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

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.  

“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