ABSTRACT
It seems that the events of September 11, 2001, have brought with them a necessity in the humanities to profoundly rethink everything that we have held almost sacred, especially in the realm of postcolonial theory and ethnic studies. Whereas ‘migration’ and the hybridity that ensued from it were long seen as solace and antidote to every kind and form of religious and ethnic fundamentalism, the events of 9/11 seemed to prove that migration and the hybrid cultural formations which result from it could in fact coexist with fundamentalism. Biculturalism was no protection against the resurgence of fundamentalism; even worse, it is now seen by many to have fuelled this very fundamentalism. This, then, seems a particularly troubling moment for the humanities-a moment in which we may in fact have to rethink the very premises of our own work, including, perhaps, the premise that nothing is automatically exempt from bigotry. At the same time, postcolonial studies and many other fi elds of research have long held that writing, the practice of writing itself, may be an antidote to such bigotry; and it is an antidote in its very insistence on the process of identity formation rather than on the stable categories on which fundamentalism seems to rely. My attempt in this chapter, then, is to forge a dialogue between religious bigotry on the one hand and life writing1 on the other-between an anti-Islamic sentiment expressed in Bollywood’s fi lmic reaction to 9/11 and the life writing of an Indian American poet and critic, Amitava Kumar, who has found himself entangled in precisely such anti-Islamic sentiment.
