Terror and the Postcolonial

Terror and the Postcolonial is a major comparative study of terrorism and its representations in postcolonial theory, literature, and culture. A ground-breaking study addressing and theorizing the relationship between postcolonial studies, colonial history, and terrorism through a series of contemporary and historical case studies from various postcolonial contexts Critically analyzes the figuration of terrorism in a variety of postcolonial literary texts from South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East Raises the subject of terror as both an expression of globalization and a postcolonial product Features key essays by well-known theorists, such as Robert J. C. Young, Derek Gregory, and Achille Mbembe, and Vron Ware

Notes on Contributors vii Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Terror and the Postcolonial 1 Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton Part I Theories of Colonial and Postcolonial Terror 25 1 The Colony: Its Guilty Secret and Its Accursed Share 27 Achille Mbembe 2 Vanishing Points: Law, Violence, and Exception in the Global War Prison 55 Derek Gregory 3 The White Fear Factor 99 Vron Ware 4 Sacrificial Militancy and the Wars around Terror 113 Alex Houen 5 Postcolonial Writing and Terror 141 Elleke Boehmer Part II Histories of Post/colonial Terror 151 6 Revolutionary Terrorism in British Bengal 153 Peter Heehs 7 Excavating Histories of Terror: Thugs, Sovereignty, and the Colonial Sublime 177 Alex Tickell 8 Terrorism, Literature, and Sedition in Colonial India 202 Stephen Morton 9 Israel in the US Empire 226 Bashir Abu-Manneh 10 The Poetics of State Terror in Twenty-first-century Zimbabwe 254 Ranka Primorac 11 The Mediation of “Terror”: Authority, Journalism, and the Stockwell Shooting 273 Stuart Price Part III Genres of Terror 305 12 Terror Effects 307 Robert J. C. Young 13 “Gendering” Terror: Representations of the Female “Freedom Fighter” in Contemporary Sri Lankan Literature and Cultural Production 329 Neluka Silva 14 Terror, Spectacle, and the Secular State in Bombay Cinema 345 Sujala Singh 15 “The age of reason was over . . . an age of fury was dawning”: Contemporary Fiction and Terror 361 Robert Eaglestone 16 Bodies of Terror: Performer and Witness 370 Emma Brodzinski Index 381