rest. Upon finding that the person is not a woman but a man, Ajay is overtaken with a passion that turns murderous: “Ajay, white-faced, his eyes like coals from a brazier of rage, barely mindful of the terror in Atif ’s eyes or his crying, grabbed his slender neck and started shaking him violently” (Dhalla 385, emphasis added). At the end of the brutal and violent terror comes the final blow with a metal candleholder (the corporeal slap of tragic irony prenominated by Atif ) from Ajay that proves fatal for Atif. The narrative’s emotive location of terror on the queer Muslim immigrant at the end of the novel speaks of a representation that makes Atif a victim of a homophobic American reality ironic in its post-9/11 transnational location: a US-born and raised Hindu boy murdering a queer Muslim immigrant for disrupting the heterosexual family structure. However, what makes this event relevant to a post-9/11 rhetoric? The relevance and relativity lies implicitly in the representative politics of a novel that shows that the queer Muslim immigrant and his transnational liberal views are inconsistent with the terror-informed ideas of American nationalist anxiety. However, the irony really makes itself prominent in the fact that it is an Americanised diasporic Indian subject that commits the act of terror – a terror that is based not on love but invested in pure revenge. The homosexual exceptionalism concocted within a discursive and ironic politics of eventual impossibility of a queer Muslim immigrant subject in post-9/11 North America employs the America-raised, home-grown diasporic, albeit homophobic, ideal of normativity. Also ironic is the fact that Ajay is shot dead by the police who retaliate against the fleeing crime suspect, therefore, eliminating the ‘other’ that can be easily relegated to the trap of being a non-real American person of colour. However, it is Atif ’s corpse that ultimately acts as a palimpsestic canvas upon which this act of revenge leaves the most visible imprints. It represents the queer transnational Muslim man’s body as a site of fatal terror and pronounces the tragic impossibility of his existence, despite its location in contemporary transnational sexual liberalism of the West and the partaking in reconciliatory individualism as such: “[T]he black and purple lesions, the history of bruises on Atif ’s body belied this fantasy. All of Atif ’s spirit, the love and yearning, and the memories stored in the meridians of his body, had been scourged from it” (Dhalla 396). The life and death of Atif – the modern tragedy of the queer Muslim immigrant in the United States of America of the 21st century – has much to say in relation to the aftermath of the events of 9/11. It seems more than plausible to end on this tentative note that there is always more to such a story – like the possible lives and/ but the impossible times in Dhalla’s The Exiles – than meets the eye.

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Notes 1 I consider the term ‘queer’ to posit a heterogeneous and non-monolithic idea of non-normative and non-conformist sexualities and their discourses and praxes. 2 I refer to Kimberle Crenshaw’s idea of ‘intersectionality’ where she asserts and ­propounds the need for an intersectional literary framework vis-a-vis politics of the Black women’s experiences in America. For a detailed discussion on the idea of intersectionality, see Crenshaw 139–140 and 150–152. Similarly, in the context of queer diasporic and transnational circuits, I utilise the intersectional framework to interrogate and problematise the intersections of multiple identities, variables, and contestations inherent in the discourse of queer diasporic and transnational experiences and their literary representations. 3 See Gopinath 4, 7, 9, 10, 11 and 13. 4 Ummah refers to the whole community of Muslims bound together by ties of religion. 5 See Yousif 17, 23 and 26; Wadud 281. 6 See Abraham 138; Rahman 945–946. 7 See Modood and Ahmad 199–200; Abraham 140 and 145; Rahman 948–956; Rayside 109–134. 8 For a discussion on the positive reception of sexual diversity and socio-religious interpretation of queerness in Islamic cultures, see Kugle 192–215. 9 For a discussion on queer sexuality, Islam, and Ijtihad, see Hendricks 35. 10 See Arondekar 240–241. 11 Also refer to Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages and see Puar and Rai 117–148. 12 See Puar, Terrorist Assemblages 79. 13 See Puar and Rai. 14 See Puar, Terrorist Assemblages 206.

Works Cited “About MASGD.” Muslimalliance. www.muslimalliance.org/aboutmasgd. Accessed 17 October 2020. “About Queer Jihad.” Queer Jihad, 10 Jan. 2003. people.well.com/user/queerjhd/aboutq j. htm. Accessed 21 October 2020. Abraham, Ibrahim. ““Sodomized by Religion”: Fictional Representations of Queer Muslims in the West.” Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 19, 2008, pp. 137–152, topia.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/topia/article/view/18010/22447. Accessed 17 October 2020. Arondekar, Anjali. “Border/Line Sex: Queer Postcolonialities, or How Race Matters Outside the United States.” Interventions, vol. 7, no. 2, 2006, pp. 236–250, doi. org/10.1080/13698010500146781. Accessed 19 October 2020. Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, vol. 1989, no. 1, 1989, pp. 139–167, ­chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8. Accessed 12 October 2020. Dhalla, Ghalib Shiraz. The Exiles. Noida: HarperCollins Publishers, 2011. Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2005. Hendricks, Muhsin. “Islamic Texts: A Source for Acceptance of Queer Individuals into Mainstream Muslim Society.” The Equal Rights Review, vol. 5, 2010, pp. 31–51, www. equalrightstrust.org/ertdocumentbank/muhsin.pdf. Accessed 19 October 2019. Kelly, Christopher Grant. “Is There a “Gay-Friendly” Islam? Synthesizing Tradition and Modernity in the Question of Homosexuality in Islam.” Islam and Homosexuality: Volume 2, edited by Samar Habib. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2010, pp. 247–268.

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Kugle, Scott Siraj al-Haqq. “Sexuality, Diversity and Ethics in the Agenda of Progressive Muslims.” Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism, edited by Omid Safi. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2003, pp. 190–234. Meghani, Shamira A. “Queer South Asian Muslims: The Ethnic Closet and Its Secular Limits.” Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora: Secularism, Religion, Representations, edited by Claire Chambers and Caroline Herbert. Abingdon: Routledge, 2015, pp. 172–184. Modood, Tariq, and Fauzia Ahmad. “British Muslim Perspectives on Multiculturalism.” Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 24, no. 2, 2007, pp. 187–213, doi. org/10.1177/0263276407075005. Accessed 19 October 2020. Music, Rusmir. “Queer Visions of Islam.” Islam and Homosexuality: Volume 2, edited by Samar Habib. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2010, pp. 327–346. Omar, Abdullah. “Islamic Identity in the Canadian Multicultural Context.” Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry, vol. 3, no. 2, 2011, pp. 16–29, journals.library.ualberta.ca/cpi/ index.php/cpi/article/download/16951/13546. Accessed 19 October 2020. Povinelli, Elizabeth A., and George Chauncey. “Thinking Sexuality Transnationally: An Introduction.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 5, no. 4, 1999, pp.  439–450, read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-pdf/5/4/439/415548/ddglq_5_4_439. pdf. Accessed 15 October 2020. Puar, Jasbir K. “Mapping US Homonormativities.” Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, vol. 31, no. 1, 2006, pp. 67–88, doi.org/10.1080/09663690500531014. Accessed 17 October 2020. ———. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Puar, Jasbir K., and Amit S. Rai. “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots.” Social Text, vol. 20, no. 3, 2002, pp. 117–148, muse. jhu.edu/article/31948. Accessed 17 October 2020. Rahman, Momin. “Queer as Intersectionality: Theorizing Gay Muslim Identities.” Sociology, vol. 44, no. 5, 2010, pp. 944–961, www.jstor.org/stable/42857483. Accessed 19 October 2020. Rayside, David. “Muslim American Communities’ Response to Queer Visibility.” Cont Islam, vol. 5, 2011, pp. 109–134, doi.org/10.1007/s11562-011-0157-8. Accessed 17 October 2020. Wadud, Amina. “American Muslim Identity: Race and Ethnicity in Progressive Islam.” Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism, edited by Omid Safi. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2003, pp. 270–285. Yousif, Ahmad F. “Muslims in the Canadian Mosaic.” The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, vol. 9, no. 4, 1992, pp. 533–545, i-epistemology.net/v1/­attachments/356_ V9N4%20Winter %2092%20 -%20Yousif %20 -%20Muslims%20in%20the%20 Canadian%20Mosaic.pdf. Accessed 17 October 2020.

15 “YOU ARE MY CREATOR, BUT I AM YOUR MASTER” A Reading of Frankenstein in Baghdad as a Postcolonial Pharmakon Avijit Basak

The temptation to read Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2012, tr. 2018) ­contrapuntally with Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) which provides the essential postcolonial context in this modern perverse rewriting is irresistible. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has famously read Shelley’s text as a colonialist narrative where knowledge is not only a vector to the re-creation of life in an inanimate body, but also an instrument of expansionist speculation.1 In this universe, populated by imperial adventurers, masquerading as philosophical intellectuals, the monster is an aberration, a caesura. He is an inadvertent product of knowledge-­producers, disowned and deserted after the mission is done, making his creator-­master embarrassed by existing as a devastated body. The master-­ creator, monstrous-inventor wants to keep disowning him and does not recognise the ravaged body that he is responsible for, whereas the product-body continues to request profusely not only for a recognition and restitution but also for a restructuring of his own location as an individual with his own people. This geo-political message is perhaps easily lost, but the body as politics, the biopolitics of body-politic is one of the most disturbing issues that unsettles a text primarily enjoyed as an example of popular gothic fiction. It is important to note here that in Saadawi’s book, the monster figure is given the proper name, Frankenstein, and in this sense, he does not mistake in identifying of the monster in the urtext. The Frankenstein-monster in Saadawi’s book is not a product of any scientific project, even though colonial speculation plays a vital part in his creation. However the identity of Frankenstein is deliberately obfuscated as Hadi, the storyteller in the book can also be named as such. It is in this fluidity of different identities that Frankenstein in Baghdad makes sense as an anti-colonial text. The tales Hadi ingenuously conjures up, and not only those of the monster, are as fragmented as Baghdad is under the US occupation. In a narratological coup, Saadawi’s tale is also equally fragmented with deep crevices of digressions DOI: 10.4324/9781003362999-20

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often lost in the blind alleys of self-contradiction. The social fabric of the city of Baghdad, with its essentially cosmopolitan rouge defies the devious ploy of presenting the old city as a singular identity. The body of the monster, who has many names, is also made up of cosmopolitan body parts, and identities. Like the fluid body of Baghdad, the identity of Whatsitsname is ungraspable. I shall argue in this essay how the creature is a postcolonial subject, a traumatised survivor who fights back, but it is in this fight that the tragedy of an equally problematic futural is embedded, where the uncertainty of the monster’s trajectory underpins and problematises the course the people of Iraq are going to undertake. The act of calling someone a “monster” is an act of interpellation, of otherising. It immediately associates the said “monster” as a lesser life, a life worth attacking, a presence to be eliminated immediately. This construction of a lesser life is at the core of the War on Terror plan hatched by the US. When the entire Middle East was termed as “Axis of Evil” by G. W. Bush it did something more than calling certain countries as evil. It immediately identified people living in those countries as eradicable devils. People of Iran or Iraq who lost their lives are not grievable lives. They are casualties, to be taken casually as collateral damages. Judith Butler in her important book Precarious Life (2004) formulates what constitutes our attitude to less grievable lives, and by extension, less grievable deaths. Formulating a complex ethical understanding of the dialogic construction “I” contra “You” in which media and society play a large role Butler offers a fascinating insight into the incorporation of certain idea of “body” as more sacred than others. Much influenced by Emanuel Levinas, she engages critically with a Euro-centric idea of body where one is either with the western notions of civilisation, or is expendable (as “terrorist”, “miscreant”, “anti-social”, or even “anti-national”). This aim to singularise diversity, apart from reeking of totalitarianism, also smacks of incorporating the corporeal. If the corporeal identity fits into the embedded narrative of the agency, it is mourned and celebrated publicly, heightening the already tensed relation between the “I” and the “You”. At the same time the “alien” body is a site of torture, of disintegration, of disincorporation. Butler continues this thread even more radically in Frames of War (2009) where she discusses how precarity is a universal threat leading to an unfair appropriation of the vulnerable status to attack the more vulnerable, until the powerless is reabsorbed and contained within the embedded narratives of empire. If we follow Butler’s definition of precarity as a “politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” with the “heightened risk of disease, poverty, starvation, displacement, and of exposure to violence without protection” as well as state-sponsored terrorism (26), we do clearly understand that Iraq, under America, underwent a similar precarious condition. Precarity is also an instrument to execute political will to power. When America invaded Iraq to introduce “democracy”, the precise implication was that common Iraqis were vulnerable under the ruthless regime of a dictator. Often, as Butler argues, major state players take charge of “common

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good” forcefully invading foreign countries and imposing their idea of statecraft on those people without consent (37). This idea of forceful introduction of white man’s democracy overriding local culture and demands goes against the very tenets of democracy. A typical scapegoat in such a situation is a person who does not understand how democracy functions, even though they are a part of that system. The ambiguity of such a person, not in favour of the previous dictatorship, and uncertain about the current regime of neo-colonialism under the garb of democracy, is telling. As a newly “liberated” subject they must behave to conform to the new regime, but as a citizen of the colony their life is less grievable. Always risking death such a subject is an objectified citizen – vulnerable, perishable, and precarious. When George W. Bush divided the world between us and them, he was not only pitting the East against the West, the Muslims against the non-Muslims, or the theocratic society against the democratic society; he was also deciding whose lives are grievable and whose are not. A war, as Butler argues, in defending a certain community divides “the globe into grievable lives and ungrievable lives” where an “ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as life at all” (38). A grievable life can be openly mourned with outrage which can be politically manipulated as “affective responses that are highly regulated by regimes of power and sometimes subject to explicit censorship” as well as “to support both the war effort and, more specifically, nationalist belonging” (39–40). What is more, I think something that Butler neglects to elucidate, is that such a narrative can be and is challenged, countered, and re-marked from the other side as well. The case of Whatsitsname is interesting from this point of view. A recently post-colonised subject can lean back to their root to derive some sort of validation for everything that is now wrong with their countries. A growing adherence to fundamentalism or a new set of puritanism can also be seen as a cultural backlash against unwanted foreign influence. Religion provides a potent pharmakon, at once a solution and a problem, a solace and a trouble. In former colonies it is not rare to see a theocratic resumption of power defining the ungrievable life in terms of religious affiliation. A going back to the fundamentals to emphasise their belongingness is an easy journey which marks a U-turn leading to further vitiation of an already distraught and fragmented society. Often it is easy to not see such a disintegration as a direct result of colonial exploitation, and directly blame the native players, and often it is even easier to ignore how the counternarrative is as problematic as the narrative itself, merging, as they do, together always to score political profit through war as business and colony-making. In Butler’s earlier contemplation on the American War on Terror, we find a clear exposition of some of the more complicated aspects that Frankenstein in Baghdad proposes in a different context. Mourning, Butler argues in Precarious Life, is transformative, intimately related to a sense of loss of something lost (21–22), something that is incomprehensible. Defined in terms of relationality the lost loss is identified as you in me, and a communal identification of such a

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loss brings together a political community (22). Grief recalibrates relationality of the subject with others and makes us aware that we are undone by one another where relationality is at once important to possess self-identity while at the same time it dispossesses us. This is one of the potent tenets where grief and desire meet. Butler goes on to propose a theory of the ecstatic, again in a different context, but it pushes us to think beyond it. She argues, To be ec-static means, literally, to be outside oneself, and thus can have several meanings: to be transported beyond oneself by a passion, but also to be beside oneself with rage or grief. I think that if I can still address a “we,” or include myself within its terms, I am speaking to those of us who are living in certain ways beside ourselves, whether in sexual passion, or emotional grief, or political rage. (25) This necessary splitting or recognising each other as continually speaking for and to each other is revitalised by some common strands, whether it is sexuality, shared humiliation, dispossession, rage, or defeat. One not only revitalises the other, but one’s body also supplants and supplements the other in the mutual recognition of identifiable vulnerability. Thus standing outside, beside, ourselves gives us the unique perspective of kinness, to find integrity in disintegrity, possession and dispossession. Butler then moves on to discuss the nature of grief as a dispossession, a feeling of discorporation (28–29). In grief we are at loss of a sense of self hood. We feel disoriented and desperately we try to find the object of loss which is unknown to us. We mourn that unknown object, and the consequent splitting of the self, of foregrounding of the lost self, force us to pose some difficult questions. Butler adds that to grieve and to turn grief into a political motif may be linked to “develop a point of identification of suffering itself ”; the disorienting effect induced by grief, where the ontological I and the haunted I are coeval, posits the grieving subject “in the mode of unknowingness” (30). This is the crucial phase, at once personal and social, in which we decide to act on the grief, to search for the lost I in the other, and the lost other in the I. Dominick LaCapra, in Writing History, Writing Trauma (2014), while analysing trauma and its relationship with loss and absence makes an interesting observation which overlaps with Butler’s thesis on loss. He makes subtle differences between loss and absence – as results of trauma and its impact on people. Trauma can be distinguished, according to LaCapra, into two types – historical trauma “and its attendant losses” and transhistorical or structural or even originary trauma which is “correlated with absence,” “notably the absence of undivided origins, absolute foundations, or perfect, totalizing solutions to problems” (xxxiv). Loss and absence, however, are not binaries and they frequently clash and meet. LaCapra proposes that when “absence is converted into loss, one increases the likelihood of misplaced nostalgia or utopian politics in quest of a new totality or fully unified community” (46); in fact, LaCapra goes on to claim that absence can be narrativised as loss in a posttraumatic text (p. 49). Absence may be defined as the

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opposite of presence and loss as the opposite of gain (48). And if we define past “the scene of losses”, it is inflected by a sense of immutable presence, something like a “symptomatic revenant” always haunts it (49).2 The revenant, at once messianic and terrifying, haunts the act of writing ­especially if we consider the act of writing as trace. Writing, canon making, is a subtle form of psychological colonialism later put into praxis as atmospheric violence, in a far off land subjugated by the coloniser. In a brilliant critique of democracy as a colonial project, Achille Mbembe, in Necropolitics (2019), has exposed, much like Butler, how the earlier colonial project shares many tropes with neo-colonialism. According to Mbembe colonial project as a trading system thrived on the “scission of humanity into ‘useful’ and ‘useless’ – ‘excess’ and ‘superfluity’” which “remained the rule, with utility being essentially measured against the capacity to deploy a labor force” (12). In a section called “The Nocturnal Body of Democracy,” a term he borrowed from Frantz Fanon, Mbembe discusses how in the mythology of democracy, invented by the western countries, individuality is eschewed in favour of a regulated and pacified statecraft where the state controls power over everything and individuals must learn to live with “constraints” relinquishing any proclivity towards social mores. Democracy, thus, does not bend to the will of a strong ruler (16). However, in different times, Mbembe argues, we have seen democracy is just as corrupt and unjust as a tyrannical society. He cites from a pro-slavery democracy where we see two orders, “a community of fellow creatures” and “a category of non fellows” where law legitimises prejudices; such a community, Mbembe asserts, “could only be a community of separation” (17). The myth of a civilised democracy, thriving industrially and financially, has always been dependent on the committing of violence in a distant colony (19), a land where desires of a colonial ruler can be played out. A colonial state “remained a state on a war footing”, as Mbembe quotes from Romain Bertrand (20). The war ravaged colonial land is ruled by a “colonial policy of terror” where precarious vulnerable people without access to justice can be rampantly and randomly tortured (20) if they do not behave according to the will of the master. In a colonial system the enemy is criminalised not to bring justice (25), but to establish superiority, where law behaves differently for a native from their master (26). Mbembe adds, “colonial conquest paves the way to a sphere of unregulated war, to war-outside-the-law led by some democracy, which, in so doing, externalizes violence to a third place ruled by nonnormative conventions and customs” (25). Thus, colonial war is eliminationist in nature, and is a “borderless war” where “subjugated population is never entirely shielded from a massacre” (26). The colonial society is “an offspring of democracy”, its “double”, where they cannot exist without each other (26–27). Mbembe recognises the subtle difference between force and violence, a ­narrative which is long part of a socialist critique of brutal democracies. Violence is revolutionary aiming to replace the force of authority. He, following Georges Sorel distinguishes force defined as an imposition of a “certain social order in which the minority governs” to press people into obedience away from violence

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defined as the movement to destroy the authoritative system which inflict force (22). Fanon’s pharmakon, Mbembe observes, has juxtaposed “destruction and violence” and “the therapeutic process and desire for unlimited life” to “form the basis of his theory of radical decolonization” (118). Fanon has talked of violence as a “cleansing” power (51) in The Wretched of the Earth (2004), but he has also talked about an atmospheric violence which triggers violence in motion (31) as colonised people concentrate their anger on their enemies. The counterviolence, the retributive violence of the colonised has a mystical tone, the wrath of a divine justice, resembling a bond based on a brotherhood, or a doctrine (84). It is the psychological impact of such a shared anger, of a fantasy to blow into pieces the system colonising them (6) that gives rise to a legendary figure like Whatsitsname. Following Fanon, Mbembe offers something, for an effective postcolony, which he terms “negative messianism”. Negative messianism, Mbembe defines, “is a kind of messianism that has either forfeited the idea of redemption as such or has been reduced to a crude belief in the expiatory power of bloodshed. It is not about salvation. In its minor version, it is about survival and the willingness to sacrifice or to be sacrificed” (106). It “paves the way for a politics of survival. It is haunted by apocalyptic fantasies. A messianism of destruction, it seeks not to actually bring about a community. Nor does it seek compromises. Rather, it emphasises purity and self-separation as ways of staving off the disasters of a ‘crackup civilization’” (107). In fact, the idea of postcolony is inflected with an idea of the religious. In an earlier chapter, Mbembe notes how, in the postcolony “wherein a particular form of power rages, wherein the dominant and the subjugated are specifically linked in one and the same bundle of desire, enthusiasm for the end is often expressed in the language of the religious” (29). Dominick LaCapra also concurs that an idea of a unified community, especially based on a sense of purity, (even though Mbembe does not agree here with LaCapra, and believes that negative messianism “seeks not to actually bring about a community”, Necropolitics, 107) is dependent on “its regeneration or even redemption through violence” (12), which is often erroneously attributed some divine qualities (xxv). It is in this anxiety and schismatic attribution of messianism on to the undying figure of Whatsitsname, much to his dismay and grudge, as a destructive force representing the indomitable spirit of a ravaged and displaced people, and as ever renewing body which festers on death and destruction, that we find how regenerative violence can be a useful postcolonial tool. Yet, as Whatsitsname is a negative messiah around whom a new religion of apocalypse and renewal is built, his story beckons to the much repeated lapsing of a postcolony into chaos and disorder, something violence carries within it if founded on nothing (Mbembe, 118). The ambiguity of a Fanonian pharmakon, the dilemma of a postcolonial rebel, is necessarily a Hamletian problem of to be or not to be; to corrupt or not to corrupt oneself with the baser instincts of the same criminal failings that lead to an enforced regime of significations. In a sense this is a race against time, one must know when to stop; as Kurtz fails to recognise in Heart of Darkness

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(51, 57), restrain is the key when time is out of joint. Marlow recognises that his idol, Kurtz is a damned soul, knowing “no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself ” (66). The monster figure in Saadawi’s book recognises this in his confession that he is already “here too long” (149), and that he is running out of time (157). Time is his only enemy (147). What he fails to recognise, however, is that he resembles time, the crazy time he is living in, in his dislodged, disjointed body. Derrida, in Specters of Marx, talks of time as a deranged and dislocated thing, it is “beside itself ” (20), and is, therefore, an ecstatic concept, much like the monster figure. As far as a creation of a genius, of a spirit, as Whatsitsname is in Saadawi’s text, or as Frankenstein is, in Shelley’s text, the monster can engineer itself (Derrida, 20). Whether the monster figure follows the trajectory of Frankenstein’s monster, or of Kurtz, who initially began his career with lofty idealism but gradually descends into the vortex of colonialist fantasy-exploitation, Saadawi is definitely writing back the Western canon hoodwinking his master-monster text. He recognises the genius of his source texts and retranslates them to critique the colonialist canon. It haunts and is haunted by the master-monster texts. As Derrida observes evil or not, a genius operates, it always resists and defies after the fashion of a spectral thing. The animated work becomes that thing, the Thing that, like an elusive specter, engineers [s’ingenie] a habitation without proper inhabiting, call it a haunting, of both memory and translation. A ­m asterpiece always moves, by definition, in the manner of a ghost. The Thing [Chose] haunts, for example, it causes, it inhabits without residing… (20–21) Much like its urtext, the monster’s version of his journey is presented exactly in the middle. The modern version of the monster speaks through a recorded audio, meant to be listened and narrativised by Mahmoud for his sleek magazine, in turn renarrativised by the “Writer” in Chapter 10 of the book. The monster, as part of the vulnerable people is at risk of turning into liquid (p. 136). Being born of stitched together body parts of different and diverse people, the monster’s body is a mosaic of the entire Iraqi populace. Frequent bombings of the city of Baghdad created this unique situation where no dead body was found with all its limbs attached or recognisable – leading to assimilation of different body parts haphazardly put together to create a semblance of a complete dead body. It is because of this situation that Hadi found it propitious to attach unclaimed limbs of different victims to create a unique and gigantic body – however it is initially not clear whether he really manufactured such a figure or is it just another one of his tall tales. As narration progresses, it appears that the monster is conjured up for the sake of the story, as Haadi, unreliable that he is, in turn claims and denies the existence of such a figure. The soul of another innocent victim of suicide bomb attack, Hasib, animates Whatsitsname, and Elishva gives him the name of his son, Daniel. Whatsitsname cannot have a singular identity – neither

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physically, nor religiously. He becomes an anomaly of every stereotype American colonial adventure tries to force onto Iraq. When the creature ends up unwittingly killing a group of beggars, authorities brand him as a terrorist, dubbed as Criminal X, and people start to hunt him as a danger to an already fraught society. This leads him to record his own version of the story to set the record straight. From the very beginning of the recording it is clear that he considers himself as a son of God who is delivered to this world by the junk dealer Hadi, and the bereaving Elishva (136). He is nonchalantly aware of his role as a saviour (136) of these poor people who have been waiting for him. But he is not only their saviour, he is also the legitimate destiny of a society deprived of justice – he is the light in their life (137), answer to their prayers (136, 137) With the help of God and of heaven, I will take revenge on all the criminals. I will finally bring justice on earth, and there will no longer be a need to wait in agony for justice to come, in heaven or after death. (137) Like a rhetor, he believes that he deserves mass support; it is, “a moral and humanitarian obligation to back” him for world justice, now “ravaged by greed, ambition, megalomania, and insatiable bloodlust” (137). He is not one for seeking attention, but his mission must not be misinterpreted for which he is now compelled to make this recording (137). People should not be afraid of him, and instead should pray for his success, and he will deliver. A product of the warring factions, significantly he lives No Man’s Land near the Assyrian quarter in Dora which is ravaged by frequent clashes of the “Iraqi National Guard and the American army on one side, and the Sunni militias and the Shiite militias as the second and third sides” (138). His living quarter is a deserted land without any political or military control and vantage. In this secluded and damaged place, he has easy access to “big gaps” to get out and come in. The labyrinthine geography helps him to fight and escape. However, he does not live alone, a number of people live with him and help him out. Most prominent among them is the Magician, a former ally of the Ba’athist regime helping the last dictator to fend off enemies by conjuring up and controlling a djinn. He now helps Whatsitsname by guiding his movement in and out of Dora. Whatsitsname finds in him selflessness, and yet notes that the Magician helps him as he represents “vengeance against anyone who has wronged him” (139). Next in importance is the self-proclaimed Sophist, who explains away ideas and furthers the “good ones”, by “polishing them, and making them more powerful”. However, he is equally capable of further vitiating bad ideas enhancing their corrupting effects. He is a dangerous companion (139), an eternal cynic who does not believe in anything and anyone and yet can strengthen faith in others; in fact he decided to stay with Whatsitsname because others did not believe in him and doubted his very existence (139). He also, predictably, helps cover the

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scars and stitches that plague Whatsitsname’s appearance through make-up. The last in importance is the Enemy, so called because he is a member of counterterrorism unit and gives Whatsitsname a clear idea of who his enemies are and how they think and behave. The Enemy is also a snitch, divulging secret information and providing counterfeit identity cards; he took refuge with this monster figure because “of his strict morality: after working in the government’s security agency for two years, he became convinced that the justice he was looking for wasn’t being achieved on the ground at all” (140). Whatsitsname also has three less important companions, the three madmen, who consider him something of a demi-god, and help him dress up in appropriate garments in his nocturnal missions. The young madman considers him as a model citizen; being stitched of limbs from different Iraqis of diverse backgrounds and affiliations Whatsitsname is “the impossible mix that never was achieved in the past” (140). The old madman views him as an eliminator predicted by different religions, an “instrument of mass destruction” of those people who are in the wrong. The eldest mad man thinks of him as a saviour and aspires to become as immortal and famous. This eldest madman, being the maddest of them all, according to the Sophist, possesses the capacity to speak “pure truth” (141). A cursory glance at the company Whatsitsname keeps makes us uncomfortably aware of the fact that people with vested and dubious ambition are using his assigned role as a vigilante to dole out petty interests. At a time of dire strain such companions may appear satisfactory, but if history is any witness, these people would surely turn Whatsitsname, after his success, into a tyrant, where the Sophist would rationalise his deeds, and those three madmen, like three witches, would continue to stoke his over ambition. Through “constant crossfire” which intensifies as night gets darker, Whatsitsname embarks on his regular journey to avenge the wronged people whose limbs are now parts of his body. In his missionary zeal, the monster machine does not care whether his target is a member of al-­Qaeda, a former Ba’ath agent, or a Venezuelan officer – he is justice personified. Once when the monster returns after being severally injured by many bullets and finds out that different parts of his body are rotting away and do not stick to his body, he becomes confused and asks the Magician for an explanation. He proffers that after the revenge is taken, the related person’s limb would melt away from the monster’s body. However, he is vehemently opposed by the Sophist and the Eldest Madman who believe that the “saviour doesn’t die” (143). Soon this argument gathers momentum and supporters of either proposition begin fighting leading to a bloodbath and members of the defeated group start escaping. The winners start a manhunt, executing the deserters and the injured, much like terrorists and members of al-Qaeda, the very people Whatsitsname fights with, amongst others. Then the body parts of one of those killed, ironically called “the saint”, are used to fit in the body of the saviour. However, as his body parts are replaced with new ones his mission is proportionately extended beyond his ­control – he must avenge those who are wronged to get rid of this body, but the act

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of righteous revenge itself becomes an excuse to live on indefinitely. The only way to stop it, he realises, is to end the civil war the country has fallen into, but as long as America-led international presence controls the geo-politics of the region it is not possible. Unclaimed dead bodies lay aplenty, like “rubbish” (147), on road. Soon the three madmen start to collect weapons and ammunitions positioning them strategically as counterinsurgency measures. The quarter of Whatsitsname takes the form of a fortress in no time (147). Thus, the monster is left to fend for himself, surrounded by people with vested interests and no one to recentre him around his original mission. Before long he realises that “things haven’t been going the way” he first thought of (149), and it is through this voice message he at once wants to justify his steps and appeals to people to understand him so that they do not stop him in his mission. He is just one of a number of previous saviours who would like to finish his work and leave (149). To cut his task short he even starts monitoring the pieces of flesh his helpers bring in to re-member his body, forbidding them to fetch limbs of criminals. However, the Magician proffers that there is no one who is not a criminal, some have more criminality, and others just less. An accidental or innocent death does not make a person a non-criminal (149). The very possibility of polluting one’s body became a point of heated discussion. The Sophist, in an attempt to deflect Whatsitsname’s attention away from the Magician, tries to convince Whatsitsname that the Magician is just demoralising him by calling him a half criminal, as half of his flesh comes from them, but he should not worry since even then he would turn into a super criminal because his body is made up of many criminals. These disparaged arguments, however, earn the Sophist the monster’s enmity (151). The Magician is proved to be right as followers of the three madmen start to overpopulate the living quarters of Whatsitsname making the entire operation conspicuous and open to danger and other logistical problems. They start to spread out to nearby buildings. The followers of the eldest madman, following his teachings, start to consider Whatsitsname “face of God on Earth”, and in the madman the prophet of a new religion, “new in both substance and imagery” (152). Their enemies, the followers of the elder madman behave similarly, but in more silence. On the other hand, the followers of the young madman, all Iraqi citizens, consider to participate “in the upcoming elections” (152). This is almost a bitter satire on the Christ image, the Catholics, the Protestants, and the Parliamentarians. Gradually, the monster realises that the crude and rough way of killing people is antagonising him to the very people he is supposedly working for, and following the Sophist’s suggestion he starts to use a gun (150, 152). When he plucks the eyes of a man he kills to replace his old discarded eyes, the Magician’s warning suddenly hits home and he realises that in this case he has no one to blame and he himself is the person he should avenge as the killer of the innocent man. Saadawi, thus, satirically exposes a person passing as a saviour/revolutionary but gradually turning into a self-righteous vigilante. The precise moral problem of a revolutionary as a pharmakon celebrated and masquerading as a liberator also mocks

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Mahmoud’s concept of three types of justice, divine, legal, and street – all rolled into one in Whatsitsname. The anguished mental struggle of Whatsitsname underscores his painful transition; he knows that the Magician would interpret it as a natural response to the baser demands of his criminal body parts, and to redeem himself, he must get rid of those corrupting flesh. The Sophist, on the other hand, would argue that Whatsitsname is now under the influence of the Magician who makes him behave like a criminal to prove his point by enlisting the help of a djinn (154). However, like a true ideologue he convinces and consoles himself upon reaching the self-congratulatory truth that the person he has killed is “a sacrificial lamb that the Lord” has offered him; the victim is the “Innocent Man Who Will Die Tonight” (155). Since they met during crossfire among the militias, he reasons, his victim would have died in a matter of minutes anyway, and his corpse would have become just another unclaimed dead body. However, he soon realises the fighting, which led him to kill an innocent, is not being waged by the militias, but by the followers of the three madmen with conflicting ideologies, something the Magician also predicted (155). Upon reaching his quarters he sees numerous dead bodies of his people, both the eldest and the elder madmen are dead, the Sophist has fled after killing the Magician, and apart from the younger madman hardly anyone has survived. He looks like an insane person, but he has survived only because he is the most murderous of all (156). The young madman, whose followers have been getting ready to take part in the democratic election soon to be arranged by the alien Americans, now looks “like a total criminal”, surviving “the festival of death” (156). It is at this moment of strange revelation seen and realised by the vision provided by the eyes of his innocent victim that Whatsitsname decides to solicit the complicit help of his fellow citizens, and he stops recording his version of the story here, but not before finishing the life of the young madman (157). Even though it is not clear whether, as the Sophist suggested, the Magician indeed enlisted the help of a djinn to help and control the monster, but he indeed was the sanest of his many companions. In fact, magic and occult are present in this text to satirically engage with the scientific spirit of its original text, Shelley’s Frankenstein, a part of Western canon, and a very prominent colonial text. The monster, in Shelley’s vision, is an agent of liberation, where egalitarianism would be a vetted part of statecraft, and the juxtaposition of Henry and Frankenstein nicely pulls off the uncomfortable seating together of a colonial nation producing a text extolling the virtues of proto-socialism. In the context of a long list of theocratic society, now undergoing a foreign aggression, the scene is too familiar, if history is any witness. It will give rise to a dictator who is never wrong even when he indiscriminately kills, without a court of law investigating and weighing any investigation. Not that the foreign occupying power, in its apparent aim to establish a democracy, behaves any better, when they forcefully invade the shack of Haadi and beat him, or forcefully introduce a night curfew, or take control of any area they think the monster might be hiding in. In this tussle of

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retaliatory politics, democracy and theocracy differ only in degree and not in kind. Dictators indeed do not have a permanent face; they just change their face (249), and their names (270). The monster at the end kills the astrologer of the Tracking and Pursuit Department employed to trace his movement. The astrologer who could foresee his death informs us that the One Who Has No Name might have been created by the occult team the Department employed (209), as a measure of vigilante justice; one of them has “inspired the creation of this creature to stop crimes before they happen” (210). We also learn how Whatsitsname is gradually turning into a popular hero and myth, the subject of a number of legends and tall tales (260). Without much investigation, the much bruised, inured, and disfigured Haadi is arrested as the Criminal X, and made to confess as responsible for all the suicide bombings and the crimes committed by Whatsitsname (270). Meanwhile Iraq descends into a full-fledged civil war and at the same time enjoys a decadent liberty where sincerity is cheap and opportunism is easy. With the news of Criminal X’s arrest people start to celebrate the event whereas the creature himself observes, coldly, the jubilant public from the balcony of the newly renovated but now destroyed, soon to be Grand Prophet Hotel (272). Saadawi’s monster figure survives every assault, living in darkness all deserted. Existing in the text as an ambiguity he remains even if lost for the moment, much like Frankenstein’s monster (Shelley, 156). Mahmoud sells the voice record of the monster to the Writer and escapes to his native place. The writer learns from the mails sent to him by the “second assistant” that the junior astrologer, from the Department, has confessed to the “killing of his superior on a Baghdad street by controlling the Criminal Who has No Name by remote suggestion and making the criminal cut off the old astrologer’s hands to fit them onto his own body” (261). The junior astrologer denies the claim that he is responsible for the creation of the monster, but accepts that he has the ability to “exploit it” (261). And Mahmoud’s aesthete editor, Saidi, the writer of The Conditions for Democracy in Rentier States, and a beneficiary of colonialist-democratic venture, escapes the dire situation and remains untraceable save the mails he sends to his protégé, still an ever profiteer. The fact that the junior astrologer’s remote suggestion or the Magician’s conjuring up of the djinn might be responsible for the way Whatsitsname ­ behaves, corroborates his role as a pharmakon. An equal possibility, the text offers, is that this monster is a creation of Elishva’s fervent prayer for her lost son, whose spectre she could visualise (15), to St. George, as she has baraka, spiritual power (9). He can also be a product of Haadi’s long tale; like a magician’s spell, avra k’davra, literally, I create as I speak, Haadi creates the creature as he speaks of him. He is also a creation of transmogrification, as the text suggests. Frankenstein in Baghdad as a text depends on the creation of Whatsitsname and his voice records, as chronicled by the Writer. Jacques Derrida in Dissemination (1981) has shown how the god of writing is also the god of rational science and the occult

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(93, 94). He is also the god of medicine: “Science and magic, the passage between life and death, the supplement to lack and evil, the privileged domain of Thoth, had finally to be medicine” (94). Like Thoth, Whatsitsname is also “the remedy and the poison”. The true writer of the text is Whatsitsname himself; his voice record, as a trace in its infinite iterability, resists a singular interpretation, as Derrida would have it. He is a pharmakon, who does not live a normal life, being immune to bodily corruption (100). He is a mixture of “violent, unbounded excess” and relief (99). Moreover, he is in a causal relationship with pharmakos, scapegoats as well as magicians, poisoners and wizards (130). However, in his ritualistic act of killing, replenishing and shedding his flesh, the getting rid of the evil, and in his gullibility as well as indiscriminate crimes, he is also a pharmakos. It is as a pharmakos that Whatsitsname makes even more sense than as a pharmakon. Derrida adds The origin of difference and division, the pharmakos represents evil both introjected and projected. Beneficial insofar as he cures-and for that, venerated and cared for-harmful insofar as he incarnates the powers of evil-and for that, feared and treated with caution. Alarming and calming. Sacred and accursed. (133) Whatsitsname’s renewal of body parts can be compared to the repetition of body as text, an act of writing (Derrida 135–136). His changing faces beneath the same mission and passion, his being surrounded by people who believe in magic and legends, his first representation by a writer called Mahmoud, and then by the anonymous Writer, and later by Saadawi himself can be likened to his made up appearance by the Sophist. His trajectory from a pharmakon to a pharmakos resembles a ritualistic practice as Derrida describes in his discussion of pharmakeus in Dissemination. Whatsitsname is the saviour and dictator who returns, like past as a revenant, as the indomitable will of the Iraqi people, and as euphoric dictator. From Plato’s pharmakon of Derrida, to Fanon’s pharmakon of Mbembe, Whatsitsname transforms into a pharmakos, a figure to reckon with. A venerable opposition, avenging what he thinks the wronged people with no agency he could change into a terrifying figure of an angel of death. The gradual rise of the ISIS, and more recently of the Talibans, shows how prescient Frankenstein in Baghdad is, and the text does not shy away to point out the inherent evils of the Iraqi society while exposing the rouge of democracy as a colonial practice. Theories, especially western theories might be helpful in an understanding of the inner politics of such a complex text, it must be remembered, the living experience of a civil war does not wait for a scholar to theoretically explain the daily tribulations of a precarious society in risk of dispossession and in need of a saviour. However, this saviour, the text cautions, unless is reined, might turn out to be a very familiar kind of danger posing as divinely ordained justice, and the country might relapse into the same fanaticism which the colonial powers could exploit to occupy it.

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Notes 1 Gayatri Spivak has read Shelley’s Frankenstein in her much celebrated essay “Three Women’s Text and a Critique of Imperialism” (1985), where she followed the “­popular” 1831 edition, which modern scholarship finds a much watered down version of the original with many revisions offered by her husband. The first edition, on the other hand, is not as prone to critique British colonialism, and is a more ambiguous text. 2 For a discussion of writing as conditioned by anguish and haunting by a soul or spirit, we must go back to Derrida, Writing and Difference (2001) pp. 9, 10, 383, 384.

Works Cited Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004. ———. Frames of War: When Life is Grievable? London: Verso, 2009. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Ed. Paul B. Armstrong. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2006. Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Tr. Barbara Johnson. London: Athelone Press, 1981. ———. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Tr. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge Classics, 2006. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Tr. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2004. LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 2014. Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Tr. Steven Corcoran. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. Saadawi, Ahmed. Frankenstein in Baghdad. Tr. Jonathan Wright. London: Oneworld, 2018. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1996.

16 THE TRAUMA OF FAMILIARITY A Very Brief Overview of British Muslim Writings in the Post-9/11 U.K. Pinaki Roy

The repercussions of the 11 September 2001 (Tuesday) attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in the U.S.A. by al-Qaeda members (which killed ­approximately 3000 people, and wounded over 6000 others) (Tella 23) were felt by the non-Western immigrants (to the U.S.A.) almost immediately (after the incident). Hate crimes perpetrated by the White Westerners against the immigrants from Asia (and Africa) – especially the Muslims from Asia – became so common in the West in the first decade of the 21st century that a Wisconsinbased Asian social activist was forced to compare the post-9/11 pitiable state of the Muslims in the West (mostly in the U.S.A., but also in the U.K.) to that of the Afro-Americans in the U.S.A. (Rivers 70). One could here relate this state of the Easterners’ losing the hitherto safe-haven to that of Eve and Adam’s biblical expulsion, and recall the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s lines in “Eleven Stars over Andalusia” (1994): ‘I am the Adam of the two Edens, I who lost paradise twice. / So expel me slowly, / and kill me slowly, / under my olive tree […]’ (Chamber 72). However, the physical and psychological ‘expulsion’ of the Muslims was not ‘slow’ in the West: rather numerous non-White (especially Muslim U.S.) citizens were mocked at, arrested, and even exterminated soon after the cataclysmic event, which, reportedly, had killed even more Americans than those who died in the Japanese air raid on the Pearl Harbour. According to Tella, 2117 Americans were killed in the Pearl Harbour raid (23). The U.K. – an ally of the U.S.A. – also participated in the ‘war on terror’ launched principally by the U.S.A. after the 9/11 attacks, but the psychological reverberations of England’s counterterrorist measures – because they were registered and reviewed by the U.K.-based Muslim writers more poignantly than their U.S. counterparts – was more keenly felt. This chapter seeks to (very

DOI: 10.4324/9781003362999-21

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briefly) focus on the effects of the post-9/11 sentiments on select British Muslim litterateurs. One can easily understand the level of segregation that the British Muslims felt in the wake of the 9/11 attacks by studying the British Security and Intelligence Coordinator David Omand’s assessment of the post-9/11 U.K. security measures: For the U.S.A. at that time, the problem was seen as defeating an external enemy; for support for jihadist violence could already be found in small minorities within European Muslim communities, and these feelings were heightened with the occupation of Iraq. In the U.K., external and domestic intelligence and police services improved their ability to work as a single counterterrorist community, and with allies and partners overseas developed the use of modern technology to track individuals, their identities, movements, finances and communications around the world. What emerged in 2002-03 was a distinctive British approach to using security and intelligence aggressively against jihadist terrorism as part of a risk reduction strategy. It was not the ‘war on terror’, but was instead aimed at maintaining normality so that people could go about their normal life freely (that is, without having to suspend the rule Europe, on the other hand, the external problem was being mirrored on the inside as of law and interfere with individual liberties) and with confidence (that is, with visitors coming to the U.K., markets stable, people still travelling by air and on the underground, and so on).1 As is evident from different sections of the post-9/11 fiction produced by the British Muslim writers, the police activities, intelligence, tracking of individuals’ movements, and the ‘urge to maintain normality’ in the U.K. actually segregated the Muslim individuals and heightened their innate sense of ‘otherness’. This feeling of ‘expulsion’ for the U.K.-based Muslims was accentuated by the fact that many of the anti-Muslim crime perpetrators were either their (former) friends or neighbours or acquaintances. These former familiarities made such experiences more traumatic than ever – it was really a ‘trauma of familiarity’ in post-9/11 England for the Muslims living there: not unlike the situation of the Jews when their German neighbours turned against them throughout Deutschland after 1933! Regarding the then oppressive situations and thereafter, Imran Ismail, a British social worker, has summarised, “We feel like outsiders in our own country…Because […] before I was part of a community, a British community in England. Now I am part of a criminal element in Bradford” (qtd. in Bagguley and Hussain 111). Almost echoing Ismail, the editors Ahmed, Morey, and Yaqin note how the 9/11 incident shattered any British Muslim utopian notion of having found acceptance and security in England, and rekindled their perception of their diasporic status (Ahmed, Morey, and Yaqin 10). Naturally, the novels, short stories,

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dramas/plays, and poems that developed out of the exasperation, indignation, and pain of these individuals were no ordinary elements of diasporic writings. While – for example – the non-Muslim litterateurs of Indian origin settled in the U.K. did not have to ‘prove’ – in the first place – that they are ‘patriotic’, ‘trustworthy’, and ‘dependable’ in order to find ‘acceptance’ and ‘readership’, the Muslim writers were faced with exactly such ‘demeaning’ challenges: they were first required to ‘prove’ that they did not harbour any ‘destructive thoughts’ against the White Westerners, that they were ‘benign Muslims’ and ‘honest individuals’, and that they would be ‘ready to leave the U.K. whenever ordered’ – only then would their voices be heard! They had failed to make their White neighbours and readers understand that the ‘Muslim faith ‘and ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ are completely different aspects (Rabasa 5). They were members of the ‘double diaspora’ in the wrong sense of the term: first, they were alienated from their own country of origin, and thereafter, they were ‘permanent aliens’ in their host nation. Hence, the term ‘diasporic writings’ would be outrightly ‘insufficient’ to describe their publications: the term ‘Post-9/11 Muslim Diasporic Writings’ would be more ‘acceptable’ internationally! Other than ostracising citizens who were as committed to the British cause and sworn to develop Britain as integrally as the White subjects, the xenophobia, which became rampant in the White British psyche after the 9/11 incident, seriously – though indirectly – challenged the concept of the U.K. as a thriving multicultural and postmodern kingdom. As Chris Weedon writes, the ‘negative differences’ associated by the White British citizens with the Muslims in the U.K. was bereft of any effort to understand and respect the ‘identity’ of the religious minorities, and led to the ‘unevenness’ of the multicultural growth of England (Sell 20–21). He identifies ‘Hanif Kureishi, M. Y. Alam, Monica Ali, and Kenneth Glenaan’ as the writers in whose fiction the segregation of the British Muslims is most vividly depicted (ibid. 21). Likewise, Ahmed, Morey, and Yaqin refer to Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), Mohammad Hanif ’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008), Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil (2008), and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (2009) as some of the fictional publications which are to be read for an idea of the depiction of these segregations and prejudices (Ahmed, Mori, and Yaqin 1). In the present chapter, I propose to very briefly review select works by Tariq Ali (b. 1943), Hanif Kureishi (b. 1954), Monica Ali (b. 1967), Mohsin Hamid (b. 1971), Zahid Hussain (b. 1972), Kamila Shamsie (b. 1973), and Tahmina Anam (b. 1975) in order to identify different aspects of alienation as felt by the above-mentioned British Muslim authors in their adopted/own country (U.K.) in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks. These authors originally hail from either Pakistan (Tariq Ali, Hanif Kureishi, Mohsin Hamid, Zahid Hussain, Kamila Shamsie) or Bangladesh (Monica Ali and Tahmina Anam), but they bore the brunt of prejudice and xenophobia after the 9/11 assault as intensely as those confronting the U.K.-settled (former) residents of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Lebanon. While Sufian specially identifies the names

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mentioned as the British Muslim postcolonial litterateurs who have revealed themselves most poignantly yet appreciably after the 9/11 attacks,2 Ranasinha detects in the female authors mentioned a symbolic empowerment of the postcolonial South Asian female writers (27). The atrocities against the Muslims settled in the U.K. have been depicted to the most minute detail by the female and male Pakistani, Afghan, and Bangladeshi litterateurs alike – and, importantly, both have suffered the same xenophobic assaults. However, as Samita Bhatia indicates, the post-9/11 period might have been the ‘worst of times’ for writers from countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh (who were settled in the U.K.), but such turbulence also gave way to ‘the best of times for the writer and the poet’ as they produced several fictional masterpieces capturing the turbulence.3 Their focuses and themes, however, were markedly different from the general writers of the diaspora settled in the U.K. While, for example, writers like Meera Syal (b. 1961), Amit Chaudhuri (b. 1962), or Sunetra Gupta (b. 1965) could write on diverse (and usual diaspora literature-related) subjects like the anxiety, hybridity, nostalgia, confusions, love, education, activism, and problems of psychological constructs, the post-9/11 Muslim authors writing in the U.K. subconsciously/unconsciously (and understandably) ‘replaced’ such issues with topics like xenophobia, indirectly expressed racial hatred, mockery, unfriendliness, unemployment or dismissal, hate crimes, forced displacement, and rootlessness. The ‘aesthetics’ of publications of the post-9/11 Muslim authors in the U.K. is ‘different’ – to say the least! Critics of diasporic writings need to design new definitions and terminology for describing their trends, issues, and topics. Novelists like Ali or Kureishi would have readily agreed to this! Born in Lahore to a family of leftist activists who worked briefly for the Pakistani Army and demanded empowerment of the Pakistani farmers, Tariq Ali studied philosophy and economics at Exeter College, Oxford. Presently a resident of London (with his partner Susan Watkins), Ali wanted the legalisation of marijuana in the U.K., protested against the U.S.A.’s participation in the Vietnam conflict, briefly sided with the Cuban revolutionaries, and is working as a respectable journalist in the U.K. Madeline Clements identifies his A Sultan in Palermo (2005) exclusively as a ‘post-9/11 fiction’ (Clements 51). The novel, written during the post-9/11 American and British military actions in Iraq, is set in medieval Europe, and depicts how the Arabians and the White inhabitants from Europe could have lived in an atmosphere of cultural exchange – thus challenging the stereotyping of Muslims in a Europe/England changed unalterably by the 9/11 incident. Through the protagonist – the Sicilian geographer Muhammad Idrisi – Ali not only imagines a Muslim conquest of England but also, hopefully, mentions how the cosmopolitism – implicit in Islam – could have altered (for the better) the habits and perspectives of the xenophobic Whites under a fictional Muslim rule. This book by Ali – who has already questioned the European ‘demonisation’ of Islam in his earlier fictional works like The Book of Saladin (1998) and The Stone Woman (2000), has been described by several critics as yet another of his attempts at reversal of the ‘Orientalising gaze’ (Chambers 39).

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In his Night of the Golden Butterfly (2010), Ali uses a plethora of characters – the narrator Dara, the housewife Naughty Lateef, the much suffering girl from Sindh Zaynab, and the Chinese (former royal family) girl from Lahore Zindi – to paint a Pakistan which has several points for improvement but whose evils have been partially contributed by the West. Zaynab tries to escape from Pakistan to England and France for a taste of freedom, but she does not find acceptance in the xenophobic post-9/11 society and forever long to return to her own country. Cara Cilano also identifies this 2010 novel as a questioning of the European interpretation of Pakistan – especially in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks ­ (Cilano 11). If a flabbergasted Tariq Ali proposes to present an alternative picture of Islam and of the British Muslims in direct opposition to the White (prejudiced) versions in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Hanif Kureishi (born in London to a Pakistani father and an English mother) published four novels (until February 2018) after the 9/11 attacks – The Body (2003), Something to Tell You (2008), The Last Word (2014), and The Nothing (2017) – and three plays: The Mother (2003), Venus (2007), and The Black Album (2009). Sara Upstone identifies The Black Album, focussing on an imagined bomb blast at Victoria Station, as a literary piece which examines the gravity of the British Christian versus British Muslim relationship in wake of the rising ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ (Birkenstein, Froula, and Randell 37). An alumnus of King’s College London, Kureishi criticises all forms of extremism in his fictional writings, with special attention to obliquely lambasting the British Christian misconception of the Muslim writers from the U.K. The principal narrative in the novella The Body identifiably focuses on the Cartesian idea of the body-mind duality, dismisses the idea in totality, and through the initially adventurous but later boring journeys of the sexually active protagonist Adam, indirectly depicts a Europe which has changed dangerously following the 9/11 incident – so much so that a sensitive person can never love touring it. In Something to Tell You, the protagonist Jamal – with an estranged wife Josephine, a gradually degrading son Rafi, and an overweighed sister Miriam – finds himself as totally incompatible with the multicultural England whose shining exteriors conceal innumerable depravities underneath and whose apparently genial society has high suspicions for people like Jamal – especially after the attack on the World Trade Centre in the U.S.A. In The Last Word – ­perceptively about the ‘irregularities’ and ‘seediness’ of Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (thinly veiled in the character of the ‘postcolonial giant Mamoon Azam’) and in The Nothing – describing the cuckoldry of the film director Waldo by his wife Zee and his friend Eddie  – Kureishi humorously attacks the hypocrisies of the English ­society – the same society which has illogically segregated the Muslims after the 9/11 inciudent. Born in Dhaka, and educated at Oxford, Monica Ali – who lives in London with her management consultant husband Simon Torrance – modelled for the ‘Womanising’ campaign of Marks and Spencer in 2013, and was shortlisted for

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the Man Booker Prize for her debut novel Brick Lane (2003), published two years after the 9/11 assault. In 2006, 2009, and 2011, respectively, Ali also published three other novels (all published by the New York-based Doubleday): Alentejo Blue, In the Kitchen, and Untold Story. Alentejo Blue studies the difficulties and effect of migration of people of various nationalities in the Portuguese village of Mamarrosa. In the Kitchen is about the hotel employee Gabriel Lightfoot’s relationship with immigrant cooks and their immigrant acquaintances. Untold Story imagines what would have happened had not Diana Frances Spencer (1961–97) died in the August 1997 car accident in Paris but had lived under a pseudonym in a small U.S. town. However, with Brick Lane (named after the east London street where numerous Bangladeshis have opened their stalls, especially those selling curries), Ali found international acclaim and attention. Focussing on the experiences of the Bangladeshi immigrant Nazneen (who seeks to marry the older, self-opinionated Chanu, lives in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, and has a lover in Karim from Shylet), Ali’s Brick Lane explores the complex dynamics of relationships between the English Christians and the Bangladeshi Muslim Bengalis settled in London – especially in the aftermath of the 9/11 incident. Matthias Dickert identifies Brick Lane as belonging to the ‘special genre of 9/11 fiction’ which uses ‘9/11 as a plot device’ – the incident having had ‘started an explosion of fiction that was not necessarily to have been’ (Dickert 4). As Sanchita Islam reviews for London Fiction, [In Brick Lane,] Monica Ali quietly documents the harrowing scenes of 9/11 as seen by millions the world over. Chanu is mesmerised, glued to the television, and his rants have an ominous foreboding of the Islamic extremism that has become pervasive. His wife, Nazneen, is bewildered: such is her detachment from the outside world. It is events like these that begin to dispel the stillness that she previously inhabited. The introduction of Karim precipitates Nazneen’s sexual awakening. In one pivotal scene she puts on a bright red sari and surreptitiously attends a meeting of the Bengali Tigers, the activist Islamist organisation headed by Karim, in order to be close to him. This radical group intends to rise up against the Western powers to defend the Muslim world. Karim’s impassioned speeches about the distant war-torn territories of Bosnia, Chechnya and Afghanistan expand her knowledge of the world beyond the flat and the estate. They stir Nazneen’s soul.4 Mohammed Hanif (b. 1964, Okara, Pakistan) – an alumnus of the University of East Anglia and Pakistan Air Force Academy – might have attracted international attention with the award-winning humorous novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008) (focussing on the death of the Pakistani President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq (1924–88)) – but, working as a B.B.C. correspondent in Karachi, he also could hardly escape describing the altered times in Europe after the Twin

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Tower attacks in the U.S.A. Mohsin Hamid (b. 1971), seven years younger to Hanif, moved to London from Lahore and New York in 2001, just before the 9/11 attacks. His first novel, Moth Smoke (2000), set in the background of the 28 May 1998 underground nuclear tests conducted by Pakistan and focussing on the sleaziness of the life led by Darashikoh Shezad, a disgraced banker who loves Mumtaz, his best friend’s wife, had already captured the darkness of the apparently healthy multicultural societies which were to be brought forth in England after the 9/11 attacks. His second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) – can be called a ‘post-9/11 fiction proper’: it is actually a ‘dramatic monologue in prose’ narrated out by Changez, a Pakistani, to an American visitor at a tea café in Lahore. A former student of Princeton University, and later a university teacher at Lahore, Changez is forced to abandon the U.S.A. for Pakistan after the 9/11 attacks when his public treatment is altered in the wake of open suspicions by the White Americans. What Hamid actually seeks to portray in his 2007 novel is the prejudiced treatment of the Muslims in the Western world – including in the U.K. – after the Twin Tower assault, and how the Muslims indignantly replied to the generalising and demeaning treatments. Hamid has also published Exit West in 2017 – about the young couple Nadia and Saeed fleeing from their country (under civil war) to England (where they encounter the White Christians’ mistreatment of migrants), but his The Reluctant Fundamentalist has found the most of critical attention. Arin Keeble pays particular attention to Hamid’s 2007 novel for its keen and poignant depiction of the ‘Otherness’ faced by the Muslims in the West – including in the U.K. – after the 9/11 incident, while steadily remaining a ‘relationship narrative’ (Keeble 115). Zahid Hussain, a former winner of the North West Poetry Slam, became a popular name with the publication of his debut novel The Curry Mile in 2006, five years after the New York attacks. Set on Wilmslow Road (in southern Manchester, England) (which is sometimes referred to as the ‘Curry Mile’ – because of its assortment of South Asian restaurants), Hussain’s novel captures the culture clash between Ajmal Butt, a restaurant owner, and his modernised, liberalised daughter Soraya, who returns to Manchester from London in order to escape a disastrous love affair but soon becomes a rival restaurant owner vis-àvis her father’s business ventures. The novel, once again, indirectly captures the changing appearances of the British society in the aftermath of the 9/11 incident, but as Ulrike Tancke writes, The Curry Mile does not portray the immigrants – in contrast with that of the usual diasporic writings – as ‘powerless victims of oppression’ but as powerful contributors to the growing multiculturalism of England (Bentley, Hubble, and Wilson 239). On the other hand, Dudrah applauds this novel for its masterful depiction of different aspects of South Asian life in Manchester (113). One of the more popular British Muslim female writers of the 21st century, Kamila Shamsie – the daughter of the editor and journalist Muneeza Shamsie (b. 1922) – moved to London from Karachi in 2007, and is an alumnus of the

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University of Massachusetts Amherst. Between 1998 and 2017, Shamsie has published eight major works, and her Kartography (2002), published in the year after the 9/11 attacks, has been most critically applauded for its depiction of the plight of the Muslims in the White West following the assaults. Arin Keeble notices how, in the post-9/11 scenario, British Muslim authors have begun weaving gradually different non-fictional incidents from the attacks into their ‘domestic fiction’ (165), and Shamsie’s novels, published after 2001, are no exceptions. On the other hand, Pei-Chen Liao identifies Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (2009) as an appreciable fictional prose regarding the Twin Tower attacks (Liao 13). Focussing on the Karachi experiences of the friends Karim, Rahim, Sonia, and Zia, Kartography is a love story set in the war-torn 1971, and details incidents from the Civil War (between West and East Pakistan, ultimately leading to the formation of ‘Bangladesh’). However, Shamsie’s strife-struck Pakistan is readable, symbolically, as the Muslim society in the West – especially in the U.K. – after the 9/11 incident led to the increasing of xenophobic attacks against the Muslim immigrants. Shamsie’s fifth novel, Burnt Shadows, starts in Second World War period Japan, moves through India during the 1947 partition, covers Pakistan during the 1980s, briefly focuses on the U.S.A. after the 9/11 attacks, and ends in Afghanistan during the post-9/11 U.S. raids, touching the lives of characters like Hiroko Tanaka ( Japan), Konrad Weiss (Germany), James Burton (England), Sajjad Ali Ashraf (India), and Raza (India-Pakistan). Maya Jaggi, reviewing the novel for The Guardian, particularly cringes at its depiction of the mistreatment of the Muslim prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay prison.5 Finally, Tahmina Anam’s A Golden Age, The Good Muslim, and The Bones of Grace were published respectively in 2007, 2011, and 2016, and these novels capture the multicultural world changed by the West’s response to the 9/11 incident. An alumnus of Harvard University (where she did her Ph.D. research), and settled in London with her second husband Roland Lamb, Anam originally hails from a family of Bangladeshi freedom fighters from Dhaka. Her first novel, The Golden Age, is a fictional biography of her grandmother during the Bangladesh Liberation War, but can be reread against the backdrop of hostilities and xenophobia of the West – including those of the Whites in the U.K. – demonstrated against the Muslims in the aftermath of the 9/11 incident. The Good Muslim, published by HarperCollins, New York, captures the symbolic conflict between the liberated Maya and her brother Sohail who has become a fanatical religious leader after the conclusion of the Bangladesh Liberation War. Writing in London after the 9/11 incident, Anam does a thorough (though fictionalised) research of the role of extremism, fanaticism, and hatred vis-à-vis the Western misconception of the Muslims settled in the U.K. and the U.S.A. The Bones of Grace captures the dilemma of Zubaida Haque, and adopted Bengali daughter, who is torn between her senses of longing for the U.S.A. (where she has studied) and belonging to Bangladesh (her native country). What plagues Haque about the West is its prejudiced attitude towards the Muslims after the 9/11 incident.

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Dickert, however, does not seem to be too much appreciative of the manner in which Anam, Fadia Faquir, Samina Ali, or Kia Abdullah uses the 9/11 incident simply to ‘push the action’ in the novels (Dickert 4). Post-9/11 period has witnessed the publication of a vast number of novels by Muslims settled in both the U.S.A. and the U.K. This chapter has listed a very few of them. In fact, the list is growing with every passing month. And, needless to say, all these novels (by the Easterners settled in the West) openly criticise the manner in which the hitherto familiar society of the Whites changed dramatically against their ‘coloured’ neighbours from the East – especially the Muslims from South Asia – after the 9/11 incident. Interestingly, the identification – or, sometimes, ‘categorisation’ – of the Muslim litterateurs writing in the U.K. ­following the incident straightforwardly as ‘British Muslim writers’ appears to be a bit complicated and requires an explanation, which would also highlight the cause for their intense sense of alienation. Most of the Muslim novelists reviewed in the present essay (permanently) settled in the U.K. from different Asian countries and took British citizenship long before the attacks. They have married, found employment, and some of them gained entry into British politics as well. As Hill and Rogers write, people like them ‘have no other national identity than British’ (166). Importantly, though these writers and intellectuals are keen neither to highlight their West-settled status or ‘British-ness’, nor vociferously register their immigrant or the so-called ‘subaltern’ status, a certain degree of their being subsumed in British culture and ways of daily life becomes obtrusive in their writings every now and then: even when they situate their novels in non-European countries! In fact, a mere surface review of their novels would reveal that though they are resentful of certain incidents and certain treatments meted out to them or to the other people of their religion in England, they are more interested to ensure that such incidents or experiences are not repeated rather than leaving England for good and settling back in their own countries of origin. Naturally, their innate sense of ‘adopted British-ness’ – their personal ideas of acceptability – were rudely jolted as the pre-9/11 atmosphere of ‘friendliness’, ‘acceptance’, and ‘cohabitation’ of England was fast replaced by the post9/11 environment of xenophobia and anti-Muslim sentiments. As mentioned earlier, what has deeply problematised the Muslims’ perception of the judgemental attitude of the Westerners is their discovery of the fact that their White, ‘familiar’ neighbours became inimical illogically and immediately after the 9/11 attacks. While many Muslims in the U.K. were attacked, abused, thrashed, wounded, or annihilated, many writers lost their readership overnight as well! Their own hitherto-‘friendly’ Western readers and acquaintances ‘rejected’ them! This ‘trauma of familiarity’ mostly plagued the Muslim inhabitants of the U.S.A. and the U.K. But then, as Samita Bhatia – referring to Rakshanda Jalil’s statement – writes, the authors mentioned are not especially concerned with ‘pleasing’ the ‘Western critics’ for ‘lucrative deals’, but are trying to find ‘their own voices’.6 The post-9/11 novels by (select) British Muslim

Overview of British Muslim Writings in the Post-9/11 U.K.  221

writers has masterfully and poignantly captured the mindless prejudices of the Whites, and has opened the perceived ‘multicultural’ societies of the U.K. and the U.S.A. to adjust international criticism and closer examination than ever.

Notes 1 Omand, David. “How the U.K. Managed Counter-Terrorism after 9/11”. R.U.S.I. 2 September 2011. Accessed on 7 February 2018 . 2 Abu, Sufian. “Countering the Misery Genre: A Postcolonial Study of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and Shelina Janmohamed’s Love in a Headscarf ” (unpublished M.H.S.-dissertation, I.I. University Malaysia, July 2016). Accessed on 11 February 2018 : 10–11. 3 Bhatia, Samita. “Pakistan’s New Script”. The Telegraph (Kolkata) 12 April 2009. Accessed on 11 February 2018 . 4 Islam, Sanchita. “Review – of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane”. London Fictions. 2013. Accessed on 12 February 2018 . 5 Jaggi, Maya. “When Worlds collide: Review of Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows”. The Guardian, 7 March 2009. Accessed on 12 February 2018 .

Works Cited Ahmed, Rehana, Peter Morey, and Amina Yaqin (eds.). Culture, Diaspora, and Modernity in Muslim Writing. Routledge, 2012. Bagguley, Paul, and Yasmin Hussain. Rituous Citizens: Ethnic Conflicts in Multicultural Britain. Routledge, 2008. Rpt. 2016. Bentley, Nick, Nick Hubble, and Leigh Wilson (eds.). The 2000s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Birkenstein, Jeff, Anna Froula, and Karen Randell (eds.). Reframing 9/11: Film, Popular Culture, and the ‘War on Terror’. Continuum, 2010. Chambers, Claire (ed.), British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Cilano, Cara. Contemporary Pakistani Fiction in English: Idea, Nation, and State. Routledge, 2013. Clements, Madeline. Writing Islam from a South Asian Muslim Perspective: Rushdie, Hamid, Aslam, and Shamsie. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Dickert, Matthias. The Influence of the 9/11 Novel on Muslim Writing. GRIN Publishing, 2017. Dudrah, Rajinder. Bollywood Travels: Culture, Diaspora, and Border-Crossings in Popular Hindi-Cinema. Routledge, 2012. Hill, John, and Ann Rogers. The Society and Culture of Major English-Speaking Countries: An Introduction. Bookman, 2002. Keeble, Arin. The 9/11 Novel: Trauma, Politics, and Identity. McFarland and Company, 2014.

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Liao, Pei-Chen. Post-9/11 South Asian Diasporic Fiction: Uncanny Terror. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Rabasa, Angel, et al. (eds.). The Muslim World after 9/11. Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2004. Ranasinha, Ravani. Contemporary Diasporic South Asian Women’s Fiction: Gender, Narration, and Globalisation. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Rivers, Patrick Lynn. Governing Hate and Race in the United States and South Africa. State University of New York Press, 2008. Sell, Jonathan (ed.). Metaphor and Diaspora in Contemporary Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Tella, Oluyinka. The Post-9/11-Syndrome. Xlibris, 2011.

INDEX

9/11 1, 2, 4, 6, 17, 26, 32, 86, 105 Ahl-e-Hadith movement 66 Ahmed, Sara 10 Akhtar, Ayad 32 Ali, Ayaan Hirsi 51 Amis, Martin 23 anti-Semitism 38 Archaeology of Knowledge 150 Arondekar, Anjali 189 Avengers: Infinity Wars 164 Badiou, Alain 47 Bauman, Zygmunt 83 belonging 1, 3, 10, 11, 44, 61, 91, 93, 94, 101, 189, 200, 217 Black Skin,White Masks 38 Boehmer, Elleke 116 Borradori, Giovanna 169 British Muslim Writings 212 Butler, Judith 10, 199 Charlie Hebdo 46 The Clash of Civilizations 51, 110 coloniality of power syndrome 97 Comedy Talk Show 138 The Concept of the Political 22 Conditional Citizens 100 conscience liberalism 158 cosmopolitan novel 114 Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World 110

critical localism 104 cultural capital 77 cultural hegemony 64 Cultural Politics 82 cynical poses 142 Death of George Floyd 167 democracy 1, 12, 65, 76, 95, 99, 101, 139, 147 democratic digital space 176 deterritorialized self 94 Deutschland after 1933 213 digital ephemera 177 digital merchandise 179 Disgraced 32 Eagleton, Terry 24 Exit West 71, 114 explosive communities 83 Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close 75 Face of the Other 25 Frankenstein in Baghdad 198 Friedman, Jonathan 79 geontopower 10 Gikandi, Simon 126, 127 Globalization 82, 104 Grewal, Inderpal 10 Hamid, Mohsin 68 Hardt, Michael 1 Heart of Darkness 203

224 Index

Hegelian dialectics 72 home 1 Homeland Elegies 35, 97 Homo Sacer 28, 29 Hollywood 155 homosexuality 190 Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits 100 Houellebecq, Michel 46 Identity and Violence 85 Ijtihad 190 Ilhan Omar Debate 148 Iron Man 159 ISIS 210 Islamic fundamentalism 214 Islamic machine 104 Islamophobia 33, 40, 43 Ivanchikova, Alla 8 Je suis Charlie 46, 47, 50 Kierkegaard, Søren 149, 150, 151 Lacanian decentring of desire 72 LaCapra, Dominick 201 Lalami, Laila 93 Language of State 77 Levinas, Emmanuel 20 LGBTQ Muslims 193 Lieux de mémoire 133 liquid modernity 83 LTTE 62 Marvel Cinematic Universe 158 Modood, Tariq 78 Muslim American Masculinity 39 Muslims in America: A Short History 35 Nancy, Jean Luc 26 narcissistic character armour 88 nationalism 116 Necropolitics 202 negative messianism 203 Negri, Antonio 1 neo-Orientalist dystopia 57 Nora, Pierre 133 NSEERS 33 Oklahoma Bombings of 1995 19 politics of fear 6 Postcolonial Pharmakon 198 postcolonial theory 116

Post-Tamil Elam War 59 Povinelli, Elizabeth 10 Prophet Muhammad 20 Queer Diasporic Muslim 193 Queer Jihad 190 Queer Muslim immigrant 194 racialization of Muslims 35 refugee as terrorist 146 Reinhard, Kenneth 22 religious martyrs 173 The Reluctant Fundamentalist 111 return of the Moor 94 Rohingya refugees 66 Rumsfeld, Donald 24 Rushdie Affair 77 Rushdie, Salman 77 Salman Rushdie on Intolerance 89 Sand Opera 28, 29 Satanic Verses 56 Schmitt, Carl 23 Sinhala Only Act 60 Sinhala Buddhists 63 Sontag, Susan 81 Specters of Marx 204 Sri Lankan Muslims 64 Submission 46 The Submission 25, 26 superheroes 154 Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times 193 terrorist villain 153 A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 105 Tragic Queer Diasporic Muslim 185 transnationalism 116 trauma of familiarity 213 Tribute in Light 133 universal homogenous state 105 Updike, John 69 war against terrorism 1 war on terror 1, 27, 33, 38, 48 WEIRD comedy 140 Welcome to the Desert of the Real 28 World Trade Centre bombings 1 Xenophobia 47, 56, 68 Žižek, Slavoj 28, 29, 156