“Those Hell-Hounds Called Terrorists” – Then and Now

In their pioneering study Terror and Taboo, the cultural anthropologists Joseba Zulaika and William Douglass point out a curious paradox in the contemporary preoccupation with terrorism. Whereas the topic of terrorism has been ubiquitous in Western public discourse since the late twentieth century, the voices of terrorists themselves are usually silenced. Zulaika and Douglass suggest that the terrorist is ‘the paradigm of inhuman bestiality, the quintessential proscribed or tabooed figure of our times’ (1996, 6). To say that there is such a thing as a ‘terrorism taboo’ (Jackson 2015a, 320) is not to say that terrorism is not talked about. Quite the opposite is true. Quoting Michel Foucault's well-known phrase (which originally refers to the public repression of sexuality in Victorian times), we may speak of a ‘veritable discursive explosion’ (1978, 17) surrounding the subject of terror, which the events of 11 September 2001 propelled to the forefront of political action and media attention. What is taboo is not the topic of terrorism as such; it is the political subjectivity of the perpetrator of terrorism, whose motives cannot be acknowledged, since ‘the very attempt to “know” how the terrorist thinks or lives can be deemed an abomination’ (Zulaika and Douglass 1996, 149). Zulaika and Douglass maintain that what they term ‘terrorism discourse’ is caught up in a self-referential tangle; rather than engaging with the actual circumstances and perpetrators of political violence, counterterrorism experts and the media reiterate the same set of assumptions in a posture of ‘rhetorical circularity’ (ix).

The Figure of the Terrorist in Literature and Visual Culture takes up these ideas within the fields of literary, film, television, and media studies. In what ways, we ask, do media forms such as novels, fiction and nonfiction films, or comic books frame and make sense of the figure of the terrorist? And how do the resulting narratives relate to official, state-led discourses? Do they reinforce the terrorism taboo, or do they find ways of circumventing it? Surprisingly few studies have devoted themselves to narrative representations of terrorists rather than terrorism as a more abstract concept and phenomenon. As the following sections will demonstrate, moreover, the existing research tends to limit itself to one medium and context.