ABSTRACT
Anna Hartnell identifies the representation of September 11 in news media, film, and literature that emerged in the first few years after the event as ‘a 9/11 industry’ which busied itself in trying to ‘confront the complexities of the relations between Islam and the US in the wake of 9/11’.1 In the United States, such popular novels as Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), John Updike’s Terrorist (2006), and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005, now a critically acclaimed motion picture) express mixed feelings about 9/11. Some are written from the point of view of the western victims of terrorism while others, such as Updike’s Terrorist, attempt to pull away from ‘the Orientalist depictions of Islam particularly prevalent in the public spheres of the US and Britain’.2 Arguably, Updike’s Terrorist tries to portray Islam in a sympathetic way, but it still ends up constructing a white, wealthy, western, heterosexual hegemonic male identity in opposition to the Muslim as the Other. In addition, within a post-9/11 context, orientalist discourses on Muslims and Islam have been greatly reinforced through a number of mainstream media texts, such as newspapers and television news, advertisements, and films. For instance, often, in the media, the Arabic word ‘jihad’ is simply translated as ‘holy war’ and as Karim H. Karim points out, this word is ‘frequently viewed
*Email: ummeal-wazedi@augustana.edu
Vol. 5, No. 4, 534-550, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2014.936210
as the ultimate expression of Muslims’ violent tendencies and as being synonymous with “Islamic terrorism”’.3 In response to these depictions, diasporic writers, filmmakers, and artists, particularly from South Asia, the Middle East, and East Asia, have offered representations of masculinity that contests such hegemonic discourse and reconstruct the Muslim man’s identity.
