ABSTRACT
The contemporary discourse after 9/11 ‘assumes that every culture has a tangible essence that defines it, and it then explains politics as a consequence of that essence’ (Mamdani 2004: 17). However, the discourse at present is no longer focused on the market (capitalism), or on the state (democracy), but its emphasis is on culture (modernity) that is the dividing line between those in favor of a peaceful, civic existence and those inclined to participate in terror and violence. However, literary responses to 9/11 engage with the oppositional tone of the cultural hegemonic language.
Amidst the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Don DeLillo, who is often considered the most prolific and prescient American author on the subject of his country’s relationship with terrorism, published a newspaper article in which he insisted, ‘The narrative ends in the rubble and it is left to us to create the counter-narrative’. Yet any innovation in the writing remains linguistic rather than thematic. Both writers and critics vie with one another to manufacture new terminologies grounded on a discourse of cultural hegemony. Amis coined the term ‘horrorism’; similarly, Christopher Hitchens referred to ‘Islamofascism’; while the Egyptian-born British writer Bat Ye’or introduced concepts such as ‘dhimmitude’, to denote an attitude of surrender toward Islam, and ‘Eurobia’, which supports Hitchens in his distinguishing between ‘us’ and ‘them’.
Literature after 9/11 becomes a vehicle to convey over-determined images of oppositional constructions perpetuated by the rhetoric of the dominating war on terror which impinges on discourses of minority cultural spaces. To understand the ways in which literary works are complicit, this chapter refers briefly to key concepts such as fundamentalism, radicalism, jihad and terrorism which become integral to defining and understanding minority discourse and culture.
