Terror and the Postcolonial is a major new comparative study of terrorism and its representations in colonial history and postcolonial theory, literature and culture. Through a series of thematically-linked, original chapters, the volume critically analyzes the figuration of terrorism in a range of colonial and postcolonial literary texts from South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The chapters also consider a variety of controversial political events such as the London shooting of Brazilian national Jean Charles de Menezes and the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. In doing so, this ground-breaking study questions, complicates, and, above all, historicizes the deep divisions between Western and non-Western cultures and their writings, and also their legacies of conquest, that underpin the contemporary rhetoric of terrorism. At the same time, the collection investigates the widely disparate value systems which are held to reinforce the recourse to “terror” in global literature and culture.
With fine theoretical sophistication, Terror and the Postcolonial offers provocative new insights that will broaden our understanding of global terrorism today as well as of the cultural and literary responses to terrorism that have emerged throughout the postcolonial world.
From the Back Cover
Terror and the Postcolonial is a major new comparative study of terrorism and its representations in colonial history and postcolonial theory, literature and culture. Through a series of thematically-linked, original chapters, the volume critically analyzes the figuration of terrorism in a range of colonial and postcolonial literary texts from South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The chapters also consider a variety of controversial political events such as the London shooting of Brazilian national Jean Charles de Menezes and the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. In doing so, this ground-breaking study questions, complicates, and, above all, historicizes the deep divisions between Western and non-Western cultures and their writings, and also their legacies of conquest, that underpin the contemporary rhetoric of terrorism. At the same time, the collection investigates the widely disparate value systems which are held to reinforce the recourse to “terror” in global literature and culture.
With fine theoretical sophistication, Terror and the Postcolonial offers provocative new insights that will broaden our understanding of global terrorism today as well as of the cultural and literary responses to terrorism that have emerged throughout the postcolonial world.
About the Author
Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literatures in English at the University of Oxford, well known for her research in international writing and postcolonial theory, she is the author of eight books, among them Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (1995, 2005), Empire, the National and the Postcolonial (2002), Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction (2008), and Nile Baby (2008).
Stephen Morton is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Southampton. He is currently completing a study of colonial states of emergency in literature and law, 1905-2005, and is the author of several books and articles on postcolonial literature and thought, including Salman Rushdie: Fictions of Postcolonial Modernity (2007) and Gayatri Spivak: Ethics, Subalternity and the Critique of Postcolonial Reason (2006).
CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS VOLUME:
Bashir Abu-Manneh, Elleke Boehmer, Emma Brodzinski, Robert Eaglestone, Derek Gregory, Peter Heehs, Alex Houen, Achille Mbembe, Stephen Morton, Stuart Price, Ranka Primorac, Neluka Silva, Sujala Singh, Alex Tickell, Vron Ware, Robert J. C. Young
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