The West and its Other: Literary Responses to 9/11

Present research aims to study the representation of Islam in post 9/11 English novels. To this aim 31 post 9/11 English novels were divided into eight categories based on the angles from which they had looked at 9/11 event, and one novel of each category, a better received one, was chosen through cluster sampling to be studied. As the study went on two categories were deleted for not being related to the subject. Thus six novels by Updike, DeLillo, Ferrigno, see, Halaby, and Kalfus were studied. Using representation theory and Foucault's discursive formation approach, the effort was taken to identify the latent and manifest discourses shaping and shaped by these texts as well as the characteristics attributed to Islam and Muslims. The results showed that the discourse shaping the texts (war against terrorism) and discourses shaped by the texts (Muslims are all the same, Muslims are violent and promote violence, and Zionists are innocent) are in line with the power discourse in four of the six novels; whereas, in the remaining two novels, the approach taken toward power discourse is quite subversive. This of course signifies the presence of a multiple voice in the American society although the weaker voice is not heard as well as the loud voice.

2015

Although it has been always difficult to provide an adequate and comprehensive definition of "Terrorism", Islam has been falsely and closely associated with this concept in post 9/11 th literature. Focusing on Joseph Geha's Alone and All Together (2002), Laila Halaby's Once on a Promised Land (2007), and Mohsin Hamid's the Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), I explain how Islam and the Arabic identity-which relates to Islam in one way or another-become responsible for the misery experienced by the Arab-American minority after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 th. In the aforementioned works, Islam and the Arab ethnicity are entrapped under the strong feelings of patriotism and Americanism in post 9/11 United States. Islam falsely becomes the religion of terrorists who are referred to as radical Arabs and who are not recognized as patriotic citizens of the United States.

2017

The start of the twenty-first century has witnessed a simultaneous rise of three areas of scholarly interest: 9/11 literature, human rights discourse, and War on Terror studies. The resulting intersections between literature and human rights, foregrounded by an overarching narrative of terror, have led to a new area of interdisciplinary enquiry broadly classed under human rights literature, at the point of the convergence of which lies the idea of human empathy. Concurrently with the development of human rights literature as a distinct field of study, two new strains of Pakistani literature have emerged on the Anglophone literary scene. Firstly, there are biographical works by women, co-authored with Western journalists, that have become controversial because there are contesting claims about human rights that emerge from their authorship, circulation and reception. Secondly, there are works of fiction, with the potential to be read as rights narratives, that problematize the curren...

For any process of literary defamiliarization of discourse to take place, it has to take into account the economy of power relations which are complicit in history. It is argued that 9/11, as a " historical " moment, has emphasized a cofounding period of " transition " in the contemporary globalized world. However, the problematic question that has not yet received much critical consideration is the extent to which literature, more specifically prose fiction, involves not merely the process of historicizing the event and its ongoing aftermath but also the process of dehistoricizing and defamiliarizing it to the reader. This is basically the framework within which the argument of the present article operates. Its premise lies at the origins of investigating closely the politics of trauma and terror in Mohsin Hamid " s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) as a post-9/11 postcolonial fictional narrative. Drawing upon postcolonial approach, the present study argues that Hamid has provided an alternative fictional perspective which has defamiliarized and problematized the hegemonic and orientalist discourses of " war on terror " and " clash of civilizations " by which the post-9/11 western colonial project is legitimatized. In so doing, this diasporic American novelist highlights in his aforementioned postcolonial trauma literary work the power relations behind " terrorism " and " war on terror " through which Hamid questions the post-9/11 " regime of truth " which has been constructing " orientals " as " terrorist others. "

2018

The decade following the events of 9/11 has witnessed a new wave of Pakistani English writers who have attained wide international acclaim. This surge in Pakistani writings in English has coincided with a renewed interest in the intersections between literature and human rights, especially in the current period of global tension. This article aims to examine the role of contemporary Pakistani Anglophone fiction as a valuable counter-narrative to 9/11 writings in the West, and the ways in which it engages with the effects of the ensuing ‘War on Terror’. For this analysis, I focus on two representative works of fiction: Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (2009), and Jamil Ahmad’s The Wandering Falcon (2011), and highlight the different yet important contributions of each in expanding the genre of 9/11 writing. While Shamsie stresses the need for a broader historical contextualization of recent events that have caused a global divide, Ahmad’s work is an attempt to humanize the tribal populations of Pakistan perceived as the ‘enemy’ in the war against terrorism. Keywords: Pakistani fiction; war on terror; human rights; human dignity; post 9/11 fiction; Kamila Shamsie; Jamil Ahmad

Postcolonial Text, 2021

On 8 May 2019, an explosion, claimed by a terrorist organization belonging to the Pakistani Taliban, killed nine people outside the shrine of Data Darbar in Lahore, Punjab. The holy place, which was built in the eleventh century, holds the remains of a much-worshipped Muslim saint, Abul Hassan Ali Hajveri (1009-1077), a mystic and a preacher who is considered the father of Sufism in the Islamic world. The act was only one of the most recent intimidations in a longstanding campaign of terror in the area. In July 2010, two suicide bombers had killed fifty and injured approximately two hundred visitors to the Sufi shrine. Sufis represent the mystical side of Islam and, like other minorities, tend to be targeted by extremists because of the perceived unorthodoxy in their practice of Islamic principles. As these attacks showcase, the reductive cultural logic of the "us and them" binary-which was championed by the political rhetoric of the George W. Bush administration following the attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on 9/11-can be seen in the intolerance and disorder which has made post-9/11 violence in Pakistan seem so prevalent. As we confront fears of resurgent global terrorism, like the recent attacks in France, Austria and Pakistan, hesitations, ambivalence and complexities still present a challenge to the simple equation of Islam with terror. This basic association, as Sankaran Krishna argues, is based on feelings of "religious fundamentalism," a passe-partout term denoting "the refusal of Americans to listen to the outrage of Muslims everywhere about what is happening to civilians in places like Iraq, Palestine, and Afghanistan" (151). As we approach the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, literary writing has interrogated the rhetoric of stark binaries, engaging with the complex reality of a world where no pure binaries seem to remain. If 9/11 has marked a turning point in human history, several Anglophone novels have offered readers a nuanced critique of global suspicion and anti-Muslim prejudice. In this respect, my article explores Nadeem Aslam's most recent fiction that makes the post-9/11 experience its central concern. Among postcolonial authors engaging with terror after 9/11, the British Pakistani author's narratives seek to depict the wide communal nature of war, offering a meditation on the

Mewar Univeristy, 2021

PREFACE This dissertation argues that white American novelistic response to the events of 9/11 places the spotlight on the domestic lives of the majority, while invoking nationalism and prose of otherness against other cultures and religions. In this predominantly WASP-cultural response, living togetherness in a multicultural society has been a far cry. Post-9/11 white American fiction deals with the nation’s trauma, and it tries to patch up the tear in the WASP cultural fabric overplaying American nationalism on the one hand, and on the other, by a prose of otherness against the Muslims. This dissertation posits such a response as the cultural trauma of the Americans. The first among the four novels under study for the dissertation—Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close—evoke ethics, melancholia, and traumatic solidarity of the Americans with the Jews, which invariably make the translation of trauma cultural—what Jeffrey Alexander calls cultural trauma. Don DeLillo’s The Falling Man, too, dramatizes the trauma of 9/11 as cultural trauma which finds its entry into the novel in the form of the novelist’s discourse of us vs. them syndrome. John Updike’s Terrorist comes out as a perfect example of cultural trauma since it others the Muslims as terrorists, while deploys a clear-cut territorial divide between Western and Eastern spaces in order to envision a unified American space. A welcome departure from the above three novels has been Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, which tires to come to terms with the trauma of 9/11 by building up cosmopolitan echoes for a peaceful multicultural living in America. Taking a cue from Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland as a literature of trauma of a higher order, this study uses it as a touchstone to comparatively evaluate the other three novels in terms of the representation of the trauma of 9/11 and finds them failing to match the quality of Netherland. What the examination of the representation of terrorism and the discourse of trauma in the above novels reveals is how American authors, with the exception of O’Neill, have not been able to free themselves from xenophobic media representations of 9/11. It has also aimed at raising questions about the patriotic tendency behind the canonization of the above novels of violence. Texts like Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and John Updike’s Terrorist present 9/11 as cultural trauma which is sought to be repaired through an appeal to an intensified prose of otherness which comes about due to these novelists’ attempt to understand the terrorist incident as the conflict between two contrasting frames of reference—the Orientalist stereotypes and the self-trumpeting civilized West. The prose of otherness in DeLillo and Foer is, however, not as brazen as that of Updike who resorts to an Orientalist discourse to malign the Muslim Other and reinforce stereotypes about Islam and Muslims, thus contributing to antagonism.

The literature of the diaspora in many ways records the basic human desire for survival as well as the 'urge of becoming' overcoming the stiff resistance and confrontations that the host countries and communities had have inflicted upon the small yet strong-willed people. The Muslim communities all over the world had faced stiff challenges from time time and asserted themselves and their love for freedom in many literary pieces. In the wake of 9/11 attack of terror on America, Muslim diaspora all over the world, especially in the Western countries has been subjected to humiliation and alienation. The Western countries have become conservative in their outlook of the Muslim communities all over the world. In the name of safeguarding the national cause, the governments of the western countries have been overboard .The people of the Muslim diaspora have calmly weathered the ignominy and resisted the western dubbing in their writings.This article aims at probing the Muslim diasporic consciousness in pre and post 9/11 time through the eyes of both the Muslim diasporic writers and the western writers.It also aims at unravelling the fractured, battered psyche of the Muslim diasporic people as is revealed in the multifarious discourses of the writers.

ABSTRACT Since the attacks of September 11, hundreds of novels have been written on and about Islam. Such novels attempt to explain Islam or portray Muslims. Some of these novels have tried to explain the true Islam as opposed to fundamentalism, as a religion of peace, tolerance and charity while others have depicted Islam as an evil religion, a religion of Jihad, death and terrorism. One of these novels which belong to the latter category is John Elray’s Khalifah: A Novel of Conquest and Personal Triumph. The novel attempts to portray Islam as a religion which purportedly harbors hostility towards other religions and races. It tries to convey the idea that Islam, a harsh and intolerant creed, spread by the sword. The present article attempts to analyze the portrayal of Islam and Muslims in Khalifah. It examines the ways in which Elray has represented Islam and Muslims in his novel. The aim of the article is to explore how Islam is depicted and Muslim identities are constructed in the novel. The article argues that Khalifah nudges the reader toward viewing Islam as a danger to Western interests. The main purpose of the novelist is to demonize Islam and dehumanize Muslims particularly the first generation of Muslims.

2020

This essay explores the dominant rhetoric of American society in the wake of 9/11 as seen through fictional narratives by Muslim-American writers, it also delves into how that rhetoric was shaped by politicians and the media. The novels employed in this essay are The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, Home Boy by H. M. Naqvi and A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. The essay examines the temporality of the novel, in particular when it comes to historical fiction, and to what extent time is under the author's control. It looks into migration and the myth of return in immigrant writing and the power of nostalgia both in writing and politics, such as with Donald Trump's infamous slogan "Make America Great Again". Additionally, it analyses the attacks on September 11 as a national trauma that destroyed Americans' illusion of invulnerability and looks at how trauma can be translated in writing. It scrutinises the cultivation of fear both on a domestic and nationwide scale, in particular it focuses on the fear of the imagined 'other' cultivated by the American administration and media following 9/11. This leads into the legitimisation of war, principally the War on Terror; a war that has cost upwards of $6 trillion as of 2019. It discusses Americans' fear of Muslims and, the oft-forgotten other side of the coin, Muslim-Americans fear of American society at large. Throughout, it looks at how the novels at hand both translate and shape experience, arguing that fictional narratives have the potential power to bridge the gap between Muslim-American immigrants and the rest of American society and increase empathy for an ethnic minority that has, in past years, been painted as the 'radical enemy.'