Introduction

The relationship between migration and terrorism has been the focus of much debate in mainstream politics and the media since the attacks on America of 11 September 2001 and the London bombings in July 2005, not least because liberal democratic governments in Europe and North America have invoked such attacks to justify the regulation of migration and the introduction of new laws that particularly affect certain cultural minorities. Such debates tend to conflate the control of transnational migration and the perceived terrorist threat to the security of the nation‐state, and can in the view of some commentators overrule the social and political rights of the individual upon which liberal democratic nation‐states are based. In the context of such political concerns, there is a crucial need for informed scholarly debate about the competing narratives, cultural histories, and legal arguments that frame immigration and terrorism. One of the aims of this special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing is to contribute to this debate by bringing together essays by literary critics and cultural historians working in the field of postcolonial studies and literary studies to compare, analyse and historicize the representation of migrants in cultural, political and legal discourses of terrorism from the Irish dynamite campaign in late Victorian Britain to the contemporary war on terrorism.

If the very word “terrorism” has proved to be an elusive term to define, as Liam Connell suggests in his essay in this issue, this is in part because the term operates as a slippery and dangerous trope in the hands of dominant geopolitical forces, military leaders, formations of counter‐terrorism, and the mainstream western media. In the current global formation of imperial power, terrorism operates as a form of metalepsis that presents opposition to military intervention in Afghanistan, Gaza or Sri Lanka as the cause of repressive counter‐terrorist measures rather than a revolutionary political response to a repressive and exploitative system of colonial or postcolonial sovereignty (Morton, “Terrorism” 36–42). If, as Robert J.C. Young has suggested, terror “violates the smooth transition between causes and effects” (Young 307), the discourse of counter‐terrorism mobilizes an army of tropes and narratives to mask and obfuscate the terror and violence of new forms of imperial sovereignty.

One instantiation of the effects of this violent rhetoric is the current conflation of terrorism and migration – a subject that was the focus of a conference funded by the British Academy and held at the University of Southampton’s School of Humanities in November 2007, at which many of the papers included in this issue were first presented. One of the recurrent concerns of the papers presented at that conference was how contemporary anxieties about terrorism in the mainstream media and politics have clearly articulated the war against terrorism and the struggle for global security to the control of immigration, as well as the criminalization of Islam. As A. Sivanandan has argued in the journal Race and Class, “the war on asylum and the war on terror [ … ] have converged to produce a racism which cannot tell a settler from an immigrant, an immigrant from an asylum seeker, an asylum seeker from a Muslim, a Muslim from a terrorist” (Sivanandan 2). In response to the conflation of discourses of counter‐terrorism, global security and the control of migration, many of the papers included in this issue have attempted to address the following questions: in what ways has recent postcolonial writing responded to acts of terrorism and counter‐terrorism? How has postcolonial writing contested and challenged the demonization of migrants, refugees, Muslims and Islam? What light can examples of anti‐colonial writing from the early 20th century shed on contemporary formations of imperial sovereignty and the global war on “terror”? And how might the genres and narrative forms of postcolonial writing enable us to think through and beyond the acts of violent and hyperbolic rhetoric associated with terrorism?

Robert Spencer’s essay “Salman Rushdie and the ‘war on terror’ ” considers the relationship between Rushdie’s controversial novel The Satanic Verses and the demonization of Islam in the discourses around the “war on terror”. In his reading, The Satanic Verses provokes criticism not just of fundamentalist Islam but also of the West’s unselfconscious faith in its own virtue – an aspect of the book that is often overlooked, lately even by Rushdie himself. Spencer’s purpose in this essay is to demonstrate the timeliness and effectiveness of the book’s double‐edged critique. The essay also draws out the enduring significance of the novel in the midst of the so‐called “war on terror” and suggests that the novel’s double‐edged critique has not been matched by the comparative tendentiousness of Rushdie’s recent media‐based analyses of migration, Islam, terrorism and western power.

Spencer’s re‐reading of The Satanic Verses has important implications for understanding the recent proliferation of literary writing, which has taken as its subject the consequences of the terrorist attacks of September 2001. While the literary critics Sabina and Simona Sawhney have noted the similarity between Rushdie’s recent articles and “many mainstream media responses to the events of September 11” (Sawhney and Sawhney 433), Spencer emphasizes the dissimilarity of those articles to the less partisan, as well as more critical and, crucially, self‐critical, ways in which literary texts can dramatize these issues.

It is precisely this question of the critical and self‐critical responses of contemporary postcolonial writing to the war on terror that Margaret Scanlan addresses in her essay “Migrating from Terror: The Postcolonial Novel after September 11”. Beginning with a critique of mainstream representations of migrants as sinister and violent others in television series such as Rupert Murdoch’s notorious 24, as well as literary representations such as John Updike’s The Terrorist and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, which tend to reinforce the view of Islam as a religion of violent fanatics, Scanlan proceeds to consider how the postcolonial novelist is positioned on a fault‐line between the binaries of counter‐terrorist discourse, between Islam and the secular West for example, or between native and alien. More specifically, Scanlan looks at how Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men, Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist explore and expand that fault‐line, transforming it into a living, breathing space in which the human consequences of such rigid and lethal polarities become visible.

In Scanlan’s argument, Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men takes us inside a Libya few westerners can easily imagine, the home of poets and intellectuals where the past stretches back beyond Islam and the Roman Empire to early Phoenician trading posts. The novel explores a child’s growing realization that his father’s affiliation with an underground resistance movement will inevitably bring down on their family the full wrath of a state terror he is only beginning to understand. The novel’s evocation of a Libyan family as a victim of state violence implicitly revises the western view of Libya as a sponsor of terror; indeed, the novel barely evokes the West as a sponsor of democracy, making Egypt the refuge and home of modernity.

In her reading of Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, Scanlan contends that no pure binaries remain, whether the familiar vision of a democratic West beset by terrorists from the East or of a radical rhetoric that makes “a violent struggle to the death … the only available form of political resistance in the European colony” (Morton, “Torture” 193). Instead, Scanlan contends that most of the novel is set in a region of India that has always had a “messy map”, a misty, foggy territory disputed by so many indigenous ethnic groups and world powers that its very weather seems to dissolve, undo, make “ridiculous the drawing of borders” (10).

The final section of Scanlan’s essay considers how Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) relays the story of a once‐successfully assimilated immigrant to the United States whose smooth façade fractures after the September 11 bombings. Back home in his native Lahore, Changez, seemingly through force of will, compels a sinister American visitor, perhaps a CIA agent with a concealed weapon, to listen to an extended and vaguely threatening monologue that catalogues the events that led him to decide that “America had to be stopped in the interest not only of the rest of humanity, but also in your own” (168). In a compelling reading, Scanlan argues that the western reader is also implicated, compelled to follow the turns of a mind that associates fundamentalism not so much with an unexamined Islamic orthodoxy but with the confidence of a US corporate elite. The novel seems to end seconds before a gunshot, an artistic sleight‐of‐hand that creates a temporary and fragile reprieve from the inexorable logic of action and reprisal.

If Margaret Scanlan traces the ways in which some postcolonial writers such as Mohsin Hamid have interrogated the rhetoric of the “war on terror” by disclosing the tactics through which western military and economic power has sought to define and control the global market, Liam Connell’s illuminating essay “E‐Terror: Computer Viruses, Class and Transnationalism in Transmission and One Night @ the Call Center” considers how the framing of hacking as terrorism discloses the way in which the language of terror is utilized to defend the privileges and inequalities of existing international economic and power relations within the contemporary global economy. Connell begins by reviewing the extended semantics of terrorism within contemporary legislative discourses of terrorism and considers how these discourses have adapted historical associations between computer hacking, terrorism and foreignness. By looking at these historical associations, Connell traces a language of property and the resistance to ownership which can usefully be applied to the actions of Kunzru’s protagonist, Mehta, in Transmission. Taking this antagonism between property ownership and computer hacking as a starting point, Connell attempts to situate Mehta’s actions within the economic relationships between disenfranchised Indian workers and economically powerful nations such as the United States. Connell concludes the essay by looking at how similar narratives to those in Transmission were also being voiced by Chetan Bhagat in his novel One Night @ the Call Center, also published in 2005. By looking at Bhagat’s novel, Connell suggests that the idea of terrorism takes on a more striking ambivalence which is similarly rooted in the economic relations between India and American economic dominance. In his text, terrorism appears as something that is to be feared but also as something that can paradoxically be claimed. In tracing the roots of this dual engagement with terror, Connell suggests that such a double engagement grows out of a similar ambivalence towards US direct investment in India which appears, paradoxically, as a conduit leading India into contemporary global modernity but also as a resented curb on Indian economic power.

The formation of networks to sabotage the global hegemony of electronic capitalism, property relations and the global division of labour upon which that system rests recalls earlier networks of anti‐colonial resistance and radical politics in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Such networks are the focus of Deaglán Ó Donghaile’s essay “Anarchism, Anti‐imperialism and ‘The Doctrine of Dynamite’”. Referring to Benedict Anderson’s study of the ideological and intellectual Spanish anarchism and Filipino anti‐imperialism, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti‐colonial Imagination, Ó Donghaile considers how late 19th‐century European anarchism had a global perspective and remained in a constant state of dialogue with anti‐colonial movements throughout this period. Like the Spanish and French imperialism that Anderson describes as receiving criticism, Ó Donghaile argues that the excesses and injustices of British colonial policy in Ireland also ignited sympathy for the Irish nationalist cause in radical circles in London. As well as generating genuine sympathy for the colonized, the often graphic descriptions of colonial violence that appeared in radical journals like Freedom were used to warn British readers that the apparatus of imperial repression could also have domestic applications: coercive legislation designed for the control of the Irish population could, some anarchists argued, provide governments with models for domestic repression. Through an analysis of some key writings by British anarchists, Ó Donghaile demonstrates how Irish revolutionary activity was seen as a blueprint for possible radical action in Britain, where anarchists studied the tactics of the Irish radicals, whom they admired for holding out against the forces of landlordism and empire. In Ó Donghaile’s analysis, these British radicals regarded the Irish as natural propagandists by deed, who provided concrete examples of determined and popular opposition to British colonial repression.

Neelam Srivastava’s essay “Towards a Critique of Colonial Violence: Fanon, Gandhi and the Restoration of Agency” investigates a parallel transnational axis of anti‐colonial resistance. Beginning with a discussion of Gillo Pontecorvo’s film Burn!, Srivastava re‐assesses the debate around the response to colonial violence in the writing of Frantz Fanon and M.K. Gandhi. In Srivastava’s account, Pontecorvo’s film was permeated by the fiercely radical intellectual currents of the 1960s and 1970s, in particular, Fanon’s espousal of violence in anti‐colonial struggle, and “Third‐Worldism”, a term that circumscribes various ideologies that had their origins in Marxism but were adapted to the local contexts of particular anti‐colonial struggles. Fanon’s theory of violence is often contrasted with Gandhi’s political philosophy of ahimsa and satyagraha. Yet, as Srivastava makes clear, these superficial differences overlook the ways in which both Gandhi and Fanon sought to restore agency and sovereignty to the colonized subject through resistance to the violence of colonialism.

Taken together, the essays in this special issue offer a series of important reflections on the ways in which postcolonial writing and culture provide a conceptual framework through which to interrogate the violence of sovereign power in specific colonial and postcolonial formations, and to invent spaces of resistance to such forms of power through narrative and rhetoric.

Notes on contributor

Stephen Morton is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Southampton. He is currently completing a monograph on States of Emergency: Colonialism, Literature and Law 1905–2005 for Liverpool University Press. His publications include Terror and the Postcolonial (Blackwell, 2009) co‐edited with Elleke Boehmer; Foucault in an Age of Terror (Palgrave, 2008) co‐edited with Stephen Bygrave; Salman Rushdie: Fictions of Postcolonial Modernity (Palgrave, 2007); Gayatri Spivak: Ethics, Subalternity and the Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Polity, 2006); and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Routledge, 2003); as well as articles in Textual Practice, Wasafiri, Public Culture, New Formations, Ariel, The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory and Interventions: An International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the British Academy and to the School of Humanities, University of Southampton for their financial assistance in support of the Migration and Terrorism conference at the University of Southampton in November 2007, at which many of the papers included in this special issue were first presented.