Terror and the Postcolonial: A Concise Companion

  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 theLondon shooting of Brazilian national Jean Charles de Menezes and the treatment of detainees atGuantánamoBay 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.