Book contents
- The Cambridge History ofAsian American Literature
- The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Early Forms of Expression to the Start of the Twentieth Century
- Part II The Exclusion Era, World War II, and the Immediate Postwar Era
- Part III The Asian American Movement
- Part IV Canons
- Part V Post-1965 and the Twenty-First Century
- Part VI Twenty-First Century: 9/11, Empire, and Other Challenges to Literature
- 29 The 9/11 of Our Imaginations: Islam, the Figure of the Muslim, and the Failed Liberalism of the Racial Present
- 30 Narrating War: Arab and Muslim American Aesthetics
- 31 Thick Time and Space: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Aesthetics
- 32 Asian American New Media as Literature for the Digital Age
- 33 Beyond National Literatures: Empire and Amitav Ghosh
- Bibliography
- Index
29 - The 9/11 of Our Imaginations: Islam, the Figure of the Muslim, and the Failed Liberalism of the Racial Present
from Part VI - Twenty-First Century: 9/11, Empire, and Other Challenges to Literature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2015
By
Book contents
- The Cambridge History ofAsian American Literature
- The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Early Forms of Expression to the Start of the Twentieth Century
- Part II The Exclusion Era, World War II, and the Immediate Postwar Era
- Part III The Asian American Movement
- Part IV Canons
- Part V Post-1965 and the Twenty-First Century
- Part VI Twenty-First Century: 9/11, Empire, and Other Challenges to Literature
- 29 The 9/11 of Our Imaginations: Islam, the Figure of the Muslim, and the Failed Liberalism of the Racial Present
- 30 Narrating War: Arab and Muslim American Aesthetics
- 31 Thick Time and Space: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Aesthetics
- 32 Asian American New Media as Literature for the Digital Age
- 33 Beyond National Literatures: Empire and Amitav Ghosh
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The template for the great American novel for many of the writers of the post-9/11 era is drawn from a number of sources. The narrative of deportations and disappearances, which became a central aspect of the Bush-era domestic War on Terror, frames how racism is constructed and understood in the violence of state terror and policing. Islam is at best described in terms of typologies, and practicing Muslims are caricatured as conservative automatons without agency or complexity. Naming an external enemy to the US nation as the bad Muslim constructed as foreign and marginal is also the central reasoning of the racialization of Muslims in US popular culture. To speak of self-defense and self-determination in the Muslim world from the perspective of the US security state is to utter a terrorist discourse instead of an anticolonial or decolonial critique. The ambiguity around critiquing racism stems from a subterfuge of ideological valuation that imagines the racialized Muslim as less than human.
Keywords
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature , pp. 503 - 518Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015
- 8
- Cited by