Introduction

Among the most significant reasons for the extraordinary outpouring of cultural responses to the terrorist attacks of September 2001 has been a sense that the narratives served up by the mainstream media have not proved equal to the task of explaining those events, except in ways that are simplistic and invidious. The exploration of context, the articulation of multiple voices, the interrogation of received wisdom, the imaginative engagement with unprecedented points of view, emotion recollected in tranquillity: these are all qualities that we ascribe to works of literature and film. They add detail and some measure of intelligibility to the stark horror of images of collapsing towers. There is another reason for the proliferation of books dealing with the complex event now evoked with the reified and Americanized shorthand “9/11”. We are referring to the conviction, shared by all the contributors to this special issue of articles on culture and terror since 2001, that cultural expression is somehow intrinsically opposed to the thought‐stopping fury of fundamentalism. Novels and graphic novels provide depth and nuance. What, they ask, are the event's origins and ramifications? They encourage critical, analytical responses to situations that are usually caricatured by corporate media that prefer to manufacture consent, belligerence and paranoia. Not to respond without thinking, nor to endorse the bellicose simplifications put about by those in power: these go to make up the mood of critical engagement furthered by the essays in this collection.

Of course, it is not the case, as the former British prime minister Tony Blair claimed, that “the rules of the game have changed” since “9/11” (Chakrabarti). Blair continues to insist, most recently at the Chilcot Inquiry into the war in Iraq, that since “9/11” the world's foremost power and its auxiliaries have a new responsibility to topple despots as well as promulgate human rights and the boons of capitalism. So too must they sacrifice liberty for security at home. Furthermore, minorities must be encouraged to “assimilate” on terms dictated by the dominant culture of neo‐liberalism and Western beneficence. But as Priyamvada Gopal and Neil Lazarus have noted in an insightful piece on the discipline of postcolonial studies “after Iraq”, what is remarkable about the world since 2001 is not the discontinuity in the priorities and actions of western states but, to the contrary, their disturbing though entirely predictable continuity. “9/11” is understood in these essays not, as it is usually understood, as a date on which the world changed beyond recognition but as one which saw events that led to the intensification of the relationships and imbalances that have structured the globe more or less since the Second World War.

Two consequences flow from this insight. The first is that, as many of our contributors explore, world events since 2001, most notably in the Middle East, are linked to larger and older patterns of imperial power. That is, “9/11” and the war in Iraq are linked not in the way that the war's propagandists tried to make us believe but in terms of the infliction since that date of a complacent and divisive “clash of civilizations”. This rhetoric sets up an opposition between a liberal, multicultural and enlightened West on the one hand and its benightedly fundamentalist foes on the other. The essays in this collection complicate that opposition by analysing alternative perspectives on the ongoing “war on terror”. It is not that the zealots who flew planes into the twin towers weren't fundamentalists or that there is nothing of value in the traditions of western liberalism, but that, to put the matter simply, things are more complicated than that. “9/11” was a crime not an act of war. The tragedy of that day has been intensified and prolonged by using it as a casus belli, a pretext for a protracted and disastrous “war on terror” that is imperialistic in nature and might even, so profound is its militant certainty and its sense of mission, be described as fundamentalist.

The second consequence of understanding the world since “9/11” as one marked as much by continuity as discontinuity is that the term fundamentalism, which is ubiquitous in all of the work analysed in this special issue, must be given a more expansive definition. Fundamentalism is not limited to religion, as Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens would have us believe. Rather, it entails a dogmatic attitude to the inviolability of a particular attitude or practice. As Susan Buck‐Morss has argued in her Thinking Past Terror (2003), there are political and economic fundamentalisms as well. Neo‐liberalism is one such dogma, one that, as its survival of the current depression has shown, is credited with the unimpeachable authority of divine scripture. Hence Tariq Ali's characterization of the “war on terror” as a “clash of fundamentalisms” (Ali).

Fundamentalism has a particular relationship with texts. It adheres strictly to the script and prohibits criticism and innovation. But the term “sacred text” is an oxymoron. Every text is tainted by a proliferation of meanings and by its susceptibility to divergent and creative interpretations. Part of what makes works of culture so valuable and salutary in this context is their capacity to make received truths and established sources of authority seem suddenly moot and therefore vulnerable to criticism. All of the essays in this collection use their chosen texts as opportunities to reflect critically on the contexts and complexities behind the deplorable simplifications promulgated by the mainstream media and by the protagonists of the “war on terror”. This is critical scholarship inspired and guided by the kinds of dialogue and questioning promoted by their subjects. “[N]obody can suppose for a moment”, wrote Jean‐Paul Sartre, “that it is possible to write a good novel in praise of anti‐Semitism” (Sartre 46). Nor is it possible to write a good novel in praise of terrorism or of the so‐called war on terror. “The political falsehood stains the aesthetic form”, in Theodor Adorno's words (Adorno 186). Good novels are too ironic, too willingly susceptible to readerly participation and criticism, too democratically many‐voiced and too averse, therefore, to dogmatism and didacticism for them to present such doctrines uncritically.

Is this not the secret shortcoming of many well‐intentioned works of post‐“9/11” fiction: the difficulty they find in getting outside official narratives of the “war on terror”? In John Updike's The Terrorist (2007), for example, the portrayal of a young American Muslim's radicalization is not quite matched by a similarly perceptive account of the situation that radicalizes him. Indeed, it is a traditional figure of authority, his high school guidance counsellor, who is instrumental in dissuading Ahmad from exploding a bomb in New Jersey's Lincoln Tunnel. One of the pleasures of Updike's prose is his eye for compelling and expressive details. His description of the garage in which the conspirators prepare the bomb‐laden truck is characteristically perspicacious. The dirty walls are marked by the shapes of the tools that used to hang there. This passing observation hints at the post‐industrial situation in which the narrative unfolds and at one of the reasons for Ahmad's radical disillusionment with traditional allegiances and aspirations. It therefore serves to encapsulate the novel's implicit thesis that Ahmad's temporary conversion to terrorism and Islamism is related not just, as the novel shows, to comparatively trivial factors such as parental neglect and sexual frustration but also to the less easily comprehensible or remediable exhaustion of older class loyalties, economic aspirations and forms of political organization, none of which seem feasible any longer in a place like the ironically named suburb of New Prospect.

What is missing, of course, is any really concerted effort to extend that critical analysis to other aspects of American society. Likewise in Ian McEwan's Saturday (2005), set on the day of the massive anti‐war march in London in February 2003, the milieu of Henry Perowne, with its copious consumer luxuries and its complacent belief in science and progress, is presented largely without irony and therefore without sufficient critical distance from the official account of events post‐2001, an account which sees a progressive West resisting a series of irrational and violent external threats. This is not something that can be said of Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), which explores the way in which the events of September 2001 were quickly captured by the complacent narratives of those in power; of Philip Roth's The Plot Against America (2004), in which the plot of the title, which emanates from within rather than from without, refers to the imaginary presidency of the anti‐Semitic aviator Charles Lindbergh but which also invites comparisons with the more recent arrogation of power by a similarly overweening executive; or of The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), in which “focus on the fundamentals” is the motto of Underwood Samson (US), the specialists in commercial acquisitions for whom the radicalized protagonist used to work.

Anna Hartnell's discussion of Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist brings to the fore salient questions that arose in the aftermath of “9/11”. What role can multiculturalism now play in American society? What of the so‐called melting pot? Hartnell argues that “Hamid's novel undoubtedly identifies race as intrinsic to the constitution of the American politics of place, but [ … ] also hangs on to an image of America as the possibility of a new kind of national politics that might enable the transcendence of racial difference”. The novel forces a consideration of the new subjectivities formed at the crossroads of the destruction of familiar identity politics. This also brings with it a profound reconsideration of America's history as a welcoming and liberal destination – though the novel does not deny this stance, it questions anew the sacrifices that need to be made if one is to belong to “America” and “American values”. “9/11”, and the events that followed, forced the question of how are you American? The answer seems to lie somewhere between concealing ethnic legacies and feigning to overcome them. To belong, it seems, requires surrendering to claims of origin.

Our second article looks at Palestinian writing post‐“9/11”, in particular at the work of Sahar Khalifeh. Here, Anna Bernard investigates how media coverage of events that took place in America fuelled global anti‐Palestinian sentiment anew. Khalifeh's novel The End of Spring looks at the figure of the Palestinian suicide bomber in order to explain but “also [to problematize] the category of ‘terror’ itself”. The novel looks to interior, psychological motives behind the undertaking of destructive actions at the same time as it examines carefully the effects of these activities that destroy and make unsustainable basic human rights. Bernard astutely reveals how Khalifeh's protagonist Ahmed surrenders to the allure of becoming a suicide bomber as a means of expressing frustrated disaffection, though ironically this act simultaneously reveals that in the absence of basic human rights the act of terror provides a space for growth and personal development. Through employing what might at first seem a strategy of Palestinian victimhood, Khalifeh nevertheless makes a strong case for how international politics needs to readdress the issue of justice in the occupied territories. The context of the new war on terror only highlights anew a pre‐existing occupation that has not substantially altered and that threatens to become generalized in fresh discourses on terror.

S. Todd Atchison's reading of Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is a poignant endeavour to make textual the ethereal experience of ongoing trauma. Foer's text makes use of “meta‐textual arrangement[s]”, letters, blank spaces, photos, journal entries and other discursive means in a successful attempt to reveal the private nature of meaning and its construction. Providing his reader with information that does not immediately come together as traditional linear narrative, Foer, as Atchison argues, enacts not only the fragmentary nature of trauma but also the increasingly fractured quality of discursive strategies that attempt to capture trauma. Counter‐narratives arise and miscommunications abound, as do silences, refused conversations and missed opportunities that bring with them sadness, guilt and shame. Intense personal stories illuminate the past and present and reveal the intimate nature of pain and its manifestation. Atchison exposes the limitations of language to counter official narratives and how sometimes there is no story to tell because there simply is nothing left to communicate. Here, reading and the role of the reader are paramount as participation in the construction of meaning comes to stand in place of a wholly salutary and comprehensive story. This seems apt for an event such as “9/11” that still seems too close for complete understanding.

The “particular hybrid form of the graphic novel might offer a testing place to probe the limits of history and historiography” (Frey and Noyce 259). Tim Gauthier extends this argument through a close look at three graphic novels produced in the post‐“9/11” era: In the Shadow of No Towers, Tribeca Sunset and American Widow. Each of these narratives contests official accounts and re‐inscribes marginal viewpoints back into the centre. It is important that images, so much part of what has come to define how “9/11” will be memorialized and commemorated, are in these graphic novels rendered more nuanced and certainly more subjective. Each of the graphic novelists constructs their own story based on recurring remembered images. Spiegelman, Gauthier argues, revisits the moment in order to organize and understand his grief – ripped from him by official jingoistic propaganda rather than by the “terrorists”. Rehr's retelling of the events of the day captures a range of emotions, from “fear and helplessness (and later anger)” that resurface time and again. Torres's text American Widow wrests the story of the valorized widows of “9/11” out of the media and back into her own complex appropriation of events. Gauthier perceptively maintains that “narrative reclamation” is crucial as these stories serve to broaden the socio‐political meanings attributed to the post‐“9/11” events. Not content merely to reconceptualize media coverage through words, these graphic novelists refigure, perceptually, how they saw the events differently.

Robert Duggan's article on Patrick McGrath's Ghost Town and Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days inquires into the strategic creative uses of narrative time in order to make connections across historical, but not geographical, spaces. Both texts exhibit tripartite structures that, as Duggan argues, illuminate “the city's sometimes turbulent history and produce patterns of repetition and difference that may re‐cast readers' reactions to the attacks”. The two novels appear to take their time in telling the story of New York post‐“9/11” – in so doing, they tell a slightly different story of New York's past: a past plagued by violence, injustice and prejudice. The idea of “loss” and “sacrifice”, so emphasized in the days after the events, are themes that both novels revisit through alternative scenarios that pre‐date and post‐date “9/11”; themes that reveal the somewhat idealized account of “9/11” as the day that changed everything. New York and America are not always romanticized and Cunningham and McGrath work to recast some of the myths surrounding the city, alternately revisiting its troubled past and re‐imagining its future as either a simulacrum of its own myth or a crumbling and destroyed city. These narratives echo the repetitive and often deadly nature of traumatic memory where alternative subjectivities may be formed in the future but they may nevertheless still be bound to relive past atrocities.

The two Algerian novels that John Hawley discusses represent conflicting and thorny debates within Islamic doctrine surrounding the subject of extremism. Here, Tahar Djaout's The Last Summer of Reason and Slimane Benaïssa's The Last Night of a Damned Soul are juxtaposed to reveal elaborate and sophisticated reflections on the demands and limitations of radical Islam and its expression. Hawley argues that the crisis at the local level in Islamic communities over the causes of extremism finds itself echoed across the diaspora where it can sometimes develop out of context, both politically and culturally. Djaout's novel, set in Algeria, negotiates the myriad of “fundamentals” such as gender relations and a crisis in masculinity that jostle in their claims to Islam for an answer. This “Islam”, the novel shows, is removed from its pious function and made to serve social ends and political means. Benaïssa's novel, on the other hand, finds itself at the other end of the spectrum, following one diasporic individual's journey from capitalist hostage to radical extremist to liberal humanitarian. Hawley stresses that “what Benaïssa portrays in his novel is a modern rendition of the rite of passage”, an apposite journey for the inquisitive and impressionable young Muslim protagonist Raouf. Both these novels perform and question the place of radical Islam in the pre‐ and post‐“9/11” context, taking into account the ideological and material changes necessary to effect such a turn on the individual level.

Em McAvan's article looks closely at the uses of technology in William Gibson's Spook Country; technology as part of a complex network of surveillance techniques, the specific aims of which are not always clear. “Any analysis of the war on terror” McAvan argues, “must account for [the] confluence of the informational with the material, and further, must historically situate these technological developments against a backdrop of neo‐liberalist globalization, privatization and the increasing independence of multinational corporations”. Information, data and communication technologies are all used by a sprawling number of agents: governmental, corporate and presumably “terrorists” – all simultaneously surveying and being surveyed. In Gibson's text, this induces a heightened state of paranoia where it is not always clear who knows what and why, who is being watched and why. Accountability and responsibility is absent in the race for data, for information. Thus, new and unpredictable relations are produced between subjects; relations bound by new rules governed by suspicion and distrust. Nevertheless, Spook Country reveals the oftentimes motiveless nature of surveillance and information gathering, thus rendering it absurd and useless. In a post‐“9/11” context where the bounding of subjects is realized predominantly through forms of surveillance, McAvan offers a fresh look at the limitations of technologies that claim to control and probe.

What all the contributors to this issue reveal in their analyses is the importance of criticism and analysis when it comes to reflecting on the official accounts of terrorism that have been promulgated in the last decade. They eschew simplistic oppositions. Accordingly, the essays that follow provide an invigorating snapshot of the diversity and, no less importantly, the complexity of cultural responses to “9/11”.

Notes on contributors

Anastasia Valassopoulos is Lecturer in World Literatures at the University of Manchester. Her main area of research is in the postcolonial literature and culture of the Middle East and North Africa. She is also interested in the wider cultural production and reception of Arab women's film and music. She is the author of Contemporary Arab Women Writers (Routledge, 2007) and has published work in Research in African Literatures and Critical Survey as well as numerous edited collections.

Robert Spencer lectures in postcolonial literatures and cultures at the University of Manchester. His main research interests are in postcolonial fiction and poetry (particularly Irish and African writing) as well as the work of Edward W. Said and the philosophy of modernism. He has published widely on these subjects and is currently working on a book about the relationship between postcolonial literature and the project of cosmopolitanism.