Narratives of the War on Terror: Global Perspectives

This book challenges the predominantly Euro-American approaches to the field by bringing together essays on a wide array of literary,filmic, and journalistic responses to the decade-long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It shifts the focus from 9/11 literature to narratives of the war on terror and from the transatlantic world to Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, the Afghan-Pak border region, South Waziristan, Al-Andalus, and Kenya. The essays draw upon and critically engage with the conceptual trajectories within American literary debates, postcolonial discourse, and transatlantic literary criticism, moving away from trauma-centrism and residual US-centrism and responding to postcolonial theory's call for a historical foregrounding of terrorism, insurgency, and armed violence in the colonial-imperial power nexus.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 132 pages
Publication date: 01 February 2022
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

This comprehensive volume challenges the predominantly Euro-American approaches to the field, presenting a diverse collection of essays that explore a wide range of literary, cinematic, and journalistic responses to the decade-long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. By shifting the focus from so-called 9/11 literature to narratives of the war on terror and from the transatlantic world to Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, the Afghan-Pak border region, South Waziristan, Al-Andalus, and Kenya, the book captures the multifaceted transnational reverberations of the discourses on terrorism, counter-terrorism, and insurgency. These include, but are not limited to, the realignment of geopolitical power relations, the formation of new terrorist networks such as ISIS and regional alliances like Iraq/Syria, the increasing number of terrorist incidents in the West, the changing discourses on security and technologies of warfare, and the leveraging of fundamental constitutional principles.

The essays featured in this volume draw upon and critically engage with the conceptual trajectories within American literary debates, postcolonial discourse, and transatlantic literary criticism. Collectively, they move away from the trauma-centrism and residual US-centrism of early literary responses to 9/11 and the criticism thereof, while responding to postcolonial theory's call for a historical foregrounding of terrorism, insurgency, and armed violence in the colonial-imperial power nexus.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies.

Weight: 346g
Dimension: 245 x 175 x 13 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780367499907