Terror and the Postcolonial: A Concise Companion (Concise Companions to Literature and Culture) - Softcover

Terror and the Postcolonial is a major comparative study of terrorism and its representations in colonial history and postcolonial theory, literature, and culture. Through a series of thematically-linked, original chapters, the volume critically analyzes the figuration of terrorism in a range of colonial and postcolonial literary texts from South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. It considers a variety of controversial political events such as the London shooting of Brazilian national Jean Charles de Menezes and the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. In doing so, this groundbreaking study questions, complicates, and, above all, historicizes the deep divisions between Western and non-Western cultures and their writings, and also their legacies of conquest, that underpin the contemporary rhetoric of terrorism. At the same time, the collection investigates the widely disparate value systems that are held to reinforce the recourse to “terror” in global literature and culture.

With fine theoretical sophistication, Terror and the Postcolonial offers provocative new insights that will broaden our understanding of global terrorism today as well as of the cultural and literary responses to terrorism that have emerged throughout the postcolonial world.

Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literatures in English at the University of Oxford, well known for her research in international writing and postcolonial theory, she has published over twenty books, among them Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (1995, 2005), Empire, the National and the Postcolonial (2002), Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction (2008), Networks of Empire (2015) and The Shouting in the Dark (2015), her fifth novel.

Stephen Morton is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Southampton. He is currently completing a study of colonial states of emergency in literature and law, 1905−2005, and is the author of several books and articles on postcolonial literature and thought, including Salman Rushdie: Fictions of Postcolonial Modernity (2007) and Gayatri Spivak: Ethics, Subalternity and the Critique of Postcolonial Reason (2006).