Terror and the Postcolonial

ISBN-13: 9781405191548 / Angielski / Twarda / 2009 / 408 str.

Elleke Boehmer; Stephen Morton

Opis

Terror and the Postcolonial is a major comparative study of terrorism and its representations in postcolonial theory, literature, and culture.

• A ground-breaking study addressing and theorizing the relationship between postcolonial studies, colonial history, and terrorism through a series of contemporary and historical case studies from various postcolonial contexts
• Critically analyzes the figuration of terrorism in a variety of postcolonial literary texts from South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East
• Raises the subject of terror as both an expression of globalization and a postcolonial product
• Features key essays by well-known theorists, such as Robert J. C. Young, Derek Gregory, and Achille Mbembe, and Vron Ware

Recenzje

"This is a book written by academics but is perfectly suitable for the average reader.  The text is not too dry or overburdened with longwinded narrative, but is thought provoking and image–shattering.  Terror and the Postcolonial will take the wind out of the sails of anyone who believes we live in a world where terrorism is the sole property of extremists, religious zealots and bigots.  Terrorism has been around for much longer than since 9/11 and it is about time someone had the courage to admit our part in it." ( M/C Reviews, November 2010)

Spis treści

Notes on Contributors.

Acknowledgments.

Introduction: Terror and the Postcolonial (Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, University of Oxford and University of Southampton).

Part I: Theories of Colonial and Postcolonial Terror:

1. The Colony: Its Guilty Secret and Its Accursed Share (Achille Mbembe, University of Wiwatersrand).

2. Vanishing Points: Law, Violence, and Exception in the Global War Prison (Derek Gregory, University of British Columbia).

3. The White Fear Factor (Vron Ware, Open University).

4. Sacrificial Militancy and the Wars around Terror (Alex Houen, University of Sheffield).

5. Postcolonial Writing and Terror (Elleke Boehmer, University of Oxford).

Part II: Histories of Post/colonial Terror:

6. Revolutionary Terrorism in British Bengal (Peter Heehs, Independent Scholar).

7. Excavating Histories of Terror: Thugs, Sovereignty, and the Colonial Sublime (Alex Tickell, University of Portsmouth).

8. Terrorism, Literature, and Sedition in Colonial India (Stephen Morton, University of Southampton).

9. Israel in the US Empire (Bashir Abu–Manneh, Barnard College).

10. The Poetics of State Terror in Twenty–first–century Zimbabwe (Ranka Primorac, University of Southampton).

11. The Mediation of "Terror": Authority, Journalism, and the Stockwell Shooting (Stuart Price, De Montfort University).

Part III: Genres of Terror:

12. Terror Effects (Robert J. C. Young, New York University).

13. "Gendering" Terror: Representations of the Female "Freedom Fighter" in Contemporary Sri Lankan Literature and Cultural Production (Neluka Silva, University of Colombo).

14. Terror, Spectacle, and the Secular State in Bombay Cinema (Sujala Singh, University of Southampton).

15. "The age of reason was over . . . an age of fury was dawning": Contemporary Fiction and Terror (Robert Eaglestone. University of London).

16. Bodies of Terror: Performer and Witness (Emma Brodzinski, University of London).

Index.

O autorze

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

Blurb

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.