Globalism, Multiculturalism and Violence in Zia Hader Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know (2014) and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017)

In Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown (2005), published during the early years of the War on Terror, one character describes the acceleration of globalisation: ‘[e]verywhere was now a part of everywhere else [... ] Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discreet. This unsettled people. There were collisions and explosions’. In subsequent years such explosions, in the form of violent terrorist attacks perpetrated by white nationalist, Christian fundamentalist, Jihadi and other ideologically driven extremist groups aggrieved by various aspects of these ‘flows’ and intersections, have proliferated. The visibility and spectacle of the 7/7 attacks in London in 2005, Oslo/Utoya Island in 2011, Manchester in 2018, El Paso in 2019, and the multiple attacks in Paris over the last decade, has not meant that such incidents are any more regular than those perpetrated by, for example, ETA, the IRA or the Baader-Meinhof group in the late twentieth century. They are, however, differentiated by their association with globalisation, multiculturalism and, more recently, the global migrant crisis. Though the connection is often tenuous, it retains currency in electoral politics, and particularly in the current post-2016 culture wars.