Literature and the War on Terror Nation, Democracy and Liberalisation

This book examines cultural imaginations post 9/11. It explores the idea of a religious community and its multifaceted representations in literature and popular culture. The essays in the volume focus on the role of literature, film, music, television shows and other cultural forms in opening up spaces for complex reflections on identities and cultures, and how they enable us to rethink the ‘trauma of familiarity’, post-traumatic heterotopias, religious extremism and the idea of the ‘neighbour’ in post-9/11 literary and cultural imagination. The volume also probes the intersections of religion, popular media, televised simulacrum and digital martyrdom in the wake of 9/11. It also probes the simulation of new- age media images with reference to the creation and dissemination of ‘martyrs’, the languages of grief, religionisation of terrorism, islamophobia, religious stereotypes and the reading of comics in writing the terror. An essential read, the book reclaims and reinterprets the alternative to a Eurocentric/Americentric understanding of cultural and geopolitical structures of global designs. It will be of great interest to researchers of literature and cultural studies, media studies, politics, film studies and South Asian studies.

Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: Surveying the Frontiers of Home, Democracy and Belonging in the Literature of War on Terror Sk Sagir Ali Part I: Cartographies of Otherness and Strategic Outsiderism in Post 9/11 fictions 1) An Extravagant and Wheeling StrangerEncountering the Muslim as the Neighbour Shinjini Basu 2) Rewriting the American Narrative of Muslim Men: Ayad Akhtars Depiction of Race, Gender, and Masculinity Nalini Iyer 3) There is no Israel for Me: JeSuisCharlie, the Ends of the French Republic,and theLaicisticContours ofIslamophobic Dystopia in Michel Houellebecqs Submission. SwayamdiptaDas 4) Sinhala Budhist Nationalism and Shrinking Space for Muslims in Sri Lanka: The Post Tamil Elam War and 9/11 Situation Rajeesh CS 5) The Making of Xenophobia: Migrating from Hatred to Grief in the Novels of Mohsin Hamid Debamitra Kar 6) Pax Americana! : American Exceptionalism and Salman Rushdies Language of State Shayeari Dutta Part II: Reconfiguring the Contours of Home, Belonging, and the Rights of Conditional Citizenship in Post 9/11 Novels 7) Imagining Citizenship, Democracy and Belonging in Laila Lalamis Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits and Ayad Akhtars Homeland Elegies Sk Sagir Ali 8) Globalization, Islamic Machine, and Critical Localism in the Aftermath of 9/11 Mosarrap Hossain Khan 9) War, Terror and Migration: Hamids Exit West as a Cosmopolitan Novel Faisal Nazir Part III: Popular Imagination and the Ideological Representational Apparatus of Western Media and Culture in Post 9/11 Climate 10) Tribute in Light: Memory (Re)Placed Pinaki De 11) The Radical Sadness of Late-Night Television: The Comedy Talk Show in the Shadow of 9/11 Sudipto Sanyal and Somnath Basu 12) 9/11 and the Supervillain Crisis: A Study of the Terrorist Villain and Terrorism in select MCU films Rohan Hassan 13) Post 9/11 Digital Martyrdom Digital Ephemera of Ireland and Digital Protest Movement of Bangladesh Kusumita Datta Part IV: Locating Other Lives and the Unmappable Registers of Precarity in 9/11 Novels 14) Possible Lives, Impossible Times:The Tragic Queer Diasporic Muslim in Ghalib Shiraz Dhallas The Exiles Anil Pradhan 15) You are My Creator, but I am Your Master : A Reading of Frankenstein in Baghdad as a Postcolonial Pharmakon Avijit Basak 16) The Trauma of Familiarity: A Very Brief Overview of British-Muslim Writings in the Post 9/11 UK Pinaki Roy Index

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).