Elleke Boehmer & Stephen Morton 
Terror and the Postcolonial 
A Concise Companion

Terror and the Postcolonial is a major comparative study of terrorism and its representations in postcolonial theory, literature, and culture.

* A ground-breaking study addressing and theorizing the relationship between postcolonial studies, colonial history, and terrorism through a series of contemporary and historical case studies from various postcolonial contexts

* Critically analyzes the figuration of terrorism in a variety of postcolonial literary texts from South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East

* Raises the subject of terror as both an expression of globalization and a postcolonial product

* Features key essays by well-known theorists, such as Robert J. C. Young, Derek Gregory, and Achille Mbembe, and Vron Ware

Table of Content

Notes on Contributors vii

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: Terror and the Postcolonial 1
Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton

Part I Theories of Colonial and Postcolonial Terror 25

1 The Colony: Its Guilty Secret and Its Accursed Share 27
Achille Mbembe

2 Vanishing Points: Law, Violence, and Exception in the Global War Prison 55
Derek Gregory

3 The White Fear Factor 99
Vron Ware

4 Sacrificial Militancy and the Wars around Terror 113
Alex Houen

5 Postcolonial Writing and Terror 141
Elleke Boehmer

Part II Histories of Post/colonial Terror 151

6 Revolutionary Terrorism in British Bengal 153
Peter Heehs

7 Excavating Histories of Terror: Thugs, Sovereignty, and the Colonial Sublime 177
Alex Tickell

8 Terrorism, Literature, and Sedition in Colonial India 202
Stephen Morton

9 Israel in the US Empire 226
Bashir Abu-Manneh

10 The Poetics of State Terror in Twenty-first-century Zimbabwe 254
Ranka Primorac

11 The Mediation of ‘Terror’: Authority, Journalism, and the Stockwell Shooting 273
Stuart Price

Part III Genres of Terror 305

12 Terror Effects 307
Robert J. C. Young

13 ‘Gendering’ Terror: Representations of the Female ‘Freedom Fighter’ in Contemporary Sri Lankan Literature and Cultural Production 329
Neluka Silva

14 Terror, Spectacle, and the Secular State in Bombay Cinema 345
Sujala Singh

15 ‘The age of reason was over . . . an age of fury was dawning’: Contemporary Fiction and Terror 361
Robert Eaglestone

16 Bodies of Terror: Performer and Witness 370
Emma Brodzinski

Index 381

About the author

Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literatures in
English at the University of Oxford, well known for her research in
international writing and postcolonial theory, she has published
over twenty books, among them Colonial and Postcolonial
Literature: Migrant Metaphors (1995, 2005), Empire, the
National and the Postcolonial (2002), Nelson Mandela: A Very
Short Introduction (2008), Networks of Empire (2015) and
The Shouting in the Dark (2015), her fifth novel.

Stephen Morton is Senior Lecturer in English at the
University of Southampton. He is currently completing a study of
colonial states of emergency in literature and law,
1905-2005, and is the author of several books and articles on
postcolonial literature and thought, including Salman
Rushdie: Fictions of Postcolonial Modernity (2007) and
Gayatri Spivak: Ethics, Subalternity and the Critique of
Postcolonial Reason (2006).