(Mis)Reading in the Age of Terror: Promoting Racial Literacy through Counter-Colonial Narrative Resistance in the Post-9/11 Muslim Novel

Abstract

Abstract:In the aftermath of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks on September 11, 2001, a surge of literary works by Muslim and Arab authors emerged on the US literary scene, seeking to challenge Islamophobic rhetoric that misrepresents Muslim and Arab communities. This essay examines two such novels, Laila Halaby's Once in a Promised Land and Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, both of which were published in 2007 at a critical time in history, when the Bush administration's fearmongering had already justified the dual invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. These novels rewrite the history of the 9/11 tragedy from a position of counter-colonial resistance in order to denounce the post-9/11 US counterterror state's misinformed and damaging attempts to read the racialized Muslim body. Following Paula Moya's methodology in The Social Imperative (2015) of interpreting literature through the social-psychological lens of schema, this essay demonstrates how these post-9/11 Muslim novels invite readers to grow conscious of the ways in which their culturally formed racial schemas might impede their ability to accurately "read" racial others. In exposing these failures of racial literacy, these novels denounce how the War on Terror's culture of fear forecloses any possibility for authentic human connection and empathetic understanding.