1st Edition

Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Terror in Literature and Culture

By Basuli Deb Copyright 2015
    252 Pages
    by Routledge

    252 Pages
    by Routledge

    This book offers a transnational feminist response to the gender politics of torture and terror from the viewpoint of populations of color who have come to be associated with acts of terror. Using the War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, this book revisits other such racialized wars in Palestine, Guatemala, India, Algeria, and South Africa. It draws widely on postcolonial literature, photography, films, music, interdisciplinary arts, media/new media, and activism, joining the larger conversation about human rights by addressing the problem of a pervasive public misunderstanding of terrorism conditioned by a foreign and domestic policy perspective. Deb provides an alternative understanding of terrorism as revolutionary dissent against injustice through a postcolonial/transnational lens. The volume brings counter-terror narratives into dialogue with ideologies of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, class, and religion, addressing the situation of women as both perpetrators and targets of torture, and the possibilities of a dialogue between feminist and queer politics to confront securitized regimes of torture. This book explores the relationship in which social and cultural texts stand with respect to legacies of colonialism and neo-imperialism in a world of transnational feminist solidarities against postcolonial wars on terror.

    Introduction: Gendering the Politics of Terror  1. The US War on Terror: Queerness, Imperial Women, and their "Sister" Outsiders  2. Zionist Settler Colonialism in Palestine/Israel: Gendering Refugee Narratives of Terrorism  3. Counterinsurgency Terror in Guatemala: An Indigenous Woman’s Testimonials  4. Caste Violence in India and its British Heritage: Writing Dalit Women’s Terrorized Lives  5. French Colonial Dictatorships and Postcolonial Algeria: Horror Stories by Women  6. Inheriting Terror: South African Women, Post-Apartheid Fictions, and Queer Politics  Conclusion

    Biography

    Basuli Deb is Assistant Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, US.