Terror and the Postcolonial

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).

“Addressing issues ranging across race, gender, history, literature and militancy, [it examines] at times contentious and confronting perspectives of the world in which we live, how global terrorism and fear came into being, and the possible triggers for the ongoing confrontations challenging global unity … The text is not too dry or overburdened with longwinded narrative, but is thought provoking and image-shattering. Terror and the Postcolonial will take the wind out of the sails of anyone who believes we live in a world where terrorism is the sole property of extremists, religious zealots and bigots.” M/C Journal

• Notes on Contributors vii Acknowledgments xiIntroduction: Terror and the Postcolonial 1Elleke Boehmer and Stephen MortonPart I Theories of Colonial and Postcolonial Terror 251 The Colony: Its Guilty Secret and Its Accursed Share 27Achille Mbembe2 Vanishing Points: Law, Violence, and Exception in the Global War Prison 55Derek Gregory3 The White Fear Factor 99Vron Ware4 Sacrificial Militancy and the Wars around Terror 113Alex Houen5 Postcolonial Writing and Terror 141Elleke BoehmerPart II Histories of Post/colonial Terror 1516 Revolutionary Terrorism in British Bengal 153Peter Heehs7 Excavating Histories of Terror: Thugs, Sovereignty, and the Colonial Sublime 177Alex Tickell8 Terrorism, Literature, and Sedition in Colonial India 202Stephen Morton9 Israel in the US Empire 226Bashir Abu-Manneh10 The Poetics of State Terror in Twenty-first-century Zimbabwe 254Ranka Primorac11 The Mediation of “Terror”: Authority, Journalism, and the Stockwell Shooting 273Stuart PricePart III Genres of Terror 30512 Terror Effects 307Robert J. C. Young13 “Gendering” Terror: Representations of the Female “Freedom Fighter” in Contemporary Sri Lankan Literature and Cultural Production 329Neluka Silva14 Terror, Spectacle, and the Secular State in Bombay Cinema 345Sujala Singh15 “The age of reason was over . . . an age of fury was dawning”: Contemporary Fiction and Terror 361Robert Eaglestone16 Bodies of Terror: Performer and Witness 370Emma BrodzinskiIndex 381