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).