A Trojan horse of a different colour: counterterrorism and Islamophobia in Alan Gibbons’ An Act of Love and Anna Perera’s Guantanamo Boy

ABSTRACT

Alan Gibbons’ An Act of Love and Anna Perera’s Guantanamo Boy offer a poignant treatment of a personal and political desire for vengeance in response to terrorism, and of the consequent erosion of particular communities. This article provides a critical reading of Gibbons’ and Perera’s novels through the lens of postcolonial and terrorism studies. It argues that they can be read as instances of the refashioning of individual and communal identities in response to increased surveillance and disciplinary measures overseen by the British state and shows that the undermining of simplistic dichotomies in these novels is the primary route by which principles of familial and communal responsibility are re-established. From this perspective, the novels are seen to open post-9/11 British social and political relations to postcolonial critique. The article draws attention to the contemporary children’s novel as a socially and politically engaged form that offers powerful fictional interventions into the post-9/11 landscape, where some groups have been affected more than others by the repercussions of acts of terrorism and violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Terror
• human rights
• Islamophobia
• postcolonialism
• children’s literature

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Regarding the flaws of British state multiculturalism, see Warmington et al. (2017), Grillo (2007), Hansen (2007, 351–86), Fleras (2009, 165–186) and Gillborn (2008, 69–89).

2. See House of Commons Education Committee (2015). For a critical discussion of the Trojan horse case, see Awan (2014) or Arthur (2015), among others.

3. Various scholars have considered the practical implications of Counter-Terrorism and Security Act for British schools. See, for instance, O’Donnell (2016) and Davies (2016).

4. I discuss the way racialised identities are negotiated in children’s literature at length in Discourses of Postcolonialism in Contemporary British Children’s Literature (2015). See also McGillis (2000) and Bradford (2007).

5. Books like Sunaina Marr Maira’s Missing: Youth, Citizenship, and Empire after 9/11 (2009) and The 9/11 Generation: Youth, Rights, and Solidarity in the War on Terror (2016) or David Kieran’s edited collection, The War of My Generation: Youth Culture and the War on Terror (2015), engage with the complicated position of young people growing up in the post-9/11 era and caught between the ideologies of nationalism and the discourse of social exclusion, but with no more than occasional investigations of the connections between children’s fiction and terrorism. Jo Lampert’s Children’s Fiction about 9/11: Ethnic, National and Heroic Identities (2010), together with her essays in Pádraic Whyte and Keith O’Sullivan’s Children’s Literature and New York City (2014) and David Kieran’s The War of My Generation (2015), offer readings on children’s texts written and published mainly in the US which foreground the complexity of post-9/11 youth identities, but British children’s fiction remains a neglected resource for understanding and exploring Western responses to terrorism.

6. See Levinas and Kearne (1986). Levinas develops the notion of the “face” in Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Levinas 1991 [1961]), esp. 187–203.

7. For a discussion of the Rushdie fatwa and its enduring impact on Western representations of the Muslim subject, see Pipes (2003) and Falkenhayner (2014).

8. On what constitutes mainstream counterterrorism rhetoric see, for example, Jackson (2005).

9. Notably, the young female characters, Chris’ fiancé, Kelly, and Imran’s sister, Aisha, both evade politics, go to college, and aim for professional, white-collar jobs, whereas none of the young men in Gibbons’ novel take this route.

10. See also Miah (2013, 146–162; 2017), Boumediene and Idir (2017) and Coppock and McGovern (2014).

11. This is made clear in a 2015 open letter to the government signed by 200 academics, activists, and representatives of teaching and student unions, the Open Society Justice Initiative’s 2016 report on the Prevent strategy, and the National Union of Teachers’ 2016 motion to withdraw Prevent from schools and colleges, among others.

12. According to Boumediene and Idir (2017), while at times the guards would humiliate Guantánamo’s prisoners by shaving their beards against their will, at other times the exact opposite happened. Clean-shaven when he entered, Boumediene was not allowed to shave, and was forced to look the part of a radical Islamic terrorist.

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Notes on contributors

Blanka Grzegorczyk

Blanka Grzegorczyk is a part-time lecturer at the University of Cambridge and Anglia Ruskin University. Her main research interests are in the intersections of children’s literature and postcolonialism. She is author of Discourses of Postcolonialism in Contemporary British Children’s Literature (Routledge, 2015). Currently, she is researching the unfolding relationship between children’s fiction and terror in the twenty-first century. Her second monograph, Terror and Counter-Terror in Contemporary British Children’s Literature, will be published by Routledge in 2018.