Terror and Counter-Terror in Contemporary British Children’s Literature 9781138501744, 9781315144542

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Terror and Counter-Terror in Contemporary British Children’s Literature

The widespread threat of terrorist and counter-terrorist violence in the twenty-first century has created a globalized context for social interactions, transforming the ways in which young people relate to the world around them and to one another. This is the first study that reads post-9/11 and 7/7 British writing for the young as a response to this contemporary predicament, exploring how children’s writers find the means to express the local conditions and different facets of the global wars around terror. The texts examined in this book reveal a preoccupation with overcoming various forms of violence and prejudice faced by certain groups within post-terror Britain, as well as a concern with mapping out their social relations with other groups, and those concerns are set against the recurring themes of racist paranoia, anti-immigrant hostility, politicized identities, and growing up in countries transformed by the effects of terror and counter-terror. The book concentrates on the relationship between postcolonial and critical race studies, Britain’s colonial legacy, and literary representations of terrorism, tracing thematic and formal similarities in the novels of both established and emerging children’s writers such as Elizabeth Laird, Sumia Sukkar, Alan Gibbons, Muhammad Khan, Bali Rai, Nikesh Shukla, Malorie Blackman, Claire McFall, Miriam Halahmy, and Sita Brahmachari. In doing so, this study maps new connections for scholars, students, and readers of contemporary children’s fiction who are interested in how such writing addresses some of the most pressing issues affecting us today, including survival after terror, migration, and community building. Blanka Grzegorczyk teaches at the University of Cambridge and Manchester Metropolitan University. She is the author of Discourses of Postcolonialism in Contemporary British Children’s Literature (2015).

Children’s Literature and Culture Founding Series Editor: Jack Zipes Current Series Editors: Kenneth Kidd and Elizabeth Marshall

Postcolonial Approaches to Latin American Children’s Literature Ann González ‘The Right Thing to Read’ A History of Australian Girl-Readers, 1910-1960 Bronwyn Lowe Battling Girlhood Sympathy, Social Justice and the Tomboy Figure in American Literature Kristen B. Proehl Cyborg Saints Religion and Posthumanism in Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction Carissa Turner Smith Out of Reach The Ideal Girl in American Girls’ Serial Literature Kate G. Harper The Arctic in Literature for Children and Young Adults Edited by Heidi Hansson, Maria Lindgren Leavenworth and Anka Ryall Terror and Counter-Terror in Contemporary British Children’s Literature Blanka Grzegorczyk ChicaNerds in Chicana Young Adult Literature Brown and Nerdy Cristina Herrera

Terror and Counter-Terror in Contemporary British Children’s Literature

Blanka Grzegorczyk

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Blanka Grzegorczyk to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-50174-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-14454-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: Literature, Children, and the Wars around Terror

vi 1

1

Unhealed Wounds

12

2

Precarious Lives

36

3

Subcultural Spaces

64

4

The Reluctant Terrorist

85

5

At Home in Wonderland

106

Conclusion: A Score for Stories of Compassion and Solidarity Index

129 137

Acknowledgements

My sincere thanks to Kenneth Kidd and Elizabeth Marshall for their support and direction throughout, and to the editorial and publishing teams at Routledge, with whom it is always a real pleasure to work. To those who made possible, productive, and joyful my years as a children’s literature scholar in Cambridge, and who welcomed me into their faculties, departments, colleges, and homes: Farah Mendlesohn, Edward James, Zoe Jaques, Maria Nikolajeva, David Whitley, Georgie Horrell, Eugene Giddens, Tory Young, Jeannette Baxter, and Alex Houen. I should also like to acknowledge the support and interest in my research shown by Manchester Metropolitan University’s Department of English, Centre for Creative Writing, English Literature and Linguistics, and Centre for Youth Studies, in particular Berthold Schoene, Jess Edwards, Antony Rowland, Paul Wake, Hannah Smithson, Paul Giladi, Kaye Tew, Chloé Germaine Buckley, Alex Wheatle, and Livi Michael. Many thanks to all my wonderful and inquisitive students, past or present, whose questions cast new light on some of the ideas informing this study. Warm thanks for various kinds of help, guidance, and inspiration over the past many years to Bernd-Peter Lange, the much missed Justyna Kociatkiewicz, Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Elaine Horyza, and Maciej Masłowski. As ever, huge thanks to my family, and especially to my husband, mother, and cats, for their understanding, moral support, and encouragement, and for keeping me grounded, strong, and fed when the chapters here were being written and edited. Finally, I am grateful to have received permissions to include revised versions of articles previously published elsewhere. Chapter 2 is derived in part from an article published as “A Trojan Horse of a Different Color: Counter-Terrorism and Islamophobia in Alan Gibbons’s An Act of Love and Anna Perera’s Guantanamo Boy” in Critical Studies on Terrorism 11:1 (2018), and Chapter 4 includes sections published as “Radical Children, Radical Fictions: Terror and Extremism in Sam Mills’s Blackout and Malorie Blackman’s Noble Conflict” in Neohelicon 45:2 (2018). My thanks and due acknowledgments go to the editors and publishers of these journals for permitting the reproduction of this material.

Introduction Literature, Children, and the Wars around Terror

What affects the young people of the time in which we find ourselves living is largely framed by the specific moment in which we ask such a question. Since the beginning of the new millennium, some of the most prevalent fears among the young generation have included a concern that, having already erupted on numerous occasions both at the heart of the West and on its peripheries, terror will rise again (see, for instance, Rumbelow 2015; Khanna 2016; Fishwick 2017; Morris 2018; Coughlan 2018). The risk is not just that terror will strike from “without,” but also that fear of terrorism will bring personal and structural violence into Western democratic society in the name of “defense.” These concerns have developed rather specifically in the British context, where the revelations that most of the attackers responsible for the London bombings of 7/7/2005, or “London’s 9/11” (when four suicide bombers detonated their explosive devices on the city’s transport network), as well as the Manchester Arena suicide bomber (acting in 2017 at the conclusion of a concert clearly aimed at young people), were British-born have led to the introduction and later ramping up of anti-terrorism laws that have had a normatizing and constraining impact on public debate, and that, among their other widely criticized measures, have obligated schools, universities, and local authorities to play the game of spot the terrorist while interacting with the youth (see, for example, Cobain 2016). Thus, at a moment when one in three British children are said to be primarily anxious about global forms of terror (see Morris 2018), nursery and school-aged children are threatened with being referred to counter-extremism programs for owning a toy gun or drawing a picture of their father chopping a cucumber, mistaken by staff for a “cooker bomb” (see “Family” 2017; Fox 2016). Much like in the US, where a post-9/11 recognition of the precariousness of bodies and borders, together with the fear of continued terroristic violence, has led many to a “belief that [America] need[s] more guns, more border control, a more authoritarian government to keep a strict eye on things” (Harvey n. pag.), the extreme paranoia induced by the attacks themselves and by the counter-terror rhetoric of successive governments has constricted Britons’ freedoms and behaviors in a way that is symbolized by an “artwork” stab-proof vest decorated with a union jack flag that was

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worn by the world-famous British rapper Stormzy at his recent Glastonbury festival concert (and designed by the equally well-known British protest artist Banksy), and which cultural commentators have dubbed an “artefact of [British] paranoia [that] is a perfect image of our moment” (Jones n. pag.). The vocabulary of such terror and counter-terror resonates in the world of children, who have themselves sought to engage intellectually and creatively with terrorism and its effects. A good example of such engagement is a prize-winning speech written by the British Muslim primary school pupil Sara Hussain in the form of an imagined conversation with the Manchester Arena bomber in reaction to his possible justifications of the attack, which a close friend of hers survived (see Pidd 2019). In a development running concurrently with the rise of young people’s responses to the socio-political and psychological impact of terroristic events, terror has become a major concern for children’s writers, who have variously commented on the new world orders following 9/11 and 7/7. The potentially transformative force of children’s literature as a form of discourse that can shape social experience—a particularly important function within global situations marked by periods of crisis and conflict—offers special value to issues of post-terror healing and world-building in a context when most of the teaching about the contemporary threat of terror is state-led or regulated (see, for instance, Jerome, Elwick, and Kazim 2019; Ford 2019). And yet, children’s fiction has been neglected as a form of writing that can, like the novels of Miriam Halahmy and Sita Brahmachari that I discuss here, at once help make visible the differential exposure of various populations to terror-related violence as well as modeling alternative social interactions in the face of terror, even though it could broaden and refresh a general critical debate surrounding the relationship between fiction and terror (see, for example, Boxall 2013, esp. 123–164; Herman 2018), which all too often finds its material on a short list of canonical writers such as Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Philip Roth, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Don DeLillo. Therefore, it seems particularly timely to undertake a full scholarly investigation of representations of terrorism and its effects within post-9/11 children’s literature, as written for young readers growing up in a Britain transformed by the global wars around terror. This book considers how post-9/11 British fiction for the young has plotted ways of digesting and moving beyond the politics of terror and counterterror—here, after Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton (2010), understood to bear colonial, neo-colonial, and postcolonial characteristics (see also Boehmer 2018)—while recognizing that some groups have been affected more than others by the repercussions of acts of terrorism and violence. It sees the contemporary children’s novel as involved in the imagining of new communal modes of being that are required in a post-terror climate plagued by fear and suspicion. Throughout, the focus is on children’s writing of the new century that confronts and exposes the violence that escalates in situations of terror and counter-terror, having a deep impact upon young people’s social and

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political attitudes. The identification of violence in these novels as the foundation of a “common parlance” between the state and the terrorists allows their writers to complicate, while encouraging readers to interrogate, the simplistic ideological binaries of “with us or against us” that have arisen around contemporary discourses on extremism and counter-extremism (Houen 215). An investigation of the potential of these texts to invite the audience to which they appeal to think their way into alternative socio-political realities, this study views such novels as participating in a broader tradition of progressive children’s literature, well documented by scholars like Kimberley Reynolds (2007) or Julia L. Mickenberg and Philip Nel (2008). The texts in question could also be seen as another form of postcolonial literature, a literature that in one current interpretation, as I have argued elsewhere (Grzegorczyk 2015), aims to “engage politically with the anxieties that result from a marginalized racial and cultural identity” (1; see also McGillis 2000; Bradford 2007). The book offers a comparative analysis of the wide-ranging responses to changing configurations of Britishness, due mainly to the effects of terrorism and the war on terror, as portrayed by British children’s writers who make visible and challenge the different forms of neo-colonialism and strategies of exclusion coded as counter-terrorism. The critical principles that underpin its readings are drawn from postcolonial and critical race theory, terrorism studies, discourses of trauma, vulnerability, subcultural resistance, and cosmopolitan ethics. Its five chapters are organized around the traumatic effects of terrorism and counter-terroristic responses—with “trauma” defined as a “crisis of truth” (Caruth 6), or a disruption of historical experience that “caus[es] conventional epistemologies to falter” and “acts as a haunting or possessive influence,” while resisting articulation and representation (Whitehead 5)—followed by the greater vulnerability of certain groups of people in an age of terror, the importance of subcultural affiliation as a means of coming to terms with the reality of Britain’s post-9/11 world, the processes of and resistances to radicalization, and the possibility of realizing a progressive form of multiculturalism rooted in communal values and solidarity against oppression. By exploring the unfolding relationship between children’s fiction and terror in the new century, the study demonstrates that contemporary British children’s novels use the present conflict of ideologies to confront specific social and ethical questions concerning vulnerability, survivability, and responsibility, and open post-9/11 British social relations to postcolonial and cosmopolitan critique. Children’s books about terror—which can refer both to the violent operation of and conflict between state systems and to attempts to resist them—are certainly not new in the British tradition. This category might be said to encompass works such as Joan Lingard’s “Kevin and Sadie” novels (1970–1976), Gillian Cross’s Wolf (1990), Theresa Breslin’s Death or Glory Boys (1997), Kate MacLachlan’s Love My Enemy (2004), Alan Gibbons’s The Defender (2004), or Siobhan Dowd’s Bog Child (2008), to name only a few. These works explore the difficult relationship between Britain and its

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Irish “enemy others” against a background of terrorism during the Troubles or after the Peace Process. Similarly inflected by terrorism occurring in the West is a clutch of historical fiction, from Sally Gardner’s The Red Necklace (2007) and The Silver Blade (2009) to Catherine Johnson’s Sawbones (2013) and Blade and Bone (2016), which imagine the merging of different perspectives during the period of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. There is also a large group of texts that consider the contemporary child’s experiences ensuing from what Elleke Boehmer (2018) would call the “slow terror” of increasing global inequality, social instability, and political injustice, such as Elizabeth Laird’s A Little Piece of Ground (2003), Oranges in No Man’s Land (2006), or Lost Riders (2008); Jane Mitchell’s Chalkline (2009); Andy Mulligan’s Trash (2010); and Brian Conaghan’s The Bombs That Brought Us Together (2016), among others. There are far fewer examples of pre-9/11 British children’s fiction that reflect or respond to Britain’s attitudes and policies toward the “othered” South Asian or Arab subject without resorting to stereotypes (as do the Golden Age children’s texts such as Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess (1905) or post-war texts such as the final book in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series, The Last Battle (1956)), or else amplifying such characters’ isolation (like Jan Needle’s My Mate Shofiq (1978), Jamila Gavin’s The Wheel of Surya trilogy (1992–1997), or Meera Syal’s Anita and Me (1996)). But even texts that are involved in a search for forms of shared cultural experience and that imagine communities that are trying to break free from the divisions enforced by race, religion, or nation show that racial tensions had been simmering in Britain for decades before 9/11. I am thinking, for instance, of the pre-9/11 books featuring Asian or Muslim characters such as Farrukh Dhondy’s short story collections, East End at Your Feet (1976) and Come to Mecca and Other Stories (1978), or Bernard Ashley’s novel The Trouble with Donovan Croft (1974), which depicts the multiculturalism of 1970s Britain, but from the perspective of a white protagonist, as well as of texts such as Richard MacSween’s Victory Street (2004), which is set during the race riots in northern England during the summer of 2001. While neither terror nor the structuring of young Britons’ daily lives around the possibility of race-based violence belong exclusively to post-9/11 British children’s fiction, the question of ethical response and responsibility for the disruption of certain set ways of seeing the world has gained new urgency since 9/11. Understood from a postcolonial position, such fiction could well appear as “writing back” against the resurgence of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiments within British public culture, sentiments derived from familiar Orientalist stereotypes of the colonial other as primitive, abject, and threatening. From a critical race perspective, these texts show that political and mainstream media communications have been characterized by what Stuart Hall (1995) decades ago labelled “inferential racism,” or the production of perceptual realities by means of encoded appeals to racial fears and anxieties, made without bringing into awareness

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the racism of their unquestioned assumptions. The strategic use of ethnic and/or subcultural self-fashioning operates in some of these novels as part of an appeal for recognition, with young characters seeking to construct their own mechanisms for activating the political energies of their communities, but, in fact, sometimes turning to the default racialized ordering of British social life, and performing the political violence that they are over-coded by the state as bound to perpetuate in any case. In other novels, we see a principle of reaction against the treatment of racial and national identity as “primary sources of groupness and absolute ethnicity [that] are supposedly endowed with a special power to restore certainty and find stability amidst the flux of precarious life in increasingly dangerous conditions” (Gilroy n. pag.), a reaction distinguished from the defensive identity politics of competing ethnic, national, or religious minority constituencies in creating a genuinely open-ended pluralized community whose ethical and cosmopolitan view of cohabitation can serve as a guideline for new forms of British politics. Freighted with notions of white victimhood and vulnerability, the invocations of white ethno-nationalism coming from within Britain’s polycultural population become compelling in the face of the perceived threats presented by British Muslim communities—variously associated with violence across all forms of media, be it mainstream, national, or liberal (see Baker, Gabrielatos, and McEnery 2013)—on the one hand, and on the other, by the encroachment of potentially disruptive, alien influences from new arrivals into Britain. If these alleged threats feed rhetorically into the state’s justificatory arguments for devising new emergency measures, they are also the direct cause of threats against and attacks on the minority communities that the state and the media have discursively established as “suspect” (see, for example, Hickman et al. 2012; Mythen 2012; Breen-Smyth 2014), which is exemplified by the “Punish a Muslim Day” campaign, in which letters were sent to homes and businesses around Britain, calling on recipients to win “points” for “certain acts of violence—from 25 points for removing a woman’s headscarf to 500 points for murdering a Muslim” (Perraudin n. pag.). The novelists I examine in this study are interested not only in recording the effects of terror and registering the resistant energies that are generated by going forward from such effects, but also in developing political forms of inter-cultural solidarity that surpass the defensive habits of mind derived from the acknowledgment of one’s own precariousness and susceptibility to injury. This book gives critical attention to the often overlooked relationship between contemporary children’s fiction and terror, and examines the role of such writing in post-terror community building. Few critical books have engaged with the complicated position of young people growing up in the post-9/11 era and finding themselves caught between the ideologies of nationalism and the discourse of social exclusion (see Maira 2009, 2016; Kieran 2015), and with no more than occasional investigations of the connections between the children’s novel and terrorism. Several studies have addressed the questions of nationalist feelings, multicultural affiliations,

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cosmopolitan identities, and human rights that are framed in the context of children’s literature (see Kelen and Sundmark 2013; Sainsbury 2013; Todres and Higinbotham 2016; McCulloch 2017; O’Sullivan and Immel 2017); however, none of these works makes the impact of terrorism and of responses to terrorism on the imagination of children’s writers the sustained subject of their enquiry. Importantly, Jo Lampert’s Children’s Fiction about 9/11: Ethnic, National and Heroic Identities (2010), together with her essays in Pádraic Whyte and Keith O’Sullivan’s Children’s Literature and New York City (2014) and David Kieran’s The War of My Generation (2015), offer distinctive new readings on children’s texts written and published mainly in the United States that foreground the complexity of post-9/11 youth identities, but British children’s fiction remains a heretofore neglected resource for understanding and exploring the limits in Western responses to the era of terror and the possibilities of new communal modes of being, a gap in research that I will address in this study. The first chapter considers the extent to which the 9/11 attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and later the 7/7 London bombings, as well as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, have disrupted both the global and domestic order, disclosing how these events have inscribed themselves in the twenty-first-century imagination in a way that makes the healing process seem an ultimate impossibility. It examines novels by Catherine Bruton, Annabel Pitcher, Sumia Sukkar, Elizabeth Laird, Pooja Puri, Kerry Drewery, Phil Earle, and David Massey, which detail the experience of personal loss and community decline under post-9/11 and 7/7 conditions. While direct accounts from either victims of terrorism and their families or traumatized young soldiers are largely absent from current counterterror discourses (see McGowan 2018)—and contemporary life writing about the non-West has been commodified within them (see Whitlock 2007; Douglas and Poletti 2016)—children’s literature, I argue, can become an aesthetic means of investigating the lived experience of terror, and representing complex questions of humanity, mortality, and ethical life to younger audiences. A central preoccupation of the second chapter is with the rhetoric of fear, insecurity, and suspicion that allows the state to extinguish both real and imagined threats to the cohesion of contemporary British society, and revives an older logic grounded in colonial discourses, whereby Muslim populations are constructed as untrustworthy and dangerous others, rendering their rights as citizens increasingly precarious and their lives less grievable in the process. In examining novels by Alan Gibbons, Muhammad Khan, Sam Hepburn, and Anna Perera, this chapter discusses the damaging impact of the new emergency measures developed by the state in the name of securing the nation against terror on the foundations of young British Muslims’ familial and communal bonds. The texts I analyze here bring to light experiences of heightened vulnerability and intrusions of racist violence within the daily lives of young Britons from communities most affected by

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the social and political practices of labeling in the wake of the events of 9/11 and 7/7 and their consequences. Chapter 3 takes as its subject matter the emergence of new trans- and subcultural identities that are especially attractive to younger members of minority ethnic communities growing up in Britain following the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks. My readings of novels by Bali Rai, Na’ima B. Robert, and Nikesh Shukla demonstrate how young minority Britons attempt to create shared imaginative spaces for the construction and reinforcement of hybrid identities outside the boundaries both of the state and of existing social structures. The focus is the fictional investigation of whether these new modes of belonging can be the sustaining basis for transcending the discourses that associate minority groups in Britain with the threat of home-grown terrorism, and whether they can provide a nonviolent grounding for new political constructions, positions, and affiliations. In the fourth chapter, I turn to novels by Sam Mills, Claire McFall, Malorie Blackman, Nicky Singer, and Sarah Mussi, which combine the perspectives of terrorist and victim in order to enter the mind of an unwilling participant in terror-related acts. This binding of perspectives allows the novelists to explore the origins and workings of terrorist organizations, as well as radicalization processes, while encouraging young readers to think critically about different situations of violence in a binarized opposition of the West vs. the non-West. The conflation of British anti-terror laws and practices and the state regulation of migrant populations forms the framework for the final chapter, which examines novels by Miriam Halahmy, Sita Brahmachari, Robert Swindells, and Rachel Anderson. The texts cautiously present a vision of the possibility of crossing the “us/them” divide between young Britons on the one hand, and immigrants and asylum seekers on the other, modeling for young readers the mentality that they need to cultivate in order to counteract the state’s and the mainstream media’s “migrant as menace” rhetoric. The different collaborative actions initiated by the young characters in these novels embody a form of multicultural conviviality that is based on an idea of common humanity, a shared understanding of communal values, and an active solidarity against the oppression and marginalization of immigrants in Britain. Taken together, these readings demonstrate the rewards of analyzing post-9/11 writing for the young in the British context. However, it is important to acknowledge the challenge, in fiction and in its criticism, of what Salman Rushdie has described as “accommodate[ing] a reality that is changing at the time” (n. pag.), a challenge that is always involved in fashioning a perspective from which to think about the contemporary. It is equally important to recognize that many of these novels make apparent not only the “effective continuation of the authority structures” of the empire in counter-terroristic formations of policing and surveillance (Boehmer and Morton 7), but also continuities between the popularity of racist and ultranationalist discourses and behaviors (and resistances to them) in pre- and

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post-9/11 Britain. The novels I discuss have the capacity to keep refreshing the ways in which young people understand themselves in relation to their communities, societies, and nations, and with regard to some of the most pressing issues facing us today, including survival after terror, migration, and peacebuilding. This is because children’s literature can both “serve as a mirror to young people who have been displaced—geographically, culturally, emotionally” (Nel 359), and invoke its moments of violent rupture for the benefit of those who have not experienced displacement; it can capture terror in its various aspects without “sacrific[ing] accuracy to sanitization” (Gangi 7). And while the children’s novels I examine also force adults, in the words of Beverley Naidoo, to answer the “question of whether we conceive of … our children primarily as members of a particular tribe or of a wider, diverse humanity linked by rights and responsibilities” (31), they re-energize the idea of the “child as savior” and endow their young protagonists (and readers) with the agency to move beyond terror and its effects and to save themselves from the notable deterioration in our socio-political culture and institutions through new social and political choices.

Works Cited Ashley, Bernard. The Trouble with Donovan Croft. Oxford University Press, 1974. Baker, Paul, Costas Gabrielatos, and Tony McEnery. Discourse Analysis and Media Attitudes: The Representation of Islam in the British Press. Cambridge University Press, 2013. Boehmer, Elleke. Postcolonial Poetics: 21st-Century Critical Readings. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Boehmer, Elleke, and Stephen Morton. “Introduction: Terror and the Postcolonial.” Terror and the Postcolonial: A Concise Companion, edited by Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, pp. 1–24. Boxall, Peter. Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2013. Bradford, Clare. Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s Literature. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007. Breen-Smyth, Marie. “Theorising the ‘Suspect Community’: Counterterrorism, Security Practices and the Public Imagination.” Critical Studies on Terrorism, vol. 7, no. 2, 2014, pp. 223–240. Breslin, Theresa. Death or Glory Boys. Mammoth, 1997. Burnett, Frances Hodgson. A Little Princess. 1905. Harper, 1963. Caruth, Cathy. “Introduction.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, pp. 3–12. Cobain, Ian. “UK’s Prevent Counter-radicalisation Policy ‘Badly Flawed.’” The Guardian, 19 Oct.2016, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/oct/19/uks-p revent-counter-radicalisation-policy-badly-flawed. Accessed 2 June 2019. Conaghan, Brian. The Bombs That Brought Us Together. Bloomsbury Children’s Books, 2016. Coughlan, Sean. “Young People Anxious from Terror Coverage.” BBC.co.uk, 9 Oct.2018, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-45784642. Accessed 4 July 2019.

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Cross, Gillian. Wolf. Oxford University Press, 1990. Dhondy, Farrukh. Come to Mecca and Other Stories. Armada, 1978. Dhondy, Farrukh. East End at Your Feet. Nelson Thornes, 1976. Douglas, Kate, and Anna Poletti. Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Dowd, Siobhan. Bog Child. David Fickling Books, 2008. “Family to Get Payout over School’s Toy Gun Police Call.” BBC.co.uk, 8 Feb.2017, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-38900473. Accessed 14 June 2019. Fishwick, Carmen. “‘Parents Are Shocked How Much We Know’: Young People on the Media Reaction to Terror Attacks.” The Guardian, 2 June2017, https://www.thegua rdian. com/uk-news/2017/jun/02/parents-are-shocked-how-much-we-know-young-peop le-on-the-media-reaction-to-terror-attacks. Accessed 4 July 2019. Ford, Kieran. “This Violence Good, That Violence Bad: Normative and State-centric Discourses in British School Textbooks.” Critical Studies on Terrorism, vol. 12, no. 4, 2019, pp. 693–714. Fox, Tal. “Four-year-old Who Mispronounced ‘Cucumber’ as ‘Cooker Bomb’ Faced Terror Warnings, Family Say.” The Independent, 12 Mar.2016, https:// www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/four-year-old-raises-concerns-of-ra dicalisation-after-pronouncing-cucumber-as-cooker-bomb-a6927341.html. Accessed 14 June 2019. Gangi, Jane M. Genocide in Contemporary Children's and Young Adult Literature: Cambodia to Darfur. Routledge, 2014. Gardner, Sally. The Red Necklace. Orion Children’s Books, 2007. Gardner, Sally. The Silver Blade. Orion Children’s Books, 2009. Gavin, Jamila. The Eye of the Horse. 1994. Egmont, 2010. Gavin, Jamila. The Track of the Wind. 1997. Egmont, 2010. Gavin, Jamila. The Wheel of Surya. 1992. Egmont, 2008. Gibbons, Alan. The Defender. Orion Children’s Books, 2004. Gilroy, Paul. “Never Again: Refusing Race and Salvaging the Human.” Holberg Lecture. University of Bergen. 4 June2019. Grzegorczyk, Blanka. Discourses of Postcolonialism in Contemporary British Children’s Literature. Routledge, 2015. Hall, Stuart. “The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media.” Gender, Race and Class in Media: A Text-Reader, edited by Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez, Sage Publications, 1995, pp. 18–22. Harvey, Joan. “Vulnerability, Violence, and the Political Uses of Frustration.” 3QuarksDaily, 10 June2019, https://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2019/06/vulnerabilityviolence-and-the-political-uses-of-frustration.html. Accessed 12 June 2019. Herman, Peter C., ed. Terrorism and Literature. Cambridge University Press, 2018. Hickman, Mary J., et al. “Social Cohesion and the Notion of ‘Suspect Communities’: A Study of the Experiences and Impacts of Being ‘Suspect’ for Irish Communities and Muslim Communities in Britain.” Critical Studies on Terrorism, vol. 5, no. 1, 2012, pp. 89–106. Houen, Alex. Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson. Oxford University Press, 2002. Jerome, Lee, Alex Elwick, and Raza Kazim. “The Impact of the Prevent Duty on Schools: A Review of the Evidence.” British Educational Research Journal, vol. 45, no. 4, 2019, pp. 821–837.

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Johnson, Catherine. Blade and Bone. Walker Books, 2016. Johnson, Catherine. Sawbones. Walker Books, 2013. Jones, Jonathan. “Designed by Banksy, Worn by Stormzy: The Banner of a Divided and Frightened Nation.” The Guardian, 1 July2018, https://www.theguardian. com/music/2019/jul/01/vest-designed-by-banksy-worn-by-stormzy-glastonbury-thebanner-of-a-divided-nation. Accessed 2 July 2019. Kelen, Christopher, and Björn Sundmark, eds. The Nation in Children’s Literature: Nations of Childhood. Routledge, 2013. Khanna, Samiha. “The Impact of Trauma Oon Children.” Duke Today, 11 Aug.2016, https://today.duke.edu/2016/08/impact-trauma-children. Accessed 3 July 2019. Kieran, David, ed. The War of My Generation: Youth Culture and the War on Terror. Rutgers University Press, 2015. Laird, Elizabeth. A Little Piece of Ground. Macmillan Children’s Books, 2003. Laird, Elizabeth. Lost Riders. Macmillan Children’s Books, 2008. Laird, Elizabeth. Oranges in No Man’s Land. Macmillan Children’s Books, 2006. Lampert, Jo. Children’s Fiction about 9/11: Ethnic, National and Heroic Identities. Routledge, 2010. Lampert, Jo. “Coming of Age in 9/11 Fiction: Bildungsroman and Loss of Innocence.” The War of My Generation: Youth Culture and the War on Terror, edited by David Kieran, Rutgers University Press, 2015, pp. 171–188. Lampert, Jo. “Self in the City: Young Adult Fiction about New York City after 9/ 11.” Children’s Literature and New York City, edited by Pádraic Whyte and Keith O’Sullivan, Routledge, 2014, pp. 111–122. Lewis, C. S. The Last Battle. 1956. Penguin, 1964. Lingard, Joan. Across the Barricades. Hamish Hamilton, 1972. Lingard, Joan. Hostages to Fortune. Hamish Hamilton, 1976. Lingard, Joan. Into Exile. Hamish Hamilton, 1973. Lingard, Joan. A Proper Place. Hamish Hamilton, 1975. Lingard, Joan. The Twelfth of July. Hamish Hamilton, 1970. MacLachlan, Kate. Love My Enemy. Andersen Press, 2004. MacSween, Richard. Victory Street. Andersen Press, 2004. Maira, Sunaina Marr. The 9/11 Generation: Youth, Rights, and Solidarity in the War on Terror. New York University Press, 2016. Maira, Sunaina Marr. Missing: Youth, Citizenship, and Empire after 9/11. Duke University Press, 2009. McCulloch, Fiona. Contemporary British Children’s Fiction and Cosmopolitanism. Routledge, 2017. McGillis, Roderick, ed. Voices of the Other: Children’s Literature and the Postcolonial Context. Garland Publishing, 2000. McGowan, Will. “Critical Terrorism Studies, Victimisation, and Policy Relevance: Compromising Politics or Challenging Hegemony?” Terrorism and Policy Relevance Critical Perspectives, edited by James Fitzgerald, Nadya Ali, and Megan A. Armstrong, Routledge, 2018, pp. 12–32. Mickenberg, Julia, and Philip Nel, eds. Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature. New York University Press, 2008. Mitchell, Jane. Chalkline. Walker Books, 2009. Morris, Steven. “Number of Children Worrying about War and Terror Rises Sharply.” The Guardian, 31 Jan.2018, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/ 31/children-worrying-about-war-terror-rises-sharply-uk. Accessed 2 June 2019.

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Mulligan, Andy. Trash. 2010. Definitions, 2014. Mythen, Gabe. “‘No One Speaks for Us’: Security Policy, Suspected Communities and the Problem of Voice.” Critical Studies on Terrorism, vol. 5, no. 3, 2012, pp. 409–424. Naidoo, Beverley. “What Is and What Might Be.” Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature, vol. 53, no. 4, 2015, pp. 30–39. Needle, Jan. My Mate Shofiq. HarperCollins, 1978. Nel, Philip. “Introduction: Migration, Refugees, and Diaspora in Children’s Literature.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 4, 2018, pp. 357–362. O’Sullivan, Emer, and Andrea Immel, eds. Imagining Sameness and Difference in Children’s Literature: From the Enlightenment to the Present Day. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Perraudin, Frances. “UK Charity Urges Vigilance after ‘Punish a Muslim Day’ Letters.” The Guardian, 11 Mar.2018, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/ma r/11/uk-charity-urges-vigilance-after-punish-a-muslim-day-letters. Accessed 2 June 2019. Pidd, Helen. “Pupil’s Imagined Talk with Manchester Arena Bomber Wins Award.” The Guardian, 21 May2019, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/may/21/p upils-imagined-talk-with-manchester-arena-bomber-wins-award. Accessed 3 July 2019. Reynolds, Kimberley. Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Rumbelow, Helen. “How the Paris Terror Attacks Changed Our Children’s Lives.” The Times, 26 Nov.2015, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/how-the-paris-terror-atta cks-changed-our-childrens-lives-jf6wtqrvr39#. Accessed 3 July 2019. Rushdie, Salman. “Salman Rushdie: ‘I Like Black Comedy in Dark Times.’” Interview by Arifa Akbar. The Guardian, 16 June2018, https://www.theguardian.com/books/ 2018/jun/16/salman-rushdie-the-golden-house-interview. Accessed 2 June 2019. Sainsbury, Lisa. Ethics in British Children’s Literature: Unexamined Life. Bloomsbury, 2013. Syal, Meera. Anita and Me. Harper Perennial, 1996. Todres, Jonathan, and Sarah Higinbotham. Human Rights in Children’s Literature: Imagination and the Narrative of Law. Oxford University Press, 2016. Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Whitlock, Gillian. Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit. University of Chicago Press, 2007.

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Unhealed Wounds

Young people today have grown up in the shadow of terror, under successive state responses to the attacks on the Twin Towers and the London bombings. Subsequent terrorist acts in Paris, Brussels, Nice, Manchester, and Barcelona (not forgetting the terrorist events in Mumbai, Nairobi, Lahore, Baghdad, or Kabul, which were much less reported in the Western world) have repeatedly turned collective memory back to 9/11 and 7/7. With the transnational threat of terror affecting whole cultures and societies, terroristic violence is witnessed, appropriated, and reimagined by Western and non-Western children, who are trying to grasp, and to take control of, the difficult realities shaping their social experience. Stories of young people dealing with terror-related collective traumas by performing them—from Western children re-enacting scenes from the 9/11 attacks on America, and later the November 2015 Paris shootings, with their Lego (toy) bricks and figures to children in Gaza playing games of Arabs versus Israelis (see Enfield 2016; Doucet 2014)—clearly indicate that the force of a terrorist act is felt long after its occurrence. The profusion of children’s fiction written in response to the events of 9/11 and 7/7, as well as to the declaration of the US-led “war on terror” and its global repercussions, likewise suggests that terrorism and counter-terrorism have inscribed themselves in the contemporary imagination. Furthermore, it discloses significant commonalities in Britain’s intellectual and literary culture. Perhaps most strikingly, many of the children’s novels that comment on the re-ordering of the world around the battle lines drawn after 9/11 and 7/7 seek to demonstrate how real world and fantasy, fact and imagination, violence and play seem to collapse into one another through the effects of terror. This chapter explores the children’s fiction of the new century that bears witness to the fact that the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks have prompted a major rethinking and reinventing of the ties that bind us in our local communities and global environments. It discusses works by Catherine Bruton, Annabel Pitcher, Sumia Sukkar, Elizabeth Laird, Pooja Puri, Kerry Drewery, Phil Earle, and David Massey in relation to the capacity of terrorist attacks to fracture the ways in which we see and grasp global relations and with respect to new forms of ethical recognition and connection that emerge in

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the wake of the attacks. In fact, as Peter Boxall has pointed out, it might be the case that the violence of terrorism and of the wars it has triggered “demand[s] broken thinking and broken seeing … as an ethical response” (150), opening up new modes of sociality that recognize a shared susceptibility to injury and strive to minimize this precarity through the practices of alliance. With its commitment to challenging the binaristic “us vs. them” thinking, the contemporary children’s novel can be said to complicate the politics of terror and counter-terror, and to guide younger audiences to think about complex questions of humanity, mortality, and moral agency in the ethical context of acts of terrorism and violence. At the same time, such writing seeks to drive home the impact on children of the lived experience of terror or the threat of terrorist attacks, while considering the erosion of particular communities by the pressures of terrorism and its (too often vengeful) response. It is through focus on the practices of play and performance that many children’s writers find ways of registering the transformed political and social conditions of post-9/11 life. The multifaceted role of play practices in a time of terror is the main interest of this chapter. It examines representations of play in several recent British children’s novels that reveal how it has been used as an intellectual, rhetorical, political, and military tool by the victims and witnesses of terror and its effects, as well as by participants in conflicts linked to terrorism. Paying particular attention to how these texts extend an understanding of violence, victimization, and trauma, I look at how they deal with the psychological aftermath and ethical implications of terrorist attacks and their global consequences. There is a recurrent engagement in these novels with trauma as experienced and transmitted by terror survivors and their families and with the kind of witnessing that involves ethical connections along with empathetic cooperation. The central preoccupation of the post-terror children’s novel, I will argue here, is to find means of representing the impact of trauma that confront young readers with the oppositions that the attacks and their aftermath set in motion, and with the resulting ethical choices, with reading itself affirmed as an ethical practice as a consequence. In a broad range of play-related activities, contemporary children’s fiction functions as trauma testimony, resilience literature, and socio-political protest.

Ashes, Absences and Acting Out Catherine Bruton’s We Can Be Heroes (2011) and Annabel Pitcher’s My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece (2011) make for particularly good examples of novels depicting play practices to frame, within a narrative of social and familial rupture, the child protagonists’ responses to their own traumatic experiences of losing family members in terrorist episodes. In both novels, trauma and terror are shown to be inherently transformative, as the real and the imaginary, pain and fear, facts and fictions, in Alex Houen’s words,

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“become confused in the reactions to terrorism’s effects—particularly in the attempt to repress them” (Terrorism 81). Drawing on Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer’s theorizations of traumatic memories, Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega explain that “produc[ing] the characteristic state of affective numbing, fright, anxiety, shame, or physical pain is not the atrocity of the experience itself, but the lack of adequate reaction to it” (1–2), and the novels discussed in this section are clearly more concerned with how the psychological effects of terror can be represented or fought than with how they have been politicized. The extent to which the judgment of the protagonists and their families is influenced by their efforts to suppress the trauma-like affects of terrorism is what We Can Be Heroes explores at length through the perspective of 12-year-old Ben, whose father was killed in the 9/11 attacks when Ben was a toddler, and who sees fear of terrorism disrupt the mundane lives of the multi-ethnic community of Birmingham a decade later. There is little doubt that Ben’s mother’s repeated nervous breakdowns link back to her husband’s horrific death in the attacks, and while the grandparents with whom the boy is temporarily staying remain silent about his father’s life and death alike, Ben himself finds it easier to draw cartoons (on paper or in his head) than to talk about certain feelings. Like We Can Be Heroes, Pitcher’s My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece uses the repressed emotions of its protagonists to explore the lingering effects of terror more generally. The novel is set in the Lake District, where an unstable, alcoholic father takes 10-year-old Jamie and his teenage sister, Jas (mine), for a “Fresh New Start” (Pitcher 5). Overcome with grief, Jamie’s father understands the move as getting away from all Muslims in Britain, whom he blames for the killing of his other daughter, Rose, in a bombing in Trafalgar Square five years before—“None of that foreign stuff in the Lake District,” he says. “Just real British people minding their own business” (26). The father’s problematic honoring of the urn that contains Rose’s ashes makes the healing process particularly difficult for the two surviving siblings, as does their absent mother’s indifference to their plight. Bruton’s and Pitcher’s novels also raise questions about the public’s relationship to the traumatized and the social momentum toward oppositional, “us vs. them” thinking in the aftermath of the attacks. We Can Be Heroes broadens its poignant treatment of the manner in which the attacks on the Twin Towers are related to the lives of Ben’s family to embrace a more general atmosphere of racial tension and anti-Muslim hostilities in post-9/11 and post-7/7 Britain. Although other people are sympathetic toward the bereaved boy, there appears to be a notable lack of interest in his feelings about and reflection on the events of 9/11; instead, any such conversations underline the collective emotional and defensive response, a hardening of the boundaries that separate the Western self from its other: “[S]ometimes they get really angry and use long words. ‘Abomination,’ one lady said. ‘It’s an abomination.’ Or they talk about ‘terrorism’ and ‘Islamic fundamentalism’. But they never ask me what I think about any of it” (Bruton 180). Within

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the dominant racist structure of Ben’s immediate community—in which a biker gang jeer and throw bottles at British Asian children playing in the park, but “won’t bother with a white kid” (346), and Ben’s own grandfather responds to the boy’s growing friendship with Priti, their 11-year-old British Muslim new neighbor, by asking him if he is “sure [he] wants to get pally with that lot,” that is, the “sort that killed [his] dad” (29)—the young protagonist struggles to make sense of events that remain more complex than a rhetoric based on the cultural clash of East and West allows. As Richard Gray points out, a wound has been left open in the psychic life of post-9/11 Western society after “[a]cting out grief [was] jettisoned in favor of hitting out; getting through the crisis … yielded … to getting back at those who [are seen to have] initiated it” (8). Indeed, in We Can Be Heroes, characters are described as “see[ing] the world through warped glasses” (447), and a similarly damaging internal conflict is evident in Pitcher’s novel, whose main protagonist is puzzled by the friendly welcome offered to him at his new school by Sunya, his only British Muslim classmate. In fact, Jamie finds himself wishing his sister “had just drowned or burned to death as that would have been so much easier to explain” to Sunya than Rose’s death in a terrorist attack carried out by Islamic extremists (95); at the same time, he fears that Sunya’s dad might also be a terrorist, since he learned from his father that “even the most innocent-looking [Muslims] have explosives in their turbans” (100). Worried that his sympathetic connection with Sunya constitutes a betrayal of his father and dead sister, Jamie begins to spend his playtime in the school toilets, “respecting Dad” and “put[ting his] hands under the dryer, pretending it was a fire-breathing monster” (112), rather than playing with a Muslim girl. His resolve to “follow The Ten Commandments … [i]ncluding number five” holds until he realizes that his father has been “giving False Evidence” when saying that “[a]ll Muslims are murderers … Make bombs in their bedroom” (112, 117). The two novels repeatedly point to the contaminating effects of terror on the workings of the child’s mind and imagination and to extracting from ethical discourse a way to negotiate the ideological fault lines opened up within the family and society in the aftermath of terrorist attacks. If We Can Be Heroes and My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece imagine the closing of the boundaries of self and community resulting from the violence of terroristic events, they also remind us that these violent episodes have been turned into spectacles by both their perpetrators and the popular media, in a manner that helped sustain the post-9/11 closed tribalism. In one sense, these acts of violence are not unimaginable, but immediately recognizable to contemporary Western audiences, since they fulfill, as Brian McHale and Randall Stevenson write, the twentieth century’s imagination of disaster (274): “Just like a movie. Do you reckon that’s where the blokes who [attacked the Twin Towers] got the idea?” Priti asks Ben in We Can Be Heroes (31). And while fictionalization might be one of the “last things that most people associated with the impact of the [9/11] terrorist attacks” (Houen, Terrorism 1), the two

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novels underline the fact that the violence of 9/11 and of subsequent terrorist atrocities was in part experienced as a global media spectacle. The horrific events were witnessed by viewers around the world, first live on television and the Internet, and later in the form of various reconstructions, posing the question of whether mediated terrorism can become confused with the events that it represents. It is significant, then, that in Pitcher’s book Jamie thinks that the TV programs about the attacks that killed Rose (programs to which his parents invariably refused to contribute) “made [the events of that day] look like a film” (42); equally importantly, from Bruton’s text we learn that after Ben watches the 9/11 footage “over and over again” on his friend’s laptop, he cannot erase from his mind the images of people jumping from the “towering inferno” (69). But when their own family members refuse to share the knowledge about such traumatic episodes with the novels’ young protagonists (or, as Ben’s cousin, Jed, puts it, “still mak[e] them go to bed after CBeebies” (Bruton 227)), and given that at school their teachers “generally steer clear of [racially sensitive topics]” (16), the new generation realizes that without access to the media they “won’t know anything about how [terrorism and counterterrorism] work” (227). The role of mainstream media companies in the forming of subject positions is humorously emphasized in We Can Be Heroes by Priti’s insistence that Ben should not underestimate the “wisdom of TV”: “I’ve learned more from watching teen drama than I did in the whole of Key Stage Three,” she assures him. “No kidding” (239). However, the reader is also made aware of the one-sidedness of dominant post-9/11 narratives and becomes alert to the power of the media in the pushing of different characters toward more closed, inflexible versions of themselves: “Wasn’t there that bloke in the newspapers who reckoned he was going to drop dead cos he ate a crisp with, like, one milli-molecule of alcohol in it?” Jed says to Priti. “Grandad reckons your lot will probably go bombing the crisp factory in revenge” (171). But in a provocative demonstration of how the reinforcement of existing stereotypes of the Muslim subject in the post-9/11 popular imagination can influence young British Asians’ sense of themselves and their culture, the novel shows Priti herself to have imbibed these stereotypes. Thus, we see the girl grow increasingly distrustful of her older brothers, whom she suspects first of planning the honor killing of their other sister, Zara, and then of preparing a suicide bombing attack. In combining issues of terrorism, its representation, and its violent affects, Bruton’s and Pitcher’s novels thus engage directly in the intertwinings of fantasy and reality, fear and unreason, awareness and performance, reading the significance of post-9/11 global concerns through the filter of children’s imaginations, and marking the potential of imaginative play for figuring and fighting the effects of terror. The poignancy of these novels emerges in part from the fact that the children’s struggle toward normalcy, toward childlike playfulness, is conducted within the bounds of narratives that reveal the ways in which terror effects have shaped the present British reality. The two

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texts bring into view how frequently these characters’ attempts at playful behavior are frustrated, not least because they return the traumatic losses of the past to the children themselves (as when, after seeing Jed purposely jump headlong off the makeshift tree platform in Priti’s garden, Ben starts thinking about his father as one of the falling men from the 9/11 footage (Bruton 81–82)) or to their family members (as, for instance, in the case of Jamie’s guilt at having enjoyed spending time with Sunya, dubbed “an effing TERRORIST” by his father (Pitcher 148), and at wanting to play seaside games, like other families on the beach, during one of the trips on which the father tries, and fails, to scatter Rose’s ashes (45–48)). Even when their childhood games are not aborted, and are actually constructed as giving them agency, the young protagonists still conjure up scenarios in which they escape, rework, and challenge their traumas, and which often fulfill a wish that things had been different. Among those scenarios are Sunya and Jamie’s fantasy of magic rings bringing the boy’s dead cat—whose fatal accident is the novel’s second trauma and triggers a release of feelings about the loss of Rose—back to life (“It wasn’t true but it didn’t matter,” Jamie realizes. “It made me feel better” (Pitcher 218)) or Priti and Ben’s dream of catching the 9/11 attackers (“If they escaped,” she tells him, “they might be on the run somewhere. Wouldn’t it be dead cool if we could … turn them in to the police?” (Bruton 33–34)). In all of this, the children excluded from the experience of working through trauma by the adults around them instead project themselves into traumatizing situations, thereby claiming agency and coming to terms with fears surrounding terrorism and counter-terrorist wars. The bringing together of the adult-controlled world of war and violence and the world of children’s games is certainly not new in the children’s literature tradition, as demonstrated, for instance, in Margaret R. Higonnet’s important articles on the narrative functions of play in books about war and trauma (1998, 2005, 2007). Writing for the young, Higonnet contends, has the power to draw attention to game-playing as an “instrument of therapy” (“Time Out” 157), to supply a better understanding of how painful wartime losses can be acknowledged and contained through a child’s play. Novels like We Can Be Heroes and My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece, I argue, provide a contemporary slant on young people’s responses to loss of life caused by violent actions, expanding the category of childhood processes interrupted by the destructiveness of war to encompass the damage inflicted on children by terror and its repercussions. Yet these novels do so by employing similar strategies of representing play to those adopted by writers of children’s war narratives. One such strategy is to imagine what scenarios are likely to dominate children’s play choices after a terror-related trauma directly experienced by themselves or the larger society within which they move. Crucially, the main characters of the two novels discussed here often rehearse scenarios that revolve around saving other people’s lives and confronting villains, whether as undercover agents in We Can Be Heroes or superheroes in My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece. While Pitcher’s book

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reveals little about the specifics of the evil plans that are thwarted by Jamie and Sunya—or “Spider-Man” and “Girl M”—in their numerous imaginative performances, the young protagonists of Bruton’s novel, we learn, are busy tracking and eliminating terrorists, with Ben depicting the role-play activities in which he engages with Priti and Jed in comic strips about Ben-D, Lil’ Priti, and Jed-eye. Offering more of a cathartic release from horrifying events rather than simply a rehearsal of adult roles in the wars against terror (see also Higonnet 1998, 2007; Agnew and Fox 2001), playtime in these novels alerts us to their child characters’ desire for control and power over their own fates and those of others within these broken communities. Here, as Higonnet would have it, the work of play can be seen to focus on “re-establishing channels of communication and freedom from fear” (“Time Out” 161). And if, at first, these play practices seem to replicate the reductionist “good versus evil” thinking that responses to terrorism have often invited, each book also shows how shared playtime gradually helps the protagonists to question the generalizing assumptions behind narratives based on cultural or religious clashes. The trope of the superhero might perhaps underline the consonance between the defensive response and reactive aggression in the West that followed the 9/11 attacks, and the jingoism of popular stories about squarejawed, vengeful, extraordinarily powerful men who are always ready to defend America against enemies at home and abroad. For Martin Randall, the correlation becomes especially instructive in the context of the post-9/11 rise of superhero film and comic franchises, which, in some cases, utilized these figures to lend voice to counter-terrorist discourses (40–41). Jo Lampert (2004, 2009), on the other hand, sees in post-terror superhero stories the elevation of the vulnerable and caring over the forceful and raging, which to her provokes a “discussion … of who counts as heroic in these new times” (Children’s Fiction 168). Indeed, the characters’ growing subjectivity can be read in ethical terms in the two texts here, insofar as it is predicated on a recognition that responsibility for the other, or what Emmanuel Levinas describes as “answering for everything and for everyone” (Otherwise Than Being 114), is essential to one’s engagement with the world. Importantly, then, in We Can Be Heroes, Ben’s cartoon ends with a vision of a world in which “Da Hona Killaz and Da Bikaz make up and become best of friends,” and where it is the right-wing radicals who “turn out to be the real baddies, so they get arrested for perverting the course of justice” (470); in My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece, Jamie commits himself publicly to his friendship with Sunya when he reacts violently against the racist abuse screamed at her by school bullies (which leaves worryingly open, however, the question of violence breeding violence). While Bruton’s and Pitcher’s characters fantasize about saving the lives of others, these fantasies, together with Jamie’s real accomplishments in football and Ben’s talent for drawing, frame their actual successes in helping to heal others’ wounds. My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece is particularly

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explicit about the role that can be played in this healing process by children’s toys. Crucial here is Jamie’s reaction on hearing his sister’s story of how, when she was little, she lost her favorite (tatty) teddy bear, but was then “relieved to get back to [her] other bears,” whom she loved more than ever because “there was one less” (Pitcher 151). An obvious reference to their parents’ hurtful rejection of the siblings’ needs after Rose’s death, the story leads Jamie to present Jas with a gift of a brown, fluffy, tattered bear (“I pulled his eyes off and everything” (221)), and he is rewarded with a rare smile as a result. That the bear is already damaged can itself be seen as a means of acknowledging and domesticating loss. After all, the displacement of physical injuries onto a toy helps, in Higonnet’s words, to “bring the experience of destruction close to a child’s world, while it diminishes its impact” (“War Games” 8), perhaps even suggesting that “deconstruction may be a first step toward reconstruction” (“Time Out” 163). From the last section of the novel—a first-person narration, which, unlike the earlier chapters, is focalized through Jas—we learn that another toy, a walkietalkie, allows Jas to negotiate her needs in relation to those of others and to regain some control over her own narrative in the wake of the trauma of her twin sister’s death: “soon I was speaking to Rose for an hour a night as if we were still young, hiding under duvets either side of a wall, giggling into walkie-talkies in the darkness” (Pitcher 222). Viewed from this perspective, the walkie-talkie, or a “half broken two-way toy radio” (222), becomes what D. W. Winnicott would call a “transitional object”—even though Winnicott’s interest lies in the use of special objects by children in general, not just those who have experienced trauma (1951/53; see also Kuznets 1994)— that comes to represent Rose as well as herself to Jas. It is vital that this particular object is transformed by its symbolic significance in relation to unresolved trauma; it has provided what Marie Luise Kohlke terms a “talking-to-oneself-as-Other cure” (58). At the same time, the girl’s conversations with her dead twin by means of a toy radio typify only one transitional stage of psychological healing, with her leaving of the walkie-talkie on Rose’s grave, and a final reassertion of an independent sense of identity on the way back from the cemetery (“in a shop window … I recognise the pink-haired girl staring back at me. I whisper I am Jasmine before walking home” (Pitcher 226)), epitomizing a significant step toward recovery. If Jamie’s gift to Jas marks the beginning of the surviving twin’s recovery, it is also after experiencing an empathetic response from Jamie that the children’s father can move on to the phase of working through the pain of losing Rose. Jamie’s freshly acquired understanding of his father’s compulsive reliving of trauma—a compulsion that is in line with what Dominick LaCapra calls a “fidelity to trauma,” or the tendency of the traumatized subject to sacralize trauma and become consumed by commemoration of it (22, 144–146)—allows the two of them to draw strength from each other on the day that they have to bury the boy’s cat and that the father decides to finally scatter Rose’s ashes. In this way, too, Pitcher’s narrative makes clear

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that while forgetting is a necessary part of fending off trauma, remembering can also, somewhat paradoxically, enable a kind of forgetting: Jamie encourages his father to hold on to some of the ashes, which the older man then “put[s] … in his bedroom. Out of sight. But there if he needs it, which he will on the really sad days like [the anniversary of Rose’s death]” (Pitcher 205). Behind the family’s silences, there is now a valuable lesson about the importance of empathizing with the suffering of others: “When we finished our tea,” Jamie says, “we just sort of stared at each other. Something big had happened to us that morning … And even though my tummy ached and my heart ached and my throat ached and the tears kept falling, I knew that the change wasn’t all bad. That something good had happened too” (205). The creation of these empathetic bonds carries in itself the possibility of healing and reconciliation while pointing toward an ethical movement away from the self as taking one through and beyond the often unspeakable moments of terror. Pitcher’s alternative to reconstituting normality through verbalizing one’s repressed experience of trauma contrasts with Bruton’s, however. In We Can Be Heroes, the process of working through trauma is, much like for LaCapra, an “articulatory practice” (21–22), as it relies on Ben’s transformation of traumatic memories—his own and others’—into narrative ones. Like the young protagonists of My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece, Ben starts out as a wounded figure compulsively repeating the terroristic moment that he cannot fully recall, in this case through his cartoon drawings; he even re-enacts a fantasy reversal of the 9/11 events by drawing a series of thumb-flick cartoons backwards (“so you saw the toppling towers gradually rebuild themselves” (Bruton 34)), which in itself has been a recurring motif in post-9/11 writing for adults (see Randall 2011; Gibbs 2014). But unlike Pitcher’s protagonists, Ben keeps looking to narratives as a means of overcoming trauma, and his quest to learn more about the father he can hardly remember eventually makes it possible for both his grandparents to put their painful family story into words. And whereas the silences of the newly reconnected family in My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece—including Jamie’s father’s conscious effort, described in its final pages, not to speak ill of Sunya or stop Jamie from spending time with her—show one type of trauma-dealing functionality, Bruton’s text closes with a further demonstration of a narrative’s capacity to both mediate and minimize the effects of terroristic violence. Indeed, the resolution of We Can Be Heroes shows that Ben has collected so many stories about his father that he is finally able to stop thinking of him as a “stick man falling out of a tower,” and it is significant that this is largely thanks to the boy opening himself up to the other, here exemplified by Priti, who first urged him to gather family recollections in a memory box. Ben now sees his father through the eyes of others, as a “smiling man playing football with a little boy on his shoulders” (Bruton 465), an image that, for him, clearly holds a regenerative power. The image can nonetheless remind the reader of the carefree joys of play—be it children’s or intergenerational—that might be lost as a result of terroristic violence.

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Refugees from Childhood The issue of what is lost or suspended in the contemporary child’s everyday experience in the aftermath of terror has also been raised by children’s novelists with regard to the trauma-like effects of the recent wars around terror on those affected by or engaged in these conflicts. Sumia Sukkar’s The Boy from Aleppo Who Painted the War (2013), Elizabeth Laird’s Welcome to Nowhere (2017), and Pooja Puri’s The Jungle (2017) stage the effects of terror on their non-Western child characters in war-torn cities and bleak refugee camps, showing how comfortable domestic routines are wrecked and social and familial structures are tested when the experience of war and dislocation begins to define individuals, communities, and nations. Sukkar’s and Laird’s novels present the Syrian conflict through the eyes of Adam, a 14-year-old boy with Asperger’s syndrome who grounds himself by translating his own and other people’s feelings, moods, and intentions into paintings, and Omar, a 12-year-old with entrepreneurial ambitions who is profoundly uninterested in politics, respectively. While both novels follow the protagonists and their families as they move through Syria, struggling to escape violence, the second part of Welcome to Nowhere sees Omar’s family flee their homeland altogether and seek refuge in a Jordanian camp where “nothing felt the same. [They] were at the bottom of the heap … Nobody saw [them] as real people, who had had lives. [They] were just … refugees” (205). The characters in The Jungle are similarly displaced and dehumanized, but most of the children in its fictionalized Calais camp are unaccompanied, and Mico, the main protagonist, finds himself slowly forgetting his family (but not the violence that he left behind) and navigating this inhospitable environment with the help of a new family unit that comprises himself, Hassan, and Sy(ed), two older boys from Syria and Afghanistan respectively. All three novels establish the intimacy of and trust in family, only to then put those close relations, and keep the protagonists’ childhoods, in suspension. While charting the horrifying violent acts perpetrated upon civilians since the onset of the Syrian conflict in 2011, Sukkar’s and Laird’s novels are notably concerned more with each family’s attempts to come to terms with the new normality of life in the post-terror city than they are with the political realities of Assad’s Syria. In both stories, the protagonists are repeatedly plunged into situations of terroristic violence, and yet these texts can be read as undoing the compression of time represented by every bomb explosion and all the sudden deaths or injuries through looking at the slow processes of family breakdown. The reader is thus taken beyond moments of terror, which accumulate day by day, to their material impact, or Adam’s and Omar’s separation from family members, memories of their homeland, and their former identities. In Sukkar and in Laird, the writing brings these impacts to focus awareness through registering the protagonists’ traumatized confusion over their altered worlds, the effect of “lur[ing] readers into uncomfortable or alien material” achieved in part through drawing them into the difficulty of

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articulating and comprehending traumatic shock after a terror event (Vickroy 3). Indeed, these events are at once familiar and alien, reminding the young characters of the numerous images of staged disaster in popular culture: the bombed city of Aleppo looks to Adam as though “Godzilla attacked it” (Sukkar 33), whereas for Omar the fighting in Daraa “didn’t seem quite real. There were times when it was almost as if [he]’d woken up in the middle of a computer game” (Laird 99). Readers then learn that, during one of his walks to school, Adam starts thinking about the new, film-like reality in a mistrustful way: “The streets have shadows that look like crooked superheroes. I can see the one-legged Batman following me from the corner of my eye. I don’t know if he is my enemy or friend. I keep a look out for him just in case” (Sukkar 48); the bombing of Omar’s house, as he experiences it, also looks scarily “like something out of a film. A cloud of choking brown dust was rolling along towards [him], like a weird sort of monster” (Laird 110). The less these characters are capable of distinguishing between reality and the media’s anticipations of disaster imposing themselves on their imaginations, the more the terror and trauma inflicted on them begin to cause violent affects, from physical reactions such as vomiting and bed-wetting to psychological anguish and deterioration, all of which are, moreover, the case for young and old family members alike. At the same time, both novels link the images of war to a war of images. Sukkar does so by making evident the disjunction between witnessed and mediatized images in a time of extensive media broadcasting (whenever there is electricity, the TV screen at Adam’s house “has breaking news on it and the same woman who has been telling [him] what has been going on down [his] street before [he] even know[s] about it comes on”), and Laird’s by having its characters look to the Internet and the grapevine for voices excluded by government-controlled media (“It wasn’t easy to work out what was true and what wasn’t,” Omar says, “There was no point in watching the news on TV either, unless … you wanted to listen to a lot of hot air and lies” (88)). Words themselves, the two boys find, are no longer reliable, as is clear in the instance of the word “travelling,” which in The Boy from Aleppo Who Painted the War comes to signify being taken or killed by the government forces (131), and in Welcome to Nowhere refers to the action of refugees fleeing violence as opposed to tourists seeking adventure (188). As the sight of blood, corpses, and body parts becomes commonplace for the young people in these books, they see their families, communities, and country disintegrate around them and feel daunted by their abrupt fall into adulthood. Adam is petrified “watching [his] family fall one by one” and realizing that while “[he] thought that [he] would be the one who would always need help … now [he is] on the other side of the table and [he does]n’t know how to deal with things” (Sukkar 67). Relatedly, Omar resents the fact that his whole family relies on him for survival in the Za’atari camp: “I felt like the dogsbody, fetching and carrying all day long. It was, ‘Omar, go and fetch some water … Omar, get over to the bread queue before it gets too long … Omar, they’ve

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given out vouchers for buckets. Go and pick ours up …’ Omar this, Omar that, Omar the next thing” (Laird 220). Like Laird’s Welcome to Nowhere, Puri’s The Jungle is sensitive to what Philip Nel has described as the “effects of physical and emotional displacement on those who have been othered geographically or culturally,” as tracked by the words “migrants” and “refugees” (358). The former word, while historically referring to migratory populations figured as less than human (Gálvez 168), might “no longer in itself [seem] a dehumanizing term” (Nel 358), especially since in the modern world Westerners, too, become “nomads migrating across a system that is too vast to be [their] own” (Chambers 14). However, refugees have continuously been argued—including by those who believe that the openness of Western borders makes their countries particularly vulnerable to terrorist attacks—to constitute a very real threat to other nations’ security, a narrative cited to justify the everstricter asylum application controls introduced by successive British governments from 2003 onward as a sign that refugees are precisely not those with whom the public should feel any obligation to live (see, for instance, Ware 110). Both Laird and Puri raise questions about how the deep paranoia deriving from the wars on terror might be linked to the strong expressions of xenophobia and racist hatred on the part of those living in fear of terroristic violence, and the two authors set these questions against the fears of young refugees themselves. Faced with the prospect of leaving the Jordanian camp and traveling to England so that their little sister could undergo heart surgery, Omar’s disabled older brother Musa worries that “in England [they]’d just be a bunch of refugees, living on charity” and asks their mother, “You know what the British say about Arabs and Muslims? They think we’re all crazy terrorists” (Laird 315). In The Jungle, some of the boys are petrified with fear because of rumors “[o]f a group wandering the streets [of a nearby town] at night. Men with time to kill and more anger than was good for them … looking to hunt … Boys, men, they weren’t picky; if you were from the camp, you were enough” (53). Fences around the camps might be shutting out the world of war and hate, but they are also shutting these children in places linked to experiences of cold, hunger, illness, violence, boredom, and desperation, thereby compromising their wellbeing even further, as well as depriving them of the potential for self-determination (Puri 69–70; Laird 213). Paradoxically, the very processes through which normative power operates in both stories are extremities of identifying the refugee with the inhuman (“I am an old man, not an animal,” the oldest resident of the camp says to Mico. “That’s not what the newspapers say,” the boy answers. “Don’t you know what they call this place?” (Puri 21)), and of excluding the image of the refugee from the public realm of appearance altogether (“We’re overflow. Stuck in this junk heap. That’s why they never give us a second look. We might as well be invisible” (134)). By rendering visible the invisible population of refugees, the novel thus stakes out a clear ethical territory: the problem of human vulnerability being articulated differently through “variable norms of recognition”

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(Butler, Precarious Life 43), and the need to develop “appropriate care policies as the only way to achieve ethical efficiency and lead [vulnerable populations] beyond trauma” (Ganteau, “Vulnerable” 100). That this politics of care is not to be found in the West’s agenda for managing the refugee camps in these novels is obvious from the apparent disinterest of “foreign bigwigs,” who in Welcome to Nowhere only drive through Za’atari camp in their expensive cars (221), and from the actions taken by the authorities in The Jungle after the repeated deaths of migrants trying to steal onto the trains traveling across the English Channel being limited to erecting further barriers (59–60). In addition, Puri’s book points toward the moral indifference of the media imagery of the camp as coupled with the media’s role in the misrepresentation—and derealization—of refugee suffering when it shows a Western journalist asking Mico and a newly arrived girl he has befriended, Leila, to pretend to be a drowned refugee’s family in a paid interview, which the two children unanimously decline to give (104–105). If certain lives and deaths in Sukkar’s, Laird’s, and Puri’s novels either remain unrepresented or come to be represented in ways that enable their capture by dominant political narratives, it is also important to note the losses that their characters are unable to mourn. In all three books, affective responses to loss such as open grief and outrage are highly regulated by the realities of war and the regimes of power. In The Boy from Aleppo Who Painted the War, for instance, Adam’s brother Isa’s funeral ends in bloodshed after a group of Assad’s soldiers attacks the mourners; in Welcome to Nowhere, the family’s confinement to the camp makes it impossible for them to properly mourn the death of Omar’s father (“If Baba had died in Syria, we’d have known what to do. There would have been ceremonies and prayers … Here, in this strange, prison-like place, none of that could happen. People barely had time to comment before the next person lost a husband or father, mother or sister” (283)); in The Jungle, there is no funeral for Razi, an older boy that Mico knew who fell to his death while attempting to jump on to a Eurotunnel train, and a police officer tramples into the ground the flowers that Mico collects to pay his respects to Razi (39–40). The differential distribution of public mourning, which functions by drawing a line “between those populations on whom [Western] life and existence depend, and those populations who represent a direct threat to [Western] life and existence” (Butler, Frames 42), is compounded under contemporary conditions of war, with the failure to be able to grieve openly putting a further strain on the already traumatized young characters. To grieve then becomes to work against the forces of erasure, as illustrated in The Jungle when Mico picks up the flowers that were the least damaged by the police officer and lays them across the sea later that night (“Nobody had told him that in order to live, he’d have to give up everything he loved,” Mico thinks to himself. “Perhaps that was why he wanted to send Razi off properly. Goodbyes were important. They were a way of remembering” (41)). To grieve can also be understood, in Butler’s words, as the “slow

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process by which we develop a point of identification with suffering itself,” and a preoccupation with grief can be transformed into a consideration of a shared condition of vulnerability (Precarious Life 30); indeed, after Mico confronts his grief and tells Leila and her sister Aysha about the terrors of losing his sister in a rebel attack in Kenya, he “felt the tightness in his chest loosen a little … It was as if, in that moment, they had all become bound by the same thread. Later, he would remember that feeling. The realisation that nothing joined humans so much as pain” (Puri 102). But to stay with the disorientation of loss, or to experience a dislocation of safety again and again after trying to seek a resolution for one’s grief by protecting others from the kinds of violence one has suffered, may well leave traumatized subjects feeling powerless and incapable of resistance. Such feelings may then result in a deterioration in family and community structures, as represented by these texts. For the three writers here, the malfunction of family life is attended by disruptions of the domestic order, which often manifest themselves in discarded opportunities for play; on the other hand, play also functions as a form of escape from the burdens of despair, anguish, and anger about living in these degraded circumstances, as well as a sign of a self who is able to go on hoping for a better future. At least initially, then, the family games in these books provide temporary relief from the horrors and uncertainties of Adam’s, Omar’s, and Mico’s new realities. In an early scene from The Boy from Aleppo Who Painted the War, Adam is delighted when his father offers to play games with him, and after they are joined by his brothers and sister, with the whole family playing cards and having tea together, he feels that he can “almost forget about the bombing” (44). In another passage, Adam’s family are shown playing ball games on a short visit to the seaside, and the boy can momentarily dismiss from his mind the war raging back home, but on their return to Aleppo “a dark square rests on [his] heart, pushing it down” (65). A similar moment of family intimacy is presented in Welcome to Nowhere, in which Omar’s family—having already fled their home in Bosra, and then their grandmother’s house in Daraa, for a farming village—are enjoying a summer picnic during which the children are chasing each other and playing football: “[T]here was something golden about that afternoon,” Omar says. “I felt—I don’t know why—a rush of love for all my family, and … looking round at all of them, it was as if I was noticing things I’d never noticed before” (157). That the togetherness offered by play can provide a useful, if often illusory, safety net for a traumatized child still experiencing conflict is also true for The Jungle’s Mico, for whom getting together with Hassan and Sy for games such as dominoes, cards, or carrom in their shared tent makes it possible to “forget the world that was waiting outside to swallow him up” (61). These and similar episodes ensure that readers are aware of the depth of the bonds that are endangered by the violent conflicts these families are trying to escape. At the same time, if we accept Levinas’s assertion, made in Totality and Infinity (1961/1991), that

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the child’s introduction to ethical responsibility for the other comes through family, then the intimacies thus constructed take on an ethical meaning. To assert the ethical importance of familial intimacies is not to say that the family bonds referred to in such passages stand out symbolically against the surrounding violence (and counter-violence) throughout these novels. These devotions and intimacies are nowhere to be found, for instance, in the scene in The Boy from Aleppo Who Painted the War in which Adam and his sister, Yasmine, ask their father to play a board game with them, but the now mentally unstable and physically deteriorating Baba becomes confused by their questions and acts violently towards the boy, hurting Adam’s hand (91); that the experience of war is starting to define this family is also evident when Adam hears his older brothers talking about the turbulent political atmosphere in Syria in voices that “sound like bullets,” their words causing him physical pain (56). Welcome to Nowhere, too, offers a portrait of a “family … falling apart” during their first few weeks in the refugee camp (220), and with his parents and older brother crippled by feelings of pity, anger, and pain, Omar is left to take care of other family members while looking on enviously as his six-year-old brother Fuad roams around the camp with other young children. As The Jungle progresses, Puri presents a similarly fractured family: increasingly desperate and bitterly disillusioned with the French police, lawyers, and authorities, Hassan and Sy quarrel over the government’s response to the refugees’ plight and start to avoid each other; Mico now finds the atmosphere in their tent to be “hot as a rocket, fully charged and ready to explode” (60), and learns that Sy sold the football with which they all used to play (67–68), a move that could be seen as foreshadowing Sy’s subsequent readiness to betray the other boys’ trust. Yet the ethical significance of the family, according to Levinas, lies in the “infinity of responsibility” for the other that emerges primarily from one’s relations to family members (Totality 244). For Levinas, family is not just a “step toward the anonymous universality of the State”; it “[i]dentifies itself outside of the state,” which reduces the other to the same, and allows one’s own subjectivity to be “for others” (Totality 306, 46; Otherwise Than Being 107). Levinas thus posits a model of a sociality that arises from filiality. That is what the characters in Sukkar’s, Laird’s, and Puri’s novels ultimately gain from the intimacy of the family: an infinite world of possibility that comes with responsibility for others’ lives and often involves what Higonnet reminds us are “peaceful games” (“War Games” 13). Crucial here are the possibilities inherent in ethical practices such as Adam’s recording of, or bearing witness to, the lives and deaths that he sees (“One day, when the war finishes, I’ll have my paintings to show people what was really going on. My paintings don’t lie” (Sukkar 191)) and his family’s efforts to look out for their neighbors, and, later, for the people they meet on their journey from Aleppo to Damascus. Omar’s new role as the “big daddy of the Hooligans, a bunch of fatherless brats” running wild in the camp and Musa’s storytelling sessions for these children (Laird 264, 325), as well as Mico’s

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continued attempts to help the most vulnerable inhabitants of the Jungle and Hassan’s plans for a little theatre for the camp’s younger children (Puri 212), suggest a similar ethic of care. But even as their young characters attempt to act as moral agents, these novels identify not just the necessity for but also the difficulty of ethics. Butler reminds us that assuming responsibility for the life of the other is a hard task “while undergoing a felt sense of precarity” (“Precarious Life” 141), and some of the claims that others make upon these characters prompt their efforts to secure for themselves the distance that allows them to survive the endemic violence and recursive traumas of their situations. This is the case with Adam’s family, who stand by and watch as a woman and a child are running down their street pursued by armed men, and who fail to react when another young woman sees them looking out of the window as she is running past their house a few minutes later: “None of us offers to help; the window is like a barrier. We are watching her like it is a movie. She pulls her dress up and runs away. I feel bad after she runs away. We could have helped, but we all stood and watched” (Sukkar 89–90). Likewise, Sy from The Jungle leaves a frightened Leila behind when a human rights protest ends in a stampede (142–143), and Omar in Welcome to Nowhere feels overwhelmed when an unruly boy’s mother tries to explain his behavior to him: “He’s been out of control since they killed his father right in front of him. They …’ I didn’t want to hear. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said hurriedly, and looked round for my family” (207). Readers’ attention, then, is directed toward just how difficult it is to respond to the suffering of others, as they, too, “become somehow implicated in lives that are clearly not the same as [their] own” (“Precarious Life” 149). These novels thus supply the ideals toward which young people are solicited to struggle, such as an affirmation of interdependency, which involve a passage through the array of violent forms by means of which terror is inflicted. With reading itself established, in Derek Attridge’s (2016) apt phrase, as an “ethical event” (see also Attridge 2004/2017, esp. 84–86; Ganteau 2015), it is the powers of creativity in general that make ethical encounters possible in the three novels. Whether it is the paintings by Adam in The Boy from Aleppo Who Painted the War, who insists that the impact of the war is “beyond words” and who draws to bring others closer to “see[ing] it with their own eyes” (172), or Leila’s paintings in The Jungle, which she intends to be “for everyone” and “real enough” to allow the camp to be remembered “exactly as it was” (79, 191), or else Omar’s and Musa’s stories in Welcome to Nowhere, which lead the little Hooligans to believe that they can “do great deeds in the world” (326), these texts can be seen to model the restorative and integrative functions of creativity; here, art operates as an ethical solicitation to recognize the viewpoint of the other. As we consider the transformative possibilities generated by such practices, we will keep in mind how children’s novels about recovery from traumas caused by terror can also transform the child reader’s mental and moral landscape.

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A Game of Soldiers The impact of terrorism and counter-terrorism upon the preoccupations of children is also addressed in Kerry Drewery’s A Brighter Fear (2012), David Massey’s Torn (2013), and Phil Earle’s Heroic (2013). The three novels are focused through adolescent protagonists caught up in or participating in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and register these young people’s reactions to the violations of childhood that they witness. Set in Iraq during the early stages of its invasion, A Brighter Fear tells the story of Lina, a teenage girl who gives us an account of growing up in US-occupied Baghdad in which, “where the children used to play, [there were] now … piles of soil and dust in rows,” and where “trigger-happy soldiers … looked like school children” (210, 174). Torn and Heroic allow a glimpse into the West’s military decisions and strategic considerations in the current Afghan conflict: the former adopts the perspective of Ellie, a young medic learning to cope with the exigencies of war on her first tour of duty, whereas the latter alternates between the viewpoints of Jammy, a soldier in his late teens who, together with his best friend Tommo, is also on his first tour of duty, and Sonny, Jammy’s younger brother who is shown trying to come to terms first with his brother’s absence, and then with his war-scarred presence back in England. In examining questions of how terror is experienced here by the different parties directly involved in the wars against it, and of how its moments of violent rupture prove difficult to endure for its perpetrators, a matter of considerable interest will again be the after-effects of terrorist traumas on contemporary childhoods. On the one hand, the teenage characters in these books have clearly been deprived of the normal preoccupations of adolescence: Lina wishes she could go to classes, see her friends, and do “[n]ormal, everyday, ordinary things” instead of learning “what gun makes what kind of noise,” “what IED and RPG stood for,” or “what the stripes on soldiers’ uniforms meant” (Drewery 97–98); and Ellie finds it “hard seeing what [Western] bombs have done” to civilians’ lives and worries when her fellow soldiers, many of whom joined the army straight out of school, turn the daily experiences of war into jokes (“the more extrovert you are, the more you internalize the bad stuff. In training they said guys like [that] go home and get hit by post-traumatic stress”) (Massey 16, 34). Relatedly, in Heroic we are told that Jammy and Sonny’s town “had been ordinary,” but “everything changed when the Twin Towers came down,” and “[s]uddenly, there were more people in uniform than ever … on the estate: flyering, persuading, filling shaven heads full of dreams” (8, 9). What now gives the townspeople a sense of larger purpose are the numerous funeral parades for young soldiers killed in action, but later in the novel Sonny realizes, while buying himself a second-hand suit for when Tommo’s body is brought back from the war zone, that this was the “kind of kit you went to your prom in. That’s what kids [his] age were doing, not burying one of their best mates” (Earle 136). On the other hand,

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the characters in these novels are equally powerfully affected by cases of younger children being, to use Lisa Sainsbury’s words, “denied childness” (79; see also McMahan 2007), cases that depend for their power on the incongruity between innocence and experience, children’s play and terror. Indeed, the wars around terror are presented in these novels as wars on childhood, since we see children being injured, killed, or themselves acting as frontline fighters as a result of such conflicts. These children are offered as victims (or, in the case of the child soldier, as what Sainsbury describes as the “ultimate victim-perpetrator” (71)) whose rights to learn and play have been taken away from them, and whose quests for stability or redemption are most likely deferred indefinitely (Walsh 192). It is worth noting that the three writers make the figure of the child soldier embody the contaminating effects of terror more generally, as they are not interested in the extent to which children might incorporate extremist ideology when forcibly drawn into the war machine. Rather, the image of a child with a gun arising in their works has very much the same shock value as that used by UNICEF and other international child protection agencies to highlight the problem of child recruitment by terrorist groups (see, for instance, Rosen 2005); such images are of particular interest insofar as they bear on other characters’ perspectives on the war. In A Brighter Fear, Lina’s father, Joe, a local interpreter for the US troops occupying Baghdad, is killed in an exchange of fire between the American soldiers and a young boy with a “full-sized gun, not a toy,” who is only “playing at being a soldier” (67). Ironically, this happens mere moments after one of the soldiers “showed [Joe] a photo of his little brother playing in the Texan desert with a toy rifle” while longing to be a soldier himself (65), and later on, Lina is thinking of how modern-day American soldiers have “made their nationality and their patriotism seep down their arms to their hands holding their weapons and their fingers resting on their triggers,” the word “terrorism” now “draw[ing] breath deeper and quicker than any four-letter word could” (74). On the other side of the conflict, Torn’s Ellie finds that child soldiers stir up memories of her younger brother, which adds to her confusion about “this stupid war [in which] nothing is simple, nothing is black and white” (161), while Jammy in Heroic is unable to shoot at a “a kid, [his] age, [his] height, a shaking pistol in his hand and two semi-automatic rifles slung across his back” because he reminds him of a local boy about whose death he feels guilty (264), the moment of hesitation resulting in Tommo’s death. Such episodes tacitly acknowledge the influence of the conventional Western framing of child combatants as the victims rather than perpetrators of violence in what Susan Shepler has termed “discourses of abnegated responsibility” (199; see also Whitehead 2011). And while the Western soldiers in Massey’s and Earle’s novels are concerned with restoring the opportunities for innocent play to the vulnerable children around them as part of a wider campaign to secure the local people’s trust, these efforts only end up putting the children in even greater danger, as when Jammy and his

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fellow soldiers decide to teach the local boys some football tricks, with Jammy bringing them a brand new ball from the camp (“Fills me up to see them acting like they should be,” one of the more experienced soldiers tells him after a game kicks off, “It’s them who misses out in all this mess … But all it takes is one pair of eyes to notice, and it could all get messy” (Earle 114)), only to witness a little boy being blown apart a few weeks later by a bomb hidden in the football by Afghan terrorists. Ellie’s reflection on the Young Martyrs, a group of ragged orphaned children fighting both the Taliban and Western forces with the use of a Taliban arms cache that they have discovered in a hidden mountain cave, reveals a similar complicity with Western narratives of child soldiers’ victimhood: when one of the Martyrs, Husna, exhibits an adult-like patience while guiding the young medic’s team through the mountains, she recognizes that “Kids out here know how to wait. Watching those big, brown eyes I struggle to imagine how he’ll ever come to terms with what he’s been through” (Massey 175). But to unequivocally position the Young Martyrs—who have taken their name in what appears at least partly to be a reference to militant martyrdom as underlain by a “desire to be part of the world, to be recognised as having a right to one’s identity” (Khosrokhavar 46)—as innocent, traumatized victims is to refuse them agency and insight in the first place, potentially excluding them from all political activity, including post-war processes of reconstruction. It is also in line with the stereotypes of the child soldier as providing a “literary focus for representing non-Western trauma” and with the “tendency in trauma discourse to collapse the traumatised subject into the victim” (Whitehead 262, 263). The playing down of responsibility is the case too with the (only slightly older) rank-and-file Western soldiers, who are shown in these texts to be subject to the demands of an oppressive military culture. In all three stories, the promises of a better life uttered by the occupying soldiers remain curiously unspecific, with the goal of winning the “hearts and minds” of the local communities (or, as Jammy’s superior would have it, of charming the locals with “tits and teeth” (Earle 42)) easily undermined by the alienating behavior of commanding officers, since those higher up in the chain of command prioritize armed victories over the extremists above ensuring the safety of the civilians, working on the basis of the rule that the “end justifies the means” (Massey 157). Thus, if the books register the young soldiers’ need for the “goodness promised by political ideology” (Sainsbury 71), they also show that goodness being repeatedly denied to them in reality. In Heroic, for example, being able to connect to Afghan children through football, Jammy feels that he is “finally making a difference”: “If this was what being a soldier meant,” he thinks, “then maybe I could hack it after all” (111). Later, however, “with the events of the bombing looped in [his] head,” he finds himself telling the army doctor that the little boy’s death “reminds [him] why we’re here. Sharpens the resolve … There’s so much still to do” while realizing that he is, in effect, telling lies (242). Ellie has a

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similarly violent reaction to a child’s death in Massey’s Torn; she deems the “contrast between innocence and the wild reality of war” to be “sickening” (69), and even though she complies with a senior officer’s request to win the trust of an Afghan boy found with an AK-47 (and, to that end, promises to play football with him), we also see her wondering “if they’ll even hear about [children dying in the war] on the news back home,” and doubting that this is the case (85). A significant part of the trauma that these young soldiers are seen to endure derives from the “feeling of having been somehow cheated” of a heroic “experience of the war” (Gibbs 172). That they are denied this experience of “proving their worth” (Drewery 56), of “play[ing] the hero” (Earle 263), of “mak[ing] a difference” (Massey 221)—an experience that many of them appear to expect, in Alan Gibbs’s words, “as a rite of passage” (172)—compounds the trauma of perpetrator guilt that follows when their actions lead to the deaths of civilians. In parallel with these young recruits’ loss of confidence in what is advertised as the West’s “virtuous militancy” (Houen, “Reckoning Sacrifice” 574), the civilians in these texts are shown to question the rightness of the actions and motives of foreign military operating in their countries: “[S]o much had been promised for our futures: freedom, democracy, a better life,” reflects Drewery’s Lina (139), yet she herself no longer believes that Western soldiers “have any answers for [the Iraqi people]” or that “they know what to do” (170); Heroic’s soldiers who attempt to collect intelligence about the drugs trafficked by the Taliban are asked by the locals why they “didn’t … concentrate on rebuilding houses flattened by [their] air strikes” or “[b]ring medicine for the kids hit by [their] shrapnel” (43); in Torn we see Hammed, a local interpreter, insist that “Afghan people have right to know if coalition planes are killing families. Only way to win war here is with truth—no hiding” (158). Readers are thus encouraged to work thoughtfully and critically to pull together Western and non-Western perspectives on the wars on terror rather than unquestioningly support these wars and the policies that attend them. Viewed in this light, A Brighter Fear, Torn, and Heroic provide an understanding of what is at stake for the different parties in the wars around terror. Without sidestepping the suffering and damage that the terrorist aims to inflict, these texts raise important questions about the presence of Western armed forces in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. It is true that certain instances of counter-terrorist violence have been co-opted here into the state discourse on just (or justified) wars, as when the American military’s drone killings of Afghan civilians turn out to have been orchestrated by a renegade Afghan security forces unit controlled by a corrupt Afghan minister, who is removed from office in the last section of Torn, showing Afghanistan as continuously reliant for its stability on external intervention and aid. It is also true that in many cases non-Western traumas resulting from Western foreign policies are rewritten here as traumas of the (soldier) perpetrators. However, the acts of narrativizing painful memories (whether through the external frame of memoir in A Brighter Fear or the mode of

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confession as employed by soldiers in all three texts), and memorializing the histories of loss (in the form of monumental official representation such as Heroic’s statue of soldiers, which Jammy drives into after being repeatedly hailed as a war hero while reeling from the war’s attendant terrors on his return home, or of genealogical, unofficial remembrance like the marking of civilians’ roadside graves with license plates, palm leaves, and pieces of cardboard that list the number and sex of adult and child victims so that their families could identify them (Drewery 211)), can be seen to have a role in the traumatized subjects’ ongoing quest to take meaning into their own hands. These novels revolve around the stories told by their fictional survivors of wars around terror, often to listeners from across the cultural and political divides in the post-9/11 world, and their polyphonic effects might be read as instances of writing back to what the prevalent rhetoric in the West dictates about terrorism and counter-terrorism. The novels’ repeated association of terror, soldiering, and suspended or disrupted childhoods ultimately attests to the precarious character of a child’s life in the post-9/11 context and turns the reader’s gaze to the human cost of terror-related conflicts. What happens to children in the texts considered in this chapter serves to underscore their increased vulnerability in an age of terror. In these recent novels, children’s writers have variously explored the effects of terrorism, and especially the relationship between trauma and matters of openness, responsibility, imagination, and cooperation. By narrating hardship and pain, but also recovery and resistance, these texts envision a better future for the futureless, yet prompt us to bear witness to both their past and present. Their engagements with terrorism and play offer ways of working through and thinking beyond terror while encouraging a more critical response to its operations and repercussions. Direct accounts from either the families of terrorism’s victims or participants in the wars linked to terror are often missing from narratives of counter-terrorism, but writing for children can become an aesthetic means of investigating the experience of terror, and of representing complex socio-political and ethical issues to a young audience. Together, such works inscribe channels for listening across cultures and offer an ethical means for moving into desirable futures, but not until they register the shocks and disruptions in contemporary global childhoods that terror and its wars inflict. These texts not only confront the young reader with the necessity of ethical responsiveness, but also dramatize the resistant power of the (ethically) speaking voice, inviting some critical and creative attention in readers who might themselves consider how the narrative or image bears on the ethical relations that it calls for and voices.

Works Cited Agnew, Kate, and Geoff Fox. Children at War: From the First World War to the Gulf. Continuum, 2001.

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Attridge, Derek. “The Literary Work as Ethical Event.” Theory Matters: The Place of Theory in Literary and Cultural Studies Today, edited by Martin Middeke and Christoph Reinfandt, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 219–232. Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. 2004. Routledge, 2017. Boxall, Peter. Twenty-First Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2013. Bruton, Catherine. We Can Be Heroes. Egmont, 2011. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?Verso, 2009. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2004. Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 26, no. 2, 2012, pp. 134–151. Chambers, Iain. Migrancy, Culture, Identity. Routledge, 1994. Doucet, Lyse. “No Place to Hide for Children of War in Gaza and Syria.” BBC.co. uk, 28 July2014, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-28513709. Accessed 18 Oct. 2018. Drewery, Kerry. A Brighter Fear. HarperCollins Children’s Books, 2012. Earle, Phil. Heroic. Penguin Books, 2013. Enfield, Lizzie. “How Children Use Play to Make Sense of Terrorism.” The Guardian, 16July 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jul/16/how-chil dren-use-play-to-make-sense-of-terrorism. Accessed 18 Oct. 2018. Gálvez, Alyshia. “Migration.” Keywords for American Cultural Studies. 2nd ed., edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, New York University Press, 2014, pp. 168–171. Ganteau, Jean-Michel. The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Fiction. Routledge, 2015. Ganteau, Jean-Michel. “Vulnerable Form and Traumatic Vulnerability: Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs.” Contemporary Trauma Narratives: Liminality and the Ethics of Form, edited by Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega, Routledge, 2014, pp. 89–103. Ganteau, Jean-Michel, and Susana Onega. “Introduction. Performing the Void: Liminality and the Ethics of Form in Contemporary Trauma Narratives.” Contemporary Trauma Narratives: Liminality and the Ethics of Form, edited by Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega, Routledge, 2014, pp. 1–18. Gibbs, Alan. Contemporary American Trauma Narratives. Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Gray, Richard. After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Higonnet, Margaret R. “Time Out: Trauma and Play in Johnny Tremain and Alan and Naomi.” Children’s Literature, vol. 33, 2005, pp. 150–170. Higonnet, Margaret R. “War Games.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 22, no. 1, 1998, pp. 1–17. Higonnet, Margaret R. “War Toys: Breaking and Remaking in Great War Narratives.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 31, no. 2, 2007, pp. 116–131. Houen, Alex. “Reckoning Sacrifice in ‘War on Terror’ Literature.” American Literary History, vol. 28, no. 3, 2016, pp. 574–595. Houen, Alex. Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson. Oxford University Press, 2002. Khosrokhavar, Farhad. Suicide Bombers: Allah’s New Martyrs. Pluto Press, 2005. Kohlke, Marie-Luise. “Witnessing without Witnesses: Atwood’s Oryx and Crake as Limit-Case of Fictional Testimony.” Contemporary Trauma Narratives: Liminality

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and the Ethics of Form, edited by Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega, Routledge, 2014, pp. 53–69. Kuznets, Lois R. When Toys Come Alive: Narratives of Animation, Metamorphosis, and Development. Yale University Press, 1994. LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Laird, Elizabeth. Welcome to Nowhere. Macmillan Children’s Books, 2017. Lampert, Jo. Children’s Fiction about 9/11: Ethnic, National and Heroic Identities. Routledge, 2009. Lampert, Jo. “Tugging on Superman’s Cape: Heroic Identities in Children’s Literature Post 9/11.” Performing Educational Research: Theories, Methods and Practices, edited by Erica McWilliam, Susan Danby, and John Knight, Post Pressed, 2004, https://eprints.qut.edu.au/6261/1/6261.pdf. Accessed 1 July 2018. Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise Than Being, or, Beyond Essence. 1974. Translated by Alphonso Lingis, Kluwer Academic, 1991. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. 1961. Translated by Alphonso Lingis, Kluwer Academic, 1991. Massey, David. Torn. Chicken House, 2012. McHale, Brian, and Randall Stevenson. “Coda: 11 September 2001, New York: Two Y2Ks.” The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English, edited by Brian McHale and Randall Stevenson, Edinburgh University Press, 2006, pp. 273–278. McMahan, Jeff. “Child Soldiers: The Ethical Perspective.” La Strada International, 2007, https://www. files.ethz.ch/isn/45682/2007_Child_Soldiers_Ethical.pdf. Accessed 25 May 2017. Nel, Philip. “Introduction: Migration, Refugees, and Diaspora in Children’s Literature.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 4, 2018, pp. 357–362. Pitcher, Annabel. My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece. 2011. Indigo, 2013. Puri, Pooja. The Jungle. Ink Road, 2017. Randall, Martin. 9/11 and the Literature of Terror. Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Rosen, David M. Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism. Rutgers University Press, 2005. Sainsbury, Lisa. Ethics in British Children’s Literature: Unexamined Life. Bloomsbury, 2013. Shepler, Susan. “The Rites of the Child: Global Discourses of Youth and Reintegrating Child Soldiers in Sierra Leone.” Journal of Human Rights, vol. 4, no. 2, 2005, pp. 197–211. Sukkar, Sumia. The Boy from Aleppo Who Painted the War. Eyewear Publishing, 2013. Vickroy, Laurie. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. University of Virginia Press, 2002. Walsh, John. “Coming of Age with an AK-47: Ahmadou Kourouma’s Allah n’est pas obligé.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 39, no. 1, 2008, pp. 185–197. Ware, Vron. “The White Fear Factor.” Terror and the Postcolonial: A Concise Companion, edited by Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, pp. 99–112.

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Whitehead, Anne. “Representing the Child Soldier: Trauma, Postcolonialism and Ethics in Delia Jarrett-Macauley’s Moses, Citizen and Me.” Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction, edited by Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau, Rodopi, 2011, pp. 241–264. Winnicott, D. W. “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena: A Study of the First Not-Me Possession.” 1951. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, vol. 34, 1953, pp. 89–97.

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The question of teaching “British values,” one of the headline issues after the 7/7 London bombings, brought into focus a felt need to recognize the factors that unite Britain’s multicultural, hybridized society rather than divide it into innocent citizens and potentially dangerous others. But while arguments were put forward that educators should take due account of alternative and complementary points of view, the reactionary policies of successive British governments were, in their operation and effects, divisive and rather opposed to the overall goal of a tolerant, multi-ethnic society (see Warmington et al. 2017; Grillo 2007; Hansen 2007; Fleras 2009; Gillborn 2008). In today’s Britain, the current of thought that declared the “failure” of multiculturalism as a doctrine that was supposed to push toward respect for ethnic difference colludes with Enoch Powell’s and Margaret Thatcher’s rhetoric of the “enemy within,” or the racialized “other” in “our” midst who must be identified, monitored, and either rejected or reintegrated (with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) moving forward with airing a full recitation of Powell’s notorious “rivers of blood” speech on its fiftieth anniversary despite widespread criticism (Sweney 2018; Badshah 2018)). These historical fears have not only been grafted onto contemporary Islamophobic narratives by the mainstream media (see, for example, O’Neill 2008), but can also be seen to underlie the responses of state agencies to the supposed ideological threat that the Muslim other poses to the British value system and way of life. This is a view that lies behind the 2014 “Trojan Horse” investigation into Birmingham schools over an alleged Islamist plot to introduce a more hard-line Muslim ethos into British life, which, according to the House of Commons Education Committee, revealed more problems with the Department for Education and with the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills than it did with actual radicalization and extremism within the schools (see also Awan 2014; Arthur 2015). The concept of failed multiculturalism and the “enemy within” rhetoric are also behind the subsequent regulations empowering local authorities to withhold state funding from nurseries and from primary and secondary schools that fail to promote British values or to challenge the extremist views of others. The 2015 Counter-Terrorism and Security Act betrays a

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similar disregard for children’s fundamental rights and freedoms, placing a statutory duty on public authorities—including schools, nurseries, and early years childcare providers—to prevent terrorism as part of their functions, something that they are supposed to ensure by identifying and reporting children who are at risk of being drawn into terrorist activities (see, for instance, O’Donnell 2016; Davies 2016). Insofar as writing for children can, increasingly, be seen as responding to issues directly relevant to young people growing up in modern Britain, it might be helpful to consider whether postcolonial and human rights discourses have acquired a particular significance in British children’s literature after 9/11 and 7/7, as a means of countering the renewed prominence of pernicious stereotypes of Muslims. Since modern forms of terrorism and counter-terrorism have frequently penetrated the world of children, and since acts of terroristic violence and the wars on terror have had a lasting influence on the imagination of children’s writers, this chapter considers how post-9/11 and 7/7 British children’s novels by Alan Gibbons, Muhammad Khan, Sam Hepburn, and Anna Perera address the limits in Western responses to terrorism and bear witness to the greater vulnerability of certain groups of people under the transformed social and political conditions of the new century. With a particular focus on how contemporary children’s fiction explores this heightened vulnerability in terms of suspended rights and weakened family and social structures following on from the events of 9/11 and 7/7 and their consequences, I look at how the exercise of the terror-stricken state’s power is shown in these novels to have the effect of exposing young Britons from targeted communities, racially and culturally conceptualized, to even greater violence. The writers discussed here ensure that young readers are made aware of the damaging impact on the foundations of British society of the new emergency measures developed by the state in the name of securing the nation against terror. By the same token, such writing encourages younger audiences to think critically about dominant discourses on the wars around terror rather than unquestioningly supporting the simplistic thinking that has accompanied them. The children’s novels that speak most eloquently on the proliferation of new laws, regulations, and measures that are associated with the attacks on America and Britain and with the subsequent “war on terror” are those that link the insecurity of the West confronted with the growth of Islamic extremism to contemporary fears and prejudices concerning the figure of the racial other. Since these terrorist attacks, we have seen the Muslim subject being, in the words of Peter Boxall, “scripted not as a high achieving member of a global community, but as an Islamic fundamentalist,” a real, physical security threat to the established order, or indeed a threat to Western identity itself (136). In Frames of War, Judith Butler refers to the “logic of self-defense” as what makes such populations appear as “‘threats’ to life as we know it” (43), leading to the development of the perspective according to which their lives are “not quite lives, not quite valuable, recognizable” (42–43; see also Butler 2004). Given its commitment to crossing cultural and

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ethnic divisions in a time of terror, contemporary children’s writing can thus be said to admit what Butler, following Emmanuel Levinas, views as the “‘faces’ of those against whom war is waged into public representation” (Precarious Life xviii, see also Levinas and Kearney 1986; Levinas 1961/ 1991). A postcolonial reading of these novels reveals what Andrew Shryock in his Islamophobia/Islamophilia has described as the resurgence of antiMuslim sentiment within contemporary Western culture to be embedded in neo-imperialist discourses that invoke a colonial set of ideas about the West’s others. With previous surges of Islamophobia within Britain, including, as Shryock reminds us, the period after the Rushdie affair of 1989 and the first Gulf War of 1990–91 (4; see also Pipes 2003; Falkenhayner 2014), the way the threatening figure of the terrorist is conjured up in the years following the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks to serve the political interests of the British state provides a significant recent example of the Orientalist logic being used as the cause of the introduction of repressive anti-terrorism legislation and surveillance procedures and the expansion of British military power. This chapter examines children’s novels that underscore the personal and familial suffering engendered by the construction of the Muslim subject as a figure of fear and terror and by the development of new emergency measures intended to protect British citizens from real and imagined threats coming from within and from outside the country. It shows that such texts use the present conflict of ideologies to confront specific moral and social questions. Its central assumption is that these novels may stand as powerful illustrations of the refashioning of traditional identities, and of the forging of newly politicized grounds of belonging, giving voice to the frustrations of British Muslim youth and recording the anxieties of a mainstream culture that relies on anti-Muslim paranoia narratives. From this perspective, they can be seen as dramatizing the problem of point of view by challenging the binary opposition of the West and non-West, Muslim and non-Muslim—or what Dominic Head has termed “new cultural tribalism”—that both the fundamentalist worldview and anti-terrorist discourse have encouraged (150). The undermining of simplistic dichotomies in these novels supplies a framework for moving beyond the “war on terror” rhetoric, which was mobilized to justify the state’s adoption of extreme security measures, in order to consider the ethics and purpose of asking British people to live in a climate of perpetual fear and suspicion. The challenging of the reductionist thinking that has accompanied the wars against terror and their associated policies is also the primary route by which the ethical foundations of familial and communal life are finally re-established. In this respect, the novels might be said to open post-9/11 British social and political relations to postcolonial critique, raising some difficult questions about the reverberations of the colonial formations of policing, detention, and surveillance—with their attendant violations of human rights justified by the racist Orientalist logic—within the twenty-first-century “war on terror.”

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Going to Extremes Alan Gibbons’s An Act of Love (2011) and Muhammad Khan’s I Am Thunder (2018) make for good examples of writers exploring the challenges of enacting and defending human rights in the current climate of fear. These challenges have assumed an increasingly prominent place in post-terror children’s texts like Gibbons’s and Khan’s, where practices of the state highlight rather than remedy the sense of child fragility. “You think you’re invincible when you’re a kid,” Chris, announced as the narrator of An Act of Love’s opening section, says wistfully. “Invincible, that’s a laugh. We’re easy to hurt, any of us, all of us. Physically, emotionally, we snap. Like a matchstick. Easy as that. And the damage can last a day. A week. Forever” (1). The novel features childhood friends who grapple with the consequences of the “war on terror,” and whose lives have followed very different paths, with one taking up arms in the name of mainstream counter-terrorism rhetoric, and the other being slowly drawn into terrorism by jihad recruiters in the aftermath of an anti-Muslim riot. The story revealing the extent of the psychological and physical damage suffered by the main protagonists as a consequence of the West’s “war on terror” is pieced together by multiple narrators, with the novel’s present established as 2011. The time of narration, over a decade later than some of the episodes that are recounted, allows the older Chris and Imran to reflect back on their younger selves’ motivations and experiences. In the process of mapping the personal onto the political, the novel registers the damaging impact of the state’s rhetoric about terrorism on post-9/11 British society in respect of psychology and domesticity. In I Am Thunder, Khan similarly explores the difficult relationship between the identities, practices, and discourses available to contemporary young Britons. Unlike the experiences in An Act of Love, however, the book’s linear mode of narrative is focalized through a single principal character, a teenage British Asian girl, Muzna, whose own sense of marginalization from mainstream society, with its prejudice against and threat to her female Muslim identity and her very body, leaves the teenager vulnerable to Islamist radicalization. The underlying point in both novels is that the tools assembled by the state to respond to threats to the stability of the nation on its own terms can, tragically, lead to the perpetuation of self-destructive violence and aid the very acts of terrorism that they claim to counter. Arjun Appadurai describes this effect when he writes that young Muslims in Britain grow up “in a multicultural world where they are by no means full citizens” and where they are affected by the beliefs and practices of radical Islamist clerics assuring them that they “truly belong not to a terrorized minority but to a terrifying majority, the Muslim world itself” (111). The rhetoric of the “enemy within” that conflates terrorism with immigration and the racialized other is used as one political tool to gain the nation’s complicity in the state’s counter-terrorism operations that might otherwise be publicly challenged as

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constricting human rights, whereas the battlefield is presented as the site of the ultimate defense of Britain’s stability against threats coming from outside the country. In the novels discussed here, the contradictions of a politics driven by horror and outrage at the thought of the nation’s vulnerability to injury are particularly important. These texts not only make readers ponder the limits of the contemporary vocabulary of terror and counter-terror but also compel them to consider the precariousness of life in situations of counter-terrorist wars-without-end. The novels’ plots turn on the identity crises of young characters whose yielding to and resisting of the “terrible satisfactions of war” follows grief, shock, and outrage over the loss of life in wars around terror (Butler, “Speaking” n. pag.). For Muzna’s boyfriend, Arif, who has been groomed by his Islamic fundamentalist older brother Jameel to radicalize British Asian girls into religious extremism, the East-West opposition has long been a “full-on war … Has been since the Crusades. [Westerners a]re never gonna rest till Islam gets wiped out” (Khan 263). Muzna herself, despite an awareness that it is extremists on both sides that “keep this stupid war going” (264), begins to feel “angry at the West” for arming Middle Eastern regimes and conducting military attacks on civilians as part of the global war on terror after she is shown videos of “injured children screaming for their mothers” at the radical Islamist meetings that she attends with Arif (205, 207). Similarly to the radicalization of the characters in I Am Thunder, Imran’s retreat into Islamic extremism and Chris’s service with the British armed forces in Afghanistan are both shown in An Act of Love to be motivated by the desire for retributive justice. These choices represent the opposite ends of a broad spectrum, or two inadequate responses to the “aftershocks of the war on terror … rumbling beneath [their] feet” that are seen to transform the protagonists into mirror images of their ideological opponents (Gibbons 257). Significantly, this desire for retribution comes mostly from the people around them: according to Nabeel, a jihad recruiter, the only way to end Muslim suffering is to “destroy the West and their puppets in the Muslim land” (114); Chris’s friend from the new school, Joe, insists that the British forces “should bomb [Arab terrorists] where they live” (127); and Joe’s father is said to be “a bit hang ’em, flog ’em” in his attitude towards extremists (126). The same is true of I Am Thunder, where Jameel is presented as the person responsible for both Arif’s and Muzna’s internalization of anti-Western ideologies, since he is the one who “fill[s] [their] hearts with suspicion and hate” by discussing the lived experience of the “war on terror” for British Muslims in terms of assuming personal responsibility for stopping what is happening to Muslims around the world as a result of the West’s military interventions (253, 205–6). The appeal of Islamist ideology is used in I Am Thunder to reveal ethnic, cultural, and generational divides between the young Muslim community in Britain and white British and older Asian British communities respectively— with the systems from which Muzna actively seeks to extricate herself

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involved in the pushes for her to be a good (second-generation) immigrant and a good Pakistani. Contrastingly, in An Act of Love, in some respects, the two young men appear to simply drift into signing up, whether with a terrorist organization or with the army, because other, more fulfilling life paths are closed to them. Chris says as much at the close of the novel when he reflects on what made him sign up (“war [is] something that happened to me, not something I chose with my eyes open” (288)), and Imran consistently wonders at finding himself joining an extremist group, who provide him with a “focus for his misery and his hatred” (149), when he does not believe wholeheartedly in the cause. I Am Thunder’s Arif likewise sees more obstacles in the way of, than opportunities for, social mobility for young British Muslims (“either we’re all failing,” he says, “or Muslim success stories are being hidden from the general public” (158)) and assumes the role of an unquestioning, rather than ardent, supporter of his brother’s cause, which makes Muzna wonder toward the end of the novel if she could have “come to [her] senses sooner and got to Arif earlier” (300). She wishes she had convinced him that the two of them could go to university: “If we both worked hard enough, it would be the ultimate flip-off to those shameful stats about British Pakistanis (and Bengalis) being right at the bottom of the poverty ladder” (195). The young men in these stories are clearly angry with the post-9/11 state of affairs and seek retributive justice, yet they are also dealing with familiar problems of adolescence—namely, how to establish an identity apart from their families and live their lives as adults. At one point, Joe comments that there are no longer jobs in the pits and factories, that is, the traditional masculine jobs that young men once took to support their families (Gibbons 153). In a postindustrial Britain, the natural spaces where Chris and Imran bond during their childhood moments of freedom and identity formation are now paved “shopping experiences” (205, 266), while service sector jobs like stocking shelves at Sainsbury’s have replaced higher-paid union jobs (153). Extremism and the armed forces are seen to offer alternative callings for young men who are not college bound but who want to assume masculine, meaningful roles in their communities (“Men fight [enemies]. That’s what they do,” we hear from Chris’s younger self early in the novel (23)). Her own career ambitions of becoming a writer still providing a partial focus of her new Muslim identity, Khan’s protagonist comments on the significantly masculine nature of such retributive violence in a poem titled “Sugarplum Hijabi,” penned for a school assembly: “Who is the man who kills in my name? / Commands and demands I commit the same? / He says he’s a Muslim. I think he’s a liar. / Murder and torture, both sins of the Fire” (255). Notably, too, the young female characters in Gibbons’s narrative, Chris’s fiancée, Kelly, and Imran’s sister, Aisha, both evade politics, go to college, and aim for professional, white-collar jobs, whereas none of the young men in the story take this route. Yet even as the transformation of the country’s economic landscape and the very few options open to young men play a role in driving Imran, Chris, or Arif to explore the appeal of retributive, masculinist ideologies, it is also

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true that racial and cultural tensions have largely replaced class tensions in the post-9/11 Britains of Gibbons’s and Khan’s novels, in which reactive aggression follows quickly on the heels of injury and loss of life due to terror. As the main character in I Am Thunder comes to realize, a set of ignorant cultural presumptions has been mobilized in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks to argue for limiting the rights of those who appear to belong to what mainstream Britain now perceives as suspect ethnic groups, which one is “allowed to hate on because [they]’re ‘terrorists’ or ‘benefits scroungers’” (157). When asked by her English teacher and school tutor, Mr Dunthorpe, about the effect of her increasing engagement with religious practice on her school performance, Muzna responds with a sober recognition of the curtailed opportunities for women of her religion and ethnicity: “Guess I finally realized how the world works,” she tells him. “I’m not going to be breaking through the glass ceiling any time soon, am I?” She counts on her fingers: “Muslim. Female. Pakistani. Too many crimes for any employer, don’t you think?” (212). The girl’s own experiences of racist aggression and abuse, together with her responses to an increase in the number of these events after she starts wearing a hijab in public, stress the limitations of Western views of Islamic religious tradition, in which the hijab either communicates the idea that Muslim women are inferior to men and in need of saving from the strict roles proscribed for them within their Islamic community or testifies to an alliance with religious fundamentalism. This point is underscored by the speaker in Muzna’s “Sugarplum Hijabi” poem, who rejects both views in a celebration of veiled Muslim womanhood (“Some call it ‘rag’: a sign of oppression. / Some want to ban it: a sign of aggression. / Your concern has been noted; politely turned down. / I don’t need rescuing. This hijab is my crown” (255)), thus addressing a post-9/11 world in which the popular image of women victimized by Islam has been “mobilized in the War on Terror in a way [it] had not been in other conflicts” (Abu-Lughod 32). At the same time, in offering us the story of Muzna’s radicalization, the novel demonstrates how forms of Islamophobia that are instituted at the level of perception (including those active within the liberal framework) can lead young Muslims in Britain to the adoption of a more defensive and alienated subject position in a time of conflict. Where Khan crafts, in I Am Thunder, a sense of social and cultural exclusion from the perspective of a disaffected British Muslim schoolgirl who experiences the violence of being positioned on one side of the divide between “us” and “them,” among the most poignant moments in Gibbons’s novel are those scenes in which alternative perspectives on the spiral of terrorism and counter-terrorism operations serve to expose the brokenness of binaristic thinking in the era of terror. This emphasis on the estrangement of all subject positions, and on the general failure of communication across the post-9/11 tribal divide, is particularly clear in the episode where Chris notices a large TV screen that dominates the town’s main square showing protestors at an army parade:

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It was a repeat of what had happened in Luton the year before. About a dozen Asian men were heckling the soldiers. They were shouting “terrorists” and holding up placards. I read them and winced: British soldiers go to hell. Crusader armies out of Afghanistan. British government. Terrorist government. … A crowd of white men moved in waving a Union flag. They were shouting “Scum!” and “No surrender to the Taliban!” The protestors were mirror images of each other, mouthing insults. They were feeding off one another’s rage. (Gibbons 177–178) His memory of this episode is crucial to the novel’s portrayal of a society that is being undermined from within while facing potential danger from without, and throughout the book the broader socio-political reaction to the “terrorist threat” is found to be eroding the family and the community base necessary for young Britons’ personal and cultural development. The demand for a decidedly tougher stance toward the threat of terrorist attacks, be it “home grown” or coming from abroad, is certainly not new, as Stuart Price writes, and can be seen to “revive a number of dormant or hidden practices” (278). But the social and political antagonism within Britain has been fueled by the creation of a convincing image of a terrorist subject, and this ultimately hinges on the ability of the media to present the threat as located within the Muslim community, thus allowing the white mainstream British public, in Sara Upstone’s words, “to imagine the threat against its own ‘safe’ space with an unparalleled detail in direct opposition to the ambiguity often surrounding the terrorist’s actual identity” (35). The earlier broad tendency in the post-9/11 media coverage of alleged terrorist plots in Britain to link the “terrorist threat” with the UK’s immigration policy was soon narrowed significantly to the point where a large part of “terrorist” activity tracked by the British police and security services was conceived as belonging to the purportedly inassimilable British Muslim community (see, for example, Matthews 2015). It is the move made by policy makers and media outlets “from speaking of a small number of violent Muslims, to suspecting radical sects of Islam, to suspecting all Muslim youth as potential radicals” that, for Orla Lynch, concluded the process whereby young British Muslims were marked out as ever-potential threats to the core of British nationhood and identity (242; see also Miah 2013, 2017; Coppock and McGovern 2014). As Khan’s main character puts it, British mainstream society could be seen as “waiting for the next brown person to snap and run around screaming ‘Death to infidels!’” (43), the religious background of Islamic communities marking them as potential radicals in the eyes of their white British neighbours and sparking national panic.

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That the word “terror” has become synonymous with the “othered” Muslim subject is emphasized in a scene from An Act of Love’s narrative present in which Chris receives a warning from Imran that a bomb is scheduled to be detonated at a ceremony recognizing the services of recently returned veterans, which he and his family are attending. “There’s no way anybody could get past the checks,” insists Chris’s father. “Look around you … Can you see anybody who looks like a terrorist?” (14). Resisting the urge to ask what a terrorist looks like, Chris nevertheless understands the logic that lies behind this kind of thinking: “[Dad] looks and there’s a sea of white faces, a few black guys in uniform, some Gurkhas: surely nobody who could pose a threat?” (14–15). As in the case of Khan’s story, where Muzna is relieved when the news splashed across the front pages of the newspapers focus for one day on a pedophile ring instead of the reporters “harping on about Muslims and terrorism” (305), Gibbons’s novel traces the dissolution of British society, conveying in the process a sense of unease with the state’s and the mainstream media’s mobilization of negative stereotypes of Muslim communities and politicization of difference. Early in the novel we learn that the media “relayed the story [of the Luton protests] into every living room, screaming difference. White against Muslim. Red, white and blue against Islamic green. At least, that’s the way the media portrayed it” (6). In a similar way, Imran’s retrospective narrative invites young readers to re-engage with the larger consequences of events witnessed during their own lifetime by describing the immediate aftermath of 9/11 from the perspective of his own family: They watched mesmerised as the drama unfolded on a large screen. A crowd had gathered, struggling to take it in … . The news anchor added some new information: “Middle Eastern sources say that the bombings are almost certainly the work of AlQaeda.” Imran realised that the woman behind him was staring at him. He turned round and discovered she wasn’t the only one with her eye on him. Most of the people around them were watching him, Dad and Aisha. One of them, a shaven-headed man in T-shirt, shorts and flipflops, finally said something. “When are you people going to take responsibility for the extremists in your midst?” “What do you mean these people are our responsibility?” Dad snapped. “How are they? Are the BNP your responsibility?” “Don’t talk to me like that,” the man retorted. “I haven’t done anything wrong.” Dad was furious. “Neither have I!” The man didn’t back down. “You might not have done, but your kind have.”

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“My kind!” Dad’s eyes were hard with anger. “You had better explain what you mean by that.” The man turned away. “Oh, go back to Islam.” (Gibbons 121–122) Passages like this serve the purpose of underscoring the fragility of post-9/11 British society, but racial tensions, even though exacerbated by counter-terrorism rhetoric and government policy after the events of 9/11 and 7/7, are already present in scenes from before September 2001, making the social landscape of eight-year-old Imran’s and Chris’s Britain seem equally unstable. Rather than an instance of the Islamophobic sentiment that has only come into being recently, the association of Muslims with terror and unjustifiable violence in Britain in the wake of the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks can then be read as building on existing stereotypes of the Muslim subject while drawing on the racist idioms of colonial ideology to transform the “barbaric Oriental into an even more dramatic and menacing form” (Upstone 40). Repeatedly in Khan’s novel, Muzna’s reflections on the populist culture of racist paranoia that has been, as Vron Ware reminds us, a “familiar ingredient of Britain’s colonial and postcolonial past” (107), point to an awareness that political violence works at the level of perception and, more generally, at the level of representation, in order to control the perspective according to which anti-Muslim conduct can be seen at all. The girl’s ambition is therefore to “write books about people like [herself]” and to give people “some Muslim heroes to look up to” so that “there’d be public outrage every time the media came up with [Islamophobic] crap” (125, 157). The heightened public receptiveness to anti-Muslim rhetoric after 9/11 and 7/7 is central to Khan’s and Gibbons’s novels’ preoccupation with the power structures that deny individual freedom, insofar as the threat of a home-grown, Trojan horse-style terrorist plot allows the state to play upon the fear that the Muslim subject generates in the post-9/11 climate and to justify its recourse to any measures ostensibly intended to reinforce national security. Indeed, while the state’s narrative of counter-terrorism encourages white British citizens in the novel to look unquestioningly to the law and the military for protection at home and abroad, the Muslim community finds its rights as citizens to be increasingly precarious. This is acknowledged in An Act of Love in Imran’s brother Rafiq’s bitter account of what would happen if the two of them tried to seek help from the police in the scene where they are rushing to the barracks to warn Chris about the terrorist bomber: “We’re relying on the same police who’ve been shaking our people down for years. Get out of the car please, sir,’ he mimics. ‘Is this your vehicle? Where do you live? Are you now, or have you ever been, a terrorist? It doesn’t give you a lot of confidence” (12). Similarly, in I Am Thunder, when the mosque at which they meet is attacked by a far-right gang, Muzna is told by Arif to leave the scene quickly rather than wait for the authorities because “[her] faith in the British police is misplaced. There is no justice for Muslims, except from Muslims” (149).

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In relation to the argument that fears of the other determine current responses to all kinds of insecurity, both novels expose the contradiction implicit in the logic that is born of a wish to defend fundamental British values such as “democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs” (as defined in the Home Office’s updated Prevent strategy of 2011), but which blurs the distinction between different spheres of terrorist activity and various forms of public protest (see also Qureshi 2015; Kinninmont 2016). Among young British Muslims like I Am Thunder’s Arif, the state’s anti-radicalization strategy has confirmed suspicions of disproportionate scrutiny and interference: “The government wants teachers to report students with ‘extreme views.’ Like if some kid in Year Six says, ‘The West is always starting wars in Muslim countries,’ teachers are supposed to snake ’em out to the feds. This half-pint, who’s pissing himself, gets dragged down to the police station for speaking truth!” (94). Arif is convinced of the racist bias of the strategy, under which double standards might be seen to operate between white Britons and British Muslims, keeping the latter from speaking freely about the limitations of current responses to the era of terror. In Gibbons’s related description of a decreasing confidence among British Muslim communities in the police (and reporting) services, the punishments imposed on young British Muslims for rioting in the streets after a fascist demonstration seem unnecessarily harsh to Imran’s father, a local councilor training to be a magistrate, who realizes that “if a football hooligan did a similar thing he would probably get no more than community service” (72); little does he know that the imprisonment of his older son, who was also involved in the riots, will soon have the effect of alienating Imran, whom we see drifting towards extremism. Later in the story, a direct echo of a climate in which the Muslim subject is by definition suspected of involvement in terrorism is suggested in the police officers’ treatment of Imran and Rafiq after a suicide bomber’s attack is prevented as a result of their successful intervention: the Hussain brothers are detained at the police station and released without charge (with Rafiq leaving the station the next day, and Imran three days later) only because Chris makes a statement on their behalf, a development that proves Rafiq’s point that the initial reaction of the policemen if the boys had tried to warn them about the bomb would have been to “lock [them] up and throw away the key” (13). Throughout the two novels, the most important challenges to the young Muslim characters’ reliance on the British laws and values they were raised to espouse come from situations in which it is the state’s determination to prevent Muslims from being drawn into violent extremism that is shown, to use Ware’s words, to “reinforce the borders held in place by intransigent racism and the ‘white fear’ [of the other that] it feeds off” (110). At one telling moment in Gibbons’s narrative, Chris recalls Imran’s remarks uttered just after Rafiq receives a four-year prison sentence: “[The judge] says he’s going to give Rafiq a tough sentence to send out a message. He wants to stop other people doing the same. Rafiq calls it victors’ justice.” The true

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extent of Imran’s transformation here is conveyed through images rather than words: “[Imran’s] face was blank,” Chris remembers, “It was as if something had broken inside him. We were eleven. Nearly twelve. Too young to be broken” (108). Seven years later, the sense of betrayal experienced by Imran on learning of his local imam’s participation in a stateorganized conference on “Isolating extremists, engaging communities” strengthens his own engagement with the extremists. Similar points of crisis are reached in Khan’s novel, where Muzna feels pushed into a corner of narrowing fundamentalism by state-led responses to youth radicalization, in that she finds herself unable to confide her anxieties about Jameel’s agenda to the adults around her, including her favourite school teacher, for fear of being referred to a deradicalization program (212, 257). For Alyas Karmani, a frontline violence prevention practitioner who works with young Britons from mainly Muslim backgrounds, a disproportionate focus on Muslims is a central flaw of “Prevent,” which is one of the components of the UK government’s counterterrorism strategy that aims to work against radicalization in British society before acts of violent extremism can occur. Karmani, whose STREET (Strategy to Reach, Educate and Empower Teenagers) won the award for the best Prevent project in London in 2010 and was viewed as a flagship organization preventing violent extremism between 2006 and 2011, argues that Prevent is increasingly being used as a “political tool for populist purposes” and that the popular appetite for far-right or nationalist media coverage “reflects a sense of social exclusion and rejection” in contemporary British society (4, 5). This feeling of marginalization from mainstream society, he explains, constitutes a “push factor” for young British Muslims (5), who, like Imran or Muzna, become more vulnerable to being influenced by extremist groups who claim to protect their rights and freedoms. The former Labour Cabinet and Home Office minister, and author of Black Flag Down: Counter-Extremism, Defeating Isis and Winning the Battle of Ideas, Liam Byrne’s reading of the current British government’s counter-extremism policy tells a similar story of complicity, where in the vacuum created by the state’s strategies of containment, “while Islamophobia spirals out of control, British Muslims despair [and] feel surrounded by … national supremacists who declare you can’t be British and Muslim, and religious supremacists who say you can’t be Muslim and British” (n. pag.). Successive governments have failed to develop an approach to safeguarding against youth radicalization that would allow for more inclusive and open spaces for a discussion of young people’s vulnerabilities. Yet at the same time they have succeeded in shifting attention away from the urgency of addressing the underlying causes of social, economic, and political conflict—a conflict that is further exacerbated by the policy’s validation of a “prejudicial worldview that perceives Islam to be a retrograde and oppressive religion that threatens the West”—and toward the potential threat that British Muslims, and especially young British Muslims, represent to non-Muslim Britons’ sense of social cohesion and political stability (“PREVENT” letter n. pag.). The complicity

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between the contemporary discourse of counter-terrorism and discourses of otherness that British colonialism produced in order to move toward a suspension of the juridical order reveals continuities that have a crucial resonance for post-9/11 and 7/7 Britain, “where a focus on the emotional-aesthetic connotations of terror is made logically to override awareness of the imperial interests that produced the terrorism” and to warrant the use of increased security measures (Boehmer and Morton 11). One of the strategies used to engage young readers empathically in the ideological and moral dilemmas encountered by the fictional characters from children’s novels is the focus on forming familial and social bonds (see, for example, Sainsbury 2013, esp. 73–98). Even though they are weakened by the attitudes associated with the post-9/11 climate, these bonds eventually prevent Gibbons’s and Khan’s principal characters from collapsing beneath the burden placed on their generation, while offering readers a familiar frame of reference. The reader is encouraged to look beyond these young characters to consider the causes and consequences of loosening ties with one’s family and community. From the novels, it is clear that the sort of dissolution they describe can only be understood in the context of a society in which communal possibilities are seen to be disappearing. In An Act of Love, Rafiq’s two-year prison sentence leaves him feeling that British justice has failed him, and his predicament is revealed to be “ripping [the Hussain] family apart” (110), as emphasized in the exchange between Rafiq and his father about the trouble that the younger man has with adjusting to life outside prison: “Many people have suffered worse examples of injustice than you and made something of themselves,” Mr Hussain says. “I did not raise you to give up at the first setback.” “No, you didn’t,” he hears in response. “You raised me to be British and to believe in British laws … Your stinking British justice hung me out to dry’” (131, 132). Rafiq and Imran both lose faith in their parents’ view of an inclusive, tolerant Britain of equal opportunities and share a strong sense of familial and cultural displacement (even if in the case of Rafiq it does not end with an interest in jihadist extremism), and this is just one way in which the novel responds to specific political circumstances as they come to bear on family and community life. Isolated from the closely knit traditional British Pakistani community held in high regard by her immediate family, I Am Thunder’s Muzna also feels increasingly antagonistic toward her parents. To her they seem not only too secularized (“According to the Gospel of Dad, being a ‘good Pakistani’ was everything and being a ‘good Muslim’ came second,” especially after 9/11, when being openly Muslim “sends out the wrong sort of message” (23, 237)), but also only too eager to adopt the “good immigrant” persona (her father would “sing [his racist colleagues’] praises, buying them boxes of mangoes [he] couldn’t afford, or luxury Christmas cards and presents” (14)), while simultaneously expecting Muzna to shun Western ideas of femininity and act like a Pakistani girl from back home (137). With pre-9/11 Britain’s social and economic disparities, which can be linked to the enduring legacies of colonialism, now breaking out into the

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open—and accompanied by a significant decline in social justice and inclusive politics—from within the fissures emerge the disenfranchised voices of a generation of British Muslim youth identified through social, cultural, and political practices of ethnic profiling as potential threats to domestic routines and national cohesion. While several episodes in Gibbons’s novel show Imran becoming alienated from his family and antagonistic toward the wider community in the face of discriminatory laws and practices, a powerful scene sees Chris, who is already serving in Afghanistan, attempting to come to terms with the radicalization of his childhood friend: “It felt as if there was a river of blood between us. I would see Imran in the young men who watched from doorways when I was on patrol in some sun-baked village. I would imagine his finger on every AK47” (225). But although the young protagonists in both An Act of Love and I Am Thunder come to question the meanings and values underpinning social relationships and the political and moral choices made by their parents, the extreme positions that they are seen to take in the novels are undermined by various betrayals and the realization that it is possible to find a meaningful focus in a rediscovered community. After he returns from Afghanistan, having lost his leg in an explosion, An Act of Love’s Chris is revealed to be moving away from a belief in the moral authority of the government’s counter-terrorism strategy, as doubts about the war effort overshadow his conviction about the rightness of Britain’s policies toward its others: “I would love somebody to tell me [what this country stands for],” he thinks. “I thought I knew once. That was before I went to war” (10). Imran, too, begins to doubt his new-found ideological convictions when he realizes his own complicity with a group whose rationale problematizes the idea of brotherhood by leaving “no room for doubt or introspection, no room for disagreement” (116). And in Khan’s novel, it takes an elderly non-Muslim woman’s intervention, which stops a vicious racist attack on Muzna in the later stages of the story, for the girl to realize that “Jameel and Arif had [her] believing the world was ‘Black and White,’ ‘Good and Evil,’ ‘Muslim and Kafir.’ But it wasn’t that way at all” (261). As these protagonists contemplate their earlier resolve to contest their parents’ actions and choices (“It’s easy to know what you’re against,” Imran tells us in An Act of Love’s ending. “It’s a lot harder to know what you’re for … My parents’ way was hard. Finding my own was even worse. [Jihadist] Arshad’s was easy” (288)), the reader is encouraged to consider the fact that in order to truly function as a member of a family or a community, a young person needs to assert an independent position of judgment. As the main protagonist’s father says to her in I Am Thunder when the girl eventually reports Jameel’s group’s activities to the police and prevents a terrorist attack on the Shard, “You are British and you are Pakistani … But before both of these, you are Muzna Saleem. And the world has never had one of those. Maybe you will make us proud, if we give you space?” (299). In defying the problematic binarism of “us” and “them” imposed by anti-Western

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fundamentalism and anti-Muslim rhetoric, the protagonists of Gibbons’s and Khan’s novels supply what is perhaps the most reliable route to genuine community and a way to overcome the post-9/11 impasse.

Mor(t)al Hazard Sam Hepburn’s If You Were Me (2015) and Alan Gibbons’s The Trap: Terrorism, Heroism and Everything in Between (2016) mix the standard conventions of the teen thriller with the post-9/11 novel’s attention to the experience of political violence and the state’s capacity to use the precariousness of life for the purposes of the defense of the national body and its geopolitical interests. In a sense, the blurring of the distinction between terrorism and counter-terrorism in these novels is more extreme than in An Act of Love and I Am Thunder, since the fragility of the political organism here leads to the state’s continuous and often unethically manipulative overresponse to perceived and invented threats of terrorist actions. Hepburn’s If You Were Me depicts the efforts of a young Afghan asylum seeker, Aliya, to disprove the accusations of terrorism leveled at her brother, Behrouz, whose former work as an interpreter for the British army makes him a target first for the Taliban, from whom the family escape to London, and then for corrupt military and police officers in Britain. The plot of Gibbons’s The Trap turns on the struggles, against coercive state power, of two British Muslim brothers, one a deradicalized ex-jihadi Majid wishing to rehabilitate himself on his return from Syria by acting as a British intelligence agent in an undercover anti-terrorist operation, and the other his disillusioned, Londonbased younger brother Amir wishing to oppose Islamophobia locally without being branded a radical. The two books offer themselves as genre pieces, blending the post-9/11 novel’s awareness of the violence done to the Muslim subject by the policies and language of counter-terror with the “exorbitant” agency possessed by the fantastically empowered protagonist of the thriller (Marsh 193; see also Denning 1987). It is precisely this mobilization of vulnerability in resistance that allows the novels to transcend the two-tribes mentality enforced by the counter-terrorist units and the media, and to present the shared condition of precariousness as tied up both with the reactive defensiveness that one’s susceptibility to injury might be seen to provoke and with the collapse of the boundaries that separate self and other as an alternative to such modes of defense. By pointing to a more general cultural disorientation after 9/11—an unraveling that is described in terms of a decline in cognitive abilities in such post-9/11 novels for adults as Kate Jennings’s Moral Hazard (2002), Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), among others (see also Boxall 2013, esp. 140–164)—Hepburn’s and Gibbons’s novels reach for a new, uncontained way of seeing and thinking that moves beyond the binaries conventionally seen to govern the relationship between “us” and “them,” terror and counter-terror, vulnerability and resistance to political power.

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The central irony of both novels is that their vulnerable young protagonists find themselves having no other option than to appeal for protection to the very state whose counter-terrorist efforts serve to expose them to arbitrary violence. As Behrouz’s employment with the British army in If You Were Me puts his whole family at risk for as long as they stay in Afghanistan, fleeing to Britain is for Aliya their only “chance of safety” and of “leaving the terror behind” (18, 19); however, even before we see the girl fending off the attempts on her life by a criminal organization led by a highprofile British colonel (whose charity work is in fact a front for smuggling drugs out of war-torn Asian countries), Hepburn draws a stark contrast between Aliya’s desire for a safe haven and the reality of her new life in England. There she faces narrow-mindedness (labeled by people like her new neighbor, Mr Brody, as one of the “scroungers” and “dirty foreigners messing the place up” (24–25)), deprivation (the asylum-seeking family are allocated a “dingy, dirty, rundown flat that no one else wanted to live in” (265)), and suspicion (as headscarf-wearing Aliya warns a young Londoner Dan when he starts helping her get to the truth of her brother’s connection to the criminals, “this is a bad time to be seen with someone who … looks like [her]” (121)). Among local populations—whose responses to the feelings of exacerbated vulnerability in the post-9/11 era are highly regulated by the vocabulary of counter-terror—the figure of a conflict-participating Muslim induces extreme paranoia, whether it is the former British army employee like Behrouz in If You Were Me, or the deradicalized Isis runaway like Majid in The Trap, the main fear being that these young Muslims would attempt to seize hold of their war traumas in terroristic ways and bring the violence inflicted upon them in terror-related conflicts back to the source of the West’s military power and strategy (Hepburn 68, 83; Gibbons 140). At the same time, Behrouz’s and Majid’s younger siblings in the two novels experience abuse and distrust from the non-Muslim British public, not just because of their familial connections to known or suspected extremists, but also as part of their everyday lives (degraded by racist strangers in the streets of Hepburn’s London (88, 90) and by schoolmates and far-right protesters in Gibbons’s book (36, 46, 74–75), respectively), and as a result of their efforts to challenge the negative perceptions of Muslim communities produced through the frames of terror wars. Meanwhile, as we can see in frequent flashbacks to Majid’s life before he goes to Syria, the Islamist extremists’ own propaganda instructs young Muslims that they could be “mak[ing] [themselves] anew,” and could become the “generation that changes everything” in a world in which the battle lines were redrawn so as to maximize precariousness for Islamic populations while minimizing it for others (34, 28). And since to be protected from the violence of extremism is, as the young characters in both If You Were Me and The Trap find out, to be exposed to the systemic violence of counter-terrorist strategy, being a Muslim youth in Britain does turn out in these books to be a “precarious designation” (Lynch 243).

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As we see reflected in Hepburn’s and Gibbons’s novels, both the violence of extremism and of the contemporary state can be understood to express themselves as terror, with the characters’ efforts to get away from the terroristic regime under which they were forced or chose to live amounting to an exchange of one form of terroristic violence for another. There are several instances of state violence at issue here: the violence of invasion and occupation, incarceration and interrogation, and surveillance and control. When Majid’s initial response to the wars around terror is to get involved in international charity work, he is admonished by a jihadist sympathizer for “sending blankets, tents, medicine,” which cannot “stop tanks and planes” sent to the Middle East by Western military (33); the police raid on Aliya’s flat is similarly described in terms of invasive penetration: “They came while we were sleeping. An angry swarm of policemen, smashing the door down with a bright-orange battering ram, pointing their guns at us and ordering us to ‘Freeze!’ Black boots, black gloves, black helmets and angry eyes staring through plastic visors” (59). At various points throughout the narratives, their young protagonists are detained and persistently interrogated by police and intelligence services: If You Were Me’s siblings because of the criminal gang’s successful plan to incriminate Behrouz in a terrorist plot after he declines to join Colonel Clarke in his illegal activities, and The Trap’s Majid and Amir as an untrustworthy potential intelligence asset and a suspected radical closely related to a reformed jihadi, respectively. In both novels, the state agents appear to proceed by the logic that establishes the British government’s power, and its mechanisms of counter-terrorist violence, as outside the law; they are shown to be lying to the young people in their care, manipulating situations to their advantage, and, as with Majid in The Trap, not hesitating to endanger the lives of those who rely on the state for protection from violence and to blackmail them to ensure their continued collaboration. Moreover, as made clear by Gibbon’s narrative, a larger systemic problem in a state that “doesn’t know what to do with” radical Islamist preachers (28), and allows far-right marches to proceed and spread hate speech, yet monitors young British-born Muslims’ “attitude to integration” and “insists on stiff sentences for [former radicals] coming back [to Britain], regardless of what they have done, or whether they regret it” can fuel grievances that lead to further marginalization and even radicalization of British Muslim youth. These developments then feed back into negative perceptions of Muslim communities in Britain and increased levels of anti-Muslim violence (97, 30): “[I]f you think the war on terror is part of the reason for the problems we have now,” Majid’s MI5 handler Kate pointedly tells a senior figure at the agency, “imagine how a young Muslim feels” (52). In If You Were Me and in The Trap, the more the state produces and exploits the vulnerability of entire populations profiled as would-be extremists, the more “the war on terror bec[omes] a war of terror” (Gibbons 52), even as its counter-extremism policy purports to safeguard and promote the welfare of all British youth.

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The frequency with which the “war on terror” rhetoric of Western governments is used by the mainstream media in Hepburn’s and Gibbons’s novels to call for the suspension of the rights of certain populations is all the more striking for being surrounded by the language of violence and retaliation. After her interrogation by the police, and with Behrouz already making headlines on every television channel, Aliya has to leave the police station lying across the back seat of an officer’s car under a foul-smelling dog’s blanket in order to escape a feverish crowd: “A fist thumped the roof, we swerved sideways. I pushed my face into the sweaty plastic, fighting the urge to vomit … Voices came right up to the car. I could feel the people out there. Hating me. Wanting to find me and hurt me” (79–80). In a related way, Amir’s family in The Trap is in a constant state of alert, having made a series of house moves in search of anonymity and on the look-out for anyone who would put them in danger by informing the press as to their whereabouts. In terms of violent responses provoked by the anti-Muslim media reports here, perhaps the most extreme example is offered by a chapter from If You Were Me, focalized through the character of Dan, in which an angry mob gathered in front of Aliya’s block of flats and, waving copies of the evening newspaper with a front-page picture of Behrouz, starts chanting with outrage, demanding the death penalty for terrorists. Both Aliya’s and The Trap’s Amir’s loyalties to British values (and the ability to assimilate successfully to the British way of life, in a tellingly odd leap also discussed by the school authorities in Gibbons’s book in relation to British-born Amir) are repeatedly called into question in media reports due to their family history and origin, with one interviewed policeman’s uncompromising view that home-grown radicals (including those formerly employed by the British army who, like Behrouz, have sought asylum in Britain) represent the “worst kind of danger to the public, because they [a]ren’t known to the police or the security services” chiming with dominant perspectives about Britain’s immigration and asylum policy (87; see also Baker, Gabrielatos, and McEnery 2013; Lynch 2013; Matthews 2015). These news reports could also be read as drawing on the many stereotyped, homogenizing images of the sly, menacing, vengeful Muslim that already circulate in the popular media, as reporters “twist the truth,” like Behrouz’s engineering ambitions or medals received for bravery, and say that “he’d only worked for the British army so he could spy on the soldiers and wait for the best moment to strike” (123). The same is true of the presentation of Amir’s arrest for shouting at the marchers and the police at the far-right demonstration in a manner that would make “anybody reading it … think that [the Sarwar family] have been organising a training camp for armed insurrection” (141). And as against the delimited media representations of the violence of terrorism abroad in the form of “wildeyed men in dusty turbans waving rocket launchers around” (Hepburn 113)— representations that, as Boehmer reminds us, make us see such violence “not as one-off [terroristic events], but as part of an unfolding story of endemic conflict” (67)—If You Were Me’s Dan instead comes to understand terror as affecting “real people. Real lives. Real deaths” in ways that Western public

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discourse has failed to mediatize (114). Interestingly, however, Hepburn’s novel proceeds to use the mainstream media’s control over representation to offer a crucial, if limited, platform for Aliya’s counter-narrative: in the novel’s final section, television footage of the “wild, dishevelled girl … shouting accusations about Colonel Clarke” saves the young protagonists’ lives and helps exonerate Behrouz, but simultaneously makes the effectiveness of the media’s regulation of affect all too apparent (346). That both novels leave the reader with an open ending suggestive of further danger—in which Majid is blackmailed back into being an undercover spy for the MI5 for “one more job” in The Trap (185), and Aliya is invited by a mysterious government official to investigate another sinister organization from within in If You Were Me (355)—illustrates their closeness to the genre conventions of the thriller, but it also emphasizes terror’s potential to disrupt any attempt by the vulnerable subject to impose order on it (see also Gayle and Cobain 2018). The difficulty of trying to minimize the precariousness of life under conditions of terror is powerfully foreshadowed early in both novels: when Majid’s sister contemplates the cruelty of his supposed death in Syria (“Majid will never be home again,” she thinks. “A hand of darkness took him” (Gibbons 14)), we know that he is back in England and working with the British intelligence against a group of terrorists; Aliya believes that starting a new life in England will mark an end to her experience of a world of fear and fighting, yet we soon see her realize that “Hope is not unlimited. It is like a fire or a child. If you do not feed it, it will die” (Hepburn 33). But there is also a recognition here that some form of congress might come about through a process of reflection on equality between self and other in the midst of a shared precariousness, as is the case with If You Were Me’s Dan and Aliya (as the girl becomes aware of how much Dan was prepared to sacrifice to help her and how much fear and pain the boy suffered to try to do this without betraying his father, a low-level cheat with links to the criminal gang that framed Behrouz for terrorism), and with The Trap’s Majid and MI5 agent Kate, with the latter risking her life and her job (she is in fact transferred to other duties as a result of her actions), to save Majid from being shot by the counter-terrorist police and then help him rescue his family from an unstable and resentful extremist in the novel’s final chapters. As political violence associated with the “war on terror” renders the lives of targeted populations more precarious than others, these novels perform a continued negotiation of selfhood through acknowledgment of and by the vulnerable other, hinting at the possibility of an ethical overcoming of the violent, oppositional thinking set in motion by terrorist attacks.

Indefinitely Detained Anna Perera’s Guantanamo Boy is another post-9/11 children’s novel that raises crucial questions about the justification of extreme disciplinary measures adopted against whole populations who are deemed by the “war on

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terror” rhetoric to be threatening the West’s cultural and political security. Therefore, the book serves as an interesting point of comparison. It is a human rights narrative that does not spare the reader depictions of the various forms of ill-treatment and outright torture suffered by suspected terrorists of any age during their incarceration at Guantánamo Bay and other detention camps controlled by the United States. The story of Khalid, a 15-year-old British Muslim from Rochdale, who is abducted and delivered to the American authorities within days of arriving in Karachi on his first family visit to his father’s home country, and who is held without charge for two years in Guantánamo Bay’s prison, projects the effects of terror and counter-terror onto a particular kind of ordinary life: he is a stereotypical Western teenager, computer-crazed, obsessed with football, and fancying himself in love with a girl from his school. The question of the book’s success in drawing readers into the story of a young Briton wrongly accused of terrorism and engaging them in the process of moral thinking, then, hinges on Khalid’s status as an everyman, snatched from his family and from everything that is familiar to him. This, according to British children’s writer S. F. Said, underscores the novel’s central point, which is to bring to the young reader’s attention the fact that “it could happen to anyone—and already has” (n. pag.). When a group of fierce-looking men (who, to a teenager so immersed in the discourse of popular culture, inevitably bring to mind “cartoon gangsters with square bodies” (62)) kidnap the boy from his aunts’ house in Pakistan in the middle of the night, “[t]he situation is so beyond Khalid’s everyday reality, he can’t take it in. Things like this don’t happen in his world. Things like this can’t happen to him. It’s more like a movie or a computer game” (64). At the same time, in a reversal of Western imaginings of the threat to society in the West as coming from the Muslim subject who erupts at its center—and of the visual and literary representations of “terror com[ing] into the heart of everyday life, and terrorism [being] woven into the very fabric of ordinary existence” (Upstone 39)— Perera, like Hepburn in If You Were Me, offers a story in which the personal space of someone identified as the feared other is invaded to telling effect. It is this principle of reversal that lends the novel its importance, unsettling the young reader’s understanding of contemporary terror and of counter-terrorism operations undertaken by the state in the process. The opening chapters of Perera’s Guantanamo Boy, which are set in Rochdale, help to pinpoint some of the more dramatic political changes affecting post-9/11 British social relations, and the novel is reminiscent of the texts I discussed earlier in its attempt to offer a morally charged and politically conscious imagining of what it might be like to experience these changes from within the Muslim community in Britain. “Things will get worse before they get better,” Khalid’s father tells his family one evening. “A man came into the restaurant today, pointed his finger at the waiter and said, ‘You better watch your step round here, mate.’ Can you believe it? The boy hasn’t done anything wrong. Nothing except wear shalwar kameez

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[traditional Asian clothing]” (4–5). Here Perera successfully dramatizes the hostile treatment of British Muslims by the section of the society that perceives itself as “white British,” despite its obvious hybridization. The tone is set in another early episode where Khalid helps a woman attacked outside a fish and chip shop by some youngsters who steal her mobile phone and her food: Holgy and Tony laugh their heads off as Khalid angrily runs over to push the kids aside. ‘Give it here!’ He knocks the mobile out of the little fair-haired one’s hand, then grabs the bag of chips from the tubby one, who now has them. ‘Sorry,’ Khalid tells the woman as he hands back the phone. ‘They’re a bunch of losers.’ She thanks him briefly with a nod and refuses the remaining chips with a sour expression. Gives him the feeling she doesn’t want his help, then strides off proudly … . When he turns back to Holgy and Tony, they are still killing themselves laughing. ‘What are you like? Fess up, Kal. Didn’t you see—ha-ha-ha—how pale she went—ha-ha—when you screamed at them?’ Holgy says. ‘I mean, you’re pretty tall, Kal. She was more scared of you than—haha—of that lot.’ ‘If you had a beard, you’d be a dead ringer for Bin Laden, mate,’ Tony adds, and both of them crack up again. ‘Yeah?’ Suddenly it dawns on Khalid that the woman maybe thought he was a terrorist or something. ‘These are dangerous times for Muslims,’ his dad said the other day. And he was right. That much he does know. (24–25) The bitter feeling of not belonging with which the scene leaves Khalid anticipates the affecting moments of self-hatred later in the novel, in which the boy, angry with himself for signing a false confession after his captors subjected him to waterboarding, or simulated drowning, imagines a news item featuring himself as a convicted terrorist who is despised by the whole Rochdale community. The scene outside the shop obliges Khalid, who is unable to forget the look of contempt on the woman’s face or his friends’ hurtful comments, to revise his perception of new forms of inequality (“It’s the first time world events and George Bush’s so-called ‘War on Terror’ really come home to him” (26)). His subsequent experiences enable him to see clearly the paradox of the new global circumstances that create the conditions for acting outside the normal legal process in order to protect the boundaries of the law and for working through the law to withdraw legal protections from those portrayed by the “war on terror” rhetoric as culturally or racially threatening. The response of the state is thus to deny humanity to the non-Western other

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in a manner that, in Paul Gilroy’s terms, revives an older Orientalist logic that “assigns differential value to lives lost according to their locations and supposed racial origins” and brings back to life a “colonial economy in which infrahumanity, measured against the benchmark of healthier imperial standards, diminishes human rights and can defer human recognition” (263). In the course of his conversations about the reality of post-9/11 Pakistan (where various American agents are said to be offering money to anyone reporting supposed al-Qaeda suspects to them), Khalid reaches a new understanding of the wide range of counter-terrorism practices used across the globe: “That sounds like bounty hunters like back in the Wild West,” he reckons, suddenly aware of the dangers underlying his family’s planned trip to Karachi (28). When the boy is abducted from his relatives’ Karachi house, the captors’ actions force him to recognize that his British-born status and his young age are in their eyes rendered irrelevant by his ethnicity: “Get me someone from the British Embassy. They’ll help me out. I haven’t committed any crime … I’m only just fifteen,” Khalid pleads with one of the officials. “‘We are living in terrible times,’ is all the man says. As if his hands are tied and the truth’s unimportant” (67–68). Later, we see the boy hearing claims of innocence from other prisoners at Guantánamo Bay’s camp (“Where are the 9/11 bombers, then? … Someone here must be a terrorist. Where are they?” (220)) and discovering that the United States controls many prisons like Guantánamo that have been left off official maps all over the world (“How do they get away with it? Where are the police?” (189)). In a further reminder of the Orientalist aspects of contemporary suspensions of the law, the current anti-terror discourses relegate the other to a place outside the category of the human: “The native, the enemy, the prisoner … can only be held accountable under special emergency rules and fierce martial laws. Their lowly status underscores the fact that they cannot be reciprocally endowed with the same vital humanity enjoyed by their wellheeled captors, conquerors, judges, executioners and other racial betters” (Gilroy 263). Accordingly, Khalid finds himself reduced to a non-person: he becomes “another meaningless bent orange shape,” like the ones that he used to see on the news, who has been “dropped into some weird world game” because intelligence agency officials seem to think that the time he spent playing a war-based online computer game and his trip to Karachi were only a prelude to a real terrorist attack (174). Derek Gregory reminds us that whereas most of the Guantánamo detainees were “minor players or indeed wholly innocent people who had been turned in to settle old scores or to receive bounties of thousands of dollars,” our horror at hearing their stories “ought not to be measured by [their] innocence or guilt … —which is a matter for the very judicial process denied to them—but by the calculated withdrawal of subjecthood from all of them” (68). The West’s defensive response to the threat of terrorism involves suspending legal rule and replacing it with military codes, while the differential allocation of value that decides what kind of subject can be

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deprived of legal protection, detained, and tortured works to uphold certain exclusionary ideas of what it means to be human. Stripped of their dignity and bodily integrity, the prisoners in Perera’s novel have their hair and beards shaven off, even though the latter, we learn, are an important part of Muslim identity (see also Boumediene and Idir 2017 on Guantánamo’s prisoners who were not allowed to shave, and were forced to look the part of a radical Islamic terrorist); they are forced to participate in communal washing, and, at meal times, find their food thrown to them over the tops of the cages in a manner “imitating feeding time at the zoo” (110). In a powerfully affective episode, Khalid is shocked by the “extraordinary sight of soldiers screaming abuse at naked men lined up against the white walls … [whose] heads are bowed in shame like something out of a horror movie as [a] man photographs each one in turn” (100). In this detention system, humiliation and human rights abuse have become routinized practice, while photographs showing the transportation and imprisonment of a dehumanized mass of enemy others have been deployed as strategic devices to reinforce the “us”/ “them” divide. The prisoners are reduced to what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life,” or life which is conceived as the biological minimum, and which “remains included in politics in the form of the exception, that is, as something that is included solely through an exclusion” (11). One may wonder, as Khalid does in the novel, “how anyone can spend their time making other people unhappy. Kicking their heads in for saying the wrong thing. Being other, not like, separate—them—they—demons— Muslims—insurgents—enemy combatants—extremists—terrorists—whatever … And then go home and have a chicken dinner in front of the TV” (209). Yet the way in which the prison guards are seen to treat suspected terrorists will be less surprising when we consider that, in Gregory’s words, American forces were, in fact, “told repeatedly that this was a war against Evil incarnate, so that they were not fighting enemies so much as casting out demons” (77–78). Neither, it seems, can moments of positive sentiment be excluded from the space of Guantánamo: a prison guard’s “small act of kindness” in giving Khalid a bar of chocolate is to him “a hundred times more uplifting than she will ever know” (241); the arrival of old Reader’s Digest copies of books (including To Kill a Mockingbird) or the sudden sight of clear blue sky in one of the rare moments that the boy spends outside his cell allow him some peace of mind and temporary respite. Unlike Imran in An Act of Love or Muzna in I Am Thunder, Khalid continues to draw comfort from the connections to his family, with feelings of isolation and despair giving him grounds for seeing his parents and sisters in a new and more appreciative light. Even his cousin Tariq, whom Khalid partly blames for what happened in Karachi, since Tariq was the one who invented the online game construed by the American authorities as a terrorist plot to destroy the West, brings him a “precious link to his family and the outside world that he could tap into at any time” when he, too, is apprehended and placed in a cell next to Khalid in the story’s bizarre twist

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(261). On the other hand, Guantanamo Boy can be seen as dramatizing the problem of perspective in the same way that Gibbons’s and Khan’s novels do, that is, by unsettling the rigid opposition between Islam and the West, Muslim and non-Muslim that responses to terrorism have often invited. This is emphasized in Khalid’s recollection of “hear[ing] a newsreader say [Islam] was the fastest-growing religion in the world” and “wishing the media wouldn’t say stuff like that. People don’t want to hear those facts, and he doesn’t particularly want to be lumped together with loads of people he doesn’t know, Muslim or not. And Muslims aren’t all the same, just like Christians aren’t all the same” (104). What is required here is a rejection of the static binarism imposed on the post-9/11 world in favor of a worthwhile form of multiculturalism rooted in communal values and principles of human rights. That this is a possibility is suggested in the scene of the school assembly that Khalid attends soon after returning to his home in Rochdale in order to read out the emotional letter that he sent from his Guantánamo cell to one of his former teachers, which he does to great applause. The novel does not, however, reproduce this hopeful projection in the following scene, in which Khalid is dismayed to learn that Nasir, the Muslim greengrocer who warned him against going to Pakistan, moved away with his family after someone put a petrol bomb through his letterbox. This visible sign of anti-Muslim feeling still present in a community that earlier rallied around Khalid’s family to fight for his release shapes the novel’s ambivalent ending. If there is something frighteningly vulnerable in the openness of our borders—that is, if our susceptibility to injury or death at the caprice of another is an all-too-legitimate cause for both fear and grief—it is also, as Butler (2004) argues, what lends us our humanity. What becomes less obvious, she points out accordingly, is why aggression and retaliation seem to so quickly follow the experiences of vulnerability, unexpected violence, and dispossession. For Butler, the problematic response in the West to the 9/11 and 7/7 terrorist attacks has been to defend Western people’s humanity by developing public policies and security measures that recognize its precariousness while denying the primary vulnerability of the non-Western other. Part of our ethical responsibility in a post-9/11 world, as she sees it, is “to consider a dimension of political life that has to do with our exposure to violence and our complicity in it, with our vulnerability to loss and the task of mourning that follows, and with finding a basis for community in these conditions” (Precarious Life 19). The novels examined in this chapter typify an increasing literary preoccupation with the problems of ethnicity, nationalism, and vulnerability while obliging young readers to engage with contemporary questions—most notably, the new forms of inequality resulting from the West/nonWest divisions underpinning the “war on terror” rhetoric—and to reorient themselves as global citizens. Importantly, these novels engage with the challenges that both Muslims and non-Muslims face as a result of the various wars that were launched in the name of securing the West against terror and show

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how communities and families disintegrate under the very government policies that were initiated to protect them. The charge in these narratives is that the rhetoric of fear and suspicion that has allowed the “war on terror” to extinguish both real and imagined threats to the cohesion of Western society conceals a casual disregard for human rights that has in itself become a form of terrorizing, neo-Orientalist power. The challenging of reductive distinctions between “us” and “them,” together with the interrogation of the connection between the racial fears of the Western world and the now persistent fear of terrorism, reveal these novels to be purposeful anti-racist, counter-hegemonic efforts, demonstrating the value of literary responses in the context of the post9/11 and 7/7 world and suggesting ways in which some kind of communication, or the sharing of common intellectual and ethical grounds, across the Muslim/ non-Muslim divide might continue to be possible. “We still bleed the same colour,” Imran says to Chris in An Act of Love’s narrative past (50), in some way foreshadowing the final recognition of a common humanity that is central to the resolutions offered in such texts. The status of most of these authors as non-Muslims does have clear implications for the production of these texts, and particularly for the subjectivities rendered within them: in Gibbons’s novel, for example, the firstperson pronoun is used in relation to Chris, but not to Imran, which means that the reader is enjoined to empathize with every character in the novel, but is given the opportunity to identify more readily with the ethno-culturally privileged perspective of the white character who joins the British Army. However, the characters and narrators of such texts are all still worthy of our attention, since they lead young readers to a more qualified understanding of the ethnic and cultural frames deployed by dominant discourses during times of terror. Rather than a Trojan horse-like instance of the Muslim radical found to have infiltrated the British nation, the main threats to Britons’ lives in An Act of Love and If You Were Me come from non-Muslim villains: An Act of Love’s White Leopard, groomed by Arshad and prevented from detonating his suicide vest thanks to the Hussain brothers’ warning, and Quade, a far-right sympathizer calling himself a Christian soldier and responsible, as revealed towards the end of the novel, for the explosion that kills Imam Nawaz and destroys the local mosque (which will be repaired, we are told, by donations from Chris’s and Imran’s families, among others), as well as If You Were Me’s Colonel Clarke and his criminal network of immigration, military, and police officers making his drug-dealing scheme possible. Perera, too, challenges the racist association of Arab populations with violence and extremism within current mainstream discourses surrounding terror by depicting non-Muslim prison guards as capable of shaming and torturing Guantánamo’s detainees, while at the same time representing Muslim prisoners as vulnerable human beings suffering arbitrary violence where no rights to counsel or means of appeal have been granted by the West. These writers are thus exposing a crucial capacity of post-9/11 children’s literature to assume some of the responsibility

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for reimagining identity politics and breaking down false dichotomies and to take its primary audience beyond the radical, inflexible subject positions hardened by political violence.

Works Cited Abu-Lughod, Lila. Do Muslim Women Need Saving?Harvard University Press, 2013. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. 1995. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford University Press, 1998. Appadurai, Arjun. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Duke University Press, 2006. Arthur, James. “Extremism and Neo-liberal Education policy: A Contextual Critique of the Trojan Horse Affair in Birmingham Schools.” British Journal of Educational Studies, vol. 63, no. 3, 2015, pp. 311–328. Awan, Imran. “Operation ‘Trojan Horse’: Islamophobia or Extremism?” Political Insight, vol. 5, no. 2, 2014, pp. 38–39. Badshah, Nadeem. “Broadcast of Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood Speech Defended by BBC.” The Times, 13 Apr.2018, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/broadca st-of-enoch-powell-s-rivers-of-blood-speech-defended-by-bbc-w0vpvmbjl. Accessed 5 May 2019. Baker, Paul, Costas Gabrielatos, and Tony McEnery. Discourse Analysis and Media Attitudes: The Representation of Islam in the British Press. Cambridge University Press, 2013. Boehmer, Elleke. Postcolonial Poetics: 21st-Century Critical Readings. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Boehmer, Elleke, and Stephen Morton. “Introduction: Terror and the Postcolonial.” Terror and the Postcolonial: A Concise Companion, edited by Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, pp. 1–24. Boumediene, Lakhdar, and Mustafa Ait Idir. Witnesses of the Unseen: Seven Years in Guantanamo. Stanford University Press, 2017. Boxall, Peter. Twenty-First Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2013. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?Verso, 2009. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2004. Butler, Judith. “Speaking of Rage and Grief.” PEN World Voices Festival, 2014, http:// www.critical-theory.com/watch-judith-butler-on-rage-and-grief/. Accessed 5 May 2019. Byrne, Liam. “Britain Must Lead the Way in the Battle of Ideas That Will Defeat Isis.” The Guardian, 17 Nov.2016, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ 2016/nov/17/britain-must-lead-battle-isis-theresa-may-counter-terrorism-plan. Accessed 21 Nov. 2016. Coppock, Vicki, and Mark McGovern. “‘Dangerous Minds’? Deconstructing Counter‐Terrorism Discourse, Radicalisation and the ‘Psychological Vulnerability’ of Muslim Children and Young People in Britain.” Children & Society, vol. 28, no. 3, 2014, pp. 242–256. Davies, Lynn. “Security, Extremism and Education: Safeguarding or Surveillance?” British Journal of Educational Studies, vol. 64, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1–19. DeLillo, Don. Falling Man. Scribner, 2007.

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Denning, Michael. Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller. Routledge, 1987. Falkenhayner, Nicole. Making the British Muslim: Representations of the Rushdie Affair and Figures of the War-On-Terror Decade. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Fleras, Augie. The Politics of Multiculturalism: Multicultural Governance in Comparative Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Gayle, Damien, and Ian Cobain. “UK Intelligence and Police Using Child Spies in Covert Operations.” The Guardian, 19 July2018, https://www.theguardian.com/uknews/2018/ jul/19/british-intelligence-uses-child-spies-in-covert-operations. Accessed 11 Nov. 2018. Gibbons, Alan. An Act of Love. Orion Children’s Books, 2011. Gibbons, Alan. The Trap: Terrorism, Heroism and Everything in Between. Orion Children’s Books, 2016. Gillborn, David. Racism and Education: Coincidence or Conspiracy?Routledge, 2008. Gilroy, Paul. “‘Where Ignorant Armies Clash by Night’: Homogeneous Community and the Planetary Aspect.” International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 6, no. 3, 2003, pp. 261–276. Gregory, Derek. “Vanishing Points: Law, Violence, and Exception in the Global War Prison.” Terror and the Postcolonial: A Concise Companion, edited by Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, pp. 55–98. Grillo, Ralph. “An Excess of Alterity? Debating Difference in a Multicultural Society.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 3, no. 6, 2007, pp. 979–998. Hansen, Randall. “Diversity, Integration and the Turn from Multiculturalism in the United Kingdom.” Belonging? Diversity, Recognition and Shared Citizenship in Canada, edited by Keith Banting, Thomas Courchene, and Leslie Seidle, Institute for Research on Public Policy, 2007, pp. 351–386. Head, Dominic. The State of the Novel: Britain and Beyond. Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. Hepburn, Sam. If You Were Me. Chicken House, 2015. Home Office. Prevent Strategy, 2011, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/p revent-strategy-2011. Accessed 22 May 2015. House of Commons Education Committee. “Extremism in Schools: The Trojan Horse Affair,” 2015, https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201415/cmselect/cm educ/473/47302.htm. Accessed 22 May 2015. Jennings, Kate. Moral Hazard. Text Classics, 2002. Karmani, Alyas. Interview by James Fitzgerald. “Frontline Perspectives on Preventing Violent Extremism: An Interview with Alyas Karmani (STREET UK).” Critical Studies on Terrorism, vol. 9, no. 1, 2016, pp. 139–149. Khan, Muhammad. I Am Thunder. Macmillan Children’s Books, 2018. Kinninmont, Jane. “Britain’s Loose Definition of Extremism is Stoking a Global Crackdown on Dissent.” The Guardian, 23 Sept. 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/comm entisfree/2016/sep/23/britain-extremism-global-effects. Accessed 6 Dec. 2016. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. 1961. Translated by Alphonso Lingis, Kluwer Academic, 1991. Levinas, Emmanuel, and Richard Kearney. “Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas.” Face to Face with Levinas, edited by Richard A. Cohen, State University of New York Press, 1986, pp. 13–33. Lynch, Orla. “British Muslim Youth: Radicalisation, Terrorism and the Construction of the ‘Other.’” Critical Studies on Terrorism, vol. 6, no. 2, 2013, pp. 241–261.

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Marsh, Nicky. “Finance, Fiction, and the Genre of a World Economy.” The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction, 1945–2010, edited by David James, Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 192–206. Matthews, Jamie. “Framing Alleged Islamist Plots: A Case Study of British Press Coverage Since 9/11.” Critical Studies on Terrorism, vol. 8, no. 2, 2015, pp. 266–283. McEwan, Ian. Saturday. Vintage, 2005. Miah, Shamim. Muslims, Schooling and Security: Trojan Horse, Prevent and Racial Politics. Springer International Publishing, 2017. Miah, Shamim. “‘Prevent’ing Education: Anti-Muslim Racism and the War on Terror in Schools.” The State of Race, edited by Nisha Kapoor, Virinder S. Kalra, and James Rhodes, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 146–162. O’Donnell, Aislinn. “Securitisation, Counterterrorism and the Silencing of Dissent: The Educational Implications of Prevent.” British Journal of Educational Studies, vol. 64, no. 1, 2016, pp. 53–76. O’Neill, Martin. “Echoes of Enoch Powell.” New Statesman, 10 Mar.2008, https:// www.newstatesman.com/life-and-society/2008/03/powell-speech-british-film-bbc. Accessed September 14, 2017. Perera, Anna. Guantanamo Boy. Puffin Books, 2009. Pipes, Daniel. The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, the Ayatollah and the West. 2nd ed. Transaction Publishers, 2003. “PREVENT Will Have a Chilling Effect on Open Debate, Free Speech and Political Dissent.” Open letter. The Independent, 10 July2015, http://www.independent.co. uk/voices/letters/prevent-will-have-a-chilling-effect-on-open-debate-free-speech-a nd-political-dissent-10381491.html. Accessed November 22, 2016. Price, Stuart. “The Mediation of ‘Terror’: Authority, Journalism, and the Stockwell Shooting.” Terror and the Postcolonial: A Concise Companion, edited by Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, pp. 273–303. Qureshi, Asim. “PREVENT: Creating ‘Radicals’ to Strengthen Anti-Muslim Narratives.” Critical Studies on Terrorism, vol. 8, no. 1, 2015, pp. 181–191. Said, S. F. “It Could Be You.” Review of Guantanamo Boy, by Anna Perera. The Guardian, 28Mar. 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/mar/28/guanta namo-boy. Accessed 22 May 2015. Sainsbury, Lisa. Ethics in British Children’s Literature: Unexamined Life. Bloomsbury, 2013. Shryock, Andrew. Islamophobia/Islamophilia: Beyond the Politics of Enemy and Friend. Indiana University Press, 2010. Sweney, Mark. “BBC under Fire over Enoch Powell ‘Rivers of Blood’ Broadcast.” The Guardian, 12 Apr.2018, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/apr/12/ bbc-to-air-reading-of-enoch-powells-rivers-of-blood-speech. Accessed 5 May 2019. Upstone, Sara. “9/11, British Muslims, and Popular Literary Fiction.” Reframing 9/ 11: Film, Popular Culture and the “War on Terror,” edited by Jeff Birkenstein, Anna Froula and Karen Randell, Continuum, 2010, pp. 35–44. Ware, Vron. “The White Fear Factor.” Terror and the Postcolonial: A Concise Companion, edited by Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, pp. 99–112. Warmington, Paul, David Gillborn, Nicola Rollock, and Sean Demack. “‘They can’t handle the race agenda’: Stakeholders’ Reflections on Race and Education Policy, 1993– 2013.” Educational Review, 2017, pp. 1–18. doi:10.1080/00131911.2017.1353482. Accessed 12 July 2018.

3

Subcultural Spaces

The post-9/11 novel for the young is shaped by its ongoing dialogue with other forms of fiction that engage with social, political, and cultural issues in a youth context. The way in which this mode of writing treats of marginalized youth experience often intersects with the aestheticization of such experience in the subcultural novel of the 2000s, itself indebted to earlier literary genres like the Bildungsroman and the “Condition of England” novel. In seeking to capture the full range of novelistic responses to contemporary terrorist attacks and to their repercussions, it is important to identify an emerging group of subcultural fictions that are inflected by 9/11 and 7/7, but that engage with these events from a greater distance than the children’s novels I have discussed so far, and that explore the difficult relationship between their young characters’ various attachments and loyalties. When our contemporary fears of youth radicalization become transposed onto the “moral panics” commonly traced to the formation of youth subcultures (see Young 1971; Cohen 2002; Osgerby 2014), the state’s regulation of young people’s behavior might acquire a sinister cast, with young people from ethnic minorities that are targeted in the internal war on terror struggling to challenge institutional racism in legitimate or public-sanctioned ways. Similarly to the youngsters who are the subjects of earlier discussions of what has come to be known as “subcultures”— whose juvenile gangs are viewed as a “collective response by the economically or ethnically marginalized to the conditions of their disadvantage” (Osgerby 3)—the new generation of disempowered ethnic subjects are sometimes seen to search for answers to the post-9/11 tribalism in gang affiliation. Several contemporary British writers including Alex Wheatle, Malorie Blackman, Beverley Naidoo, Benjamin Zephaniah, Gautam Malkani, Bali Rai, Na’ima B. Robert, and Nikesh Shukla have responded to the predicament in which a UK-born 9/11 generation of ethnic minority youth find themselves—a predicament shared with young people growing up across the globe as part of Muslim or immigrant communities that effectively became “suspect” in the wake of 9/11—by illuminating the continuing importance of subcultural affiliation, representation, and affirmation to disaffected Asian and black British children

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and teenagers. This outpouring of novelistic comments on the attractiveness of subcultures to younger members of ethnic minority communities in postterror Britain suggests a cultural urgency to the connection that these writers divine between local cross-racial solidarity and social empowerment. This chapter looks at subcultural literature that sets out to explore the limits and possibilities of certain youth alliances—a kind of literature which in itself has received little scrutiny after falling between academic disciplines (Bentley, “Staring” 175–176)—in its socio-political context and through the lens of the meanings that subcultures hold for those involved. Considering these texts in the light of postcolonial and critical race theory involves highlighting the ways in which colonial legacies continue to complicate young people’s individual and communal sense of identity at the same time as counter-terror wars triggered by 9/11 and 7/7 appear to be underpinned by the contemporary incarnation of colonial oppositions. Yet, if “it is a commonplace that divided national/ethnic loyalties or … problematisations of Britishness” have been a recurring motif in British fiction from a range of ethnic minority cultures (Murphy and Sim 2), it is also the case that hybridity in this charged social and political climate proves to be more than a condition that “posits false centres of unchanging traditions … against which postcolonial critics have a tendency to define equally false peripheral postcolonial identities” (Loh 118; see also Tew 2004). Indeed, against the backdrop of the post-9/11 tribal divides, hybrid identities that encompass self-identification as Muslim can be argued to constitute a “form of social rebellion against the status quo, resistance against the inherent prejudices perceived within institutional authority and a rejection of middle-class aspirations” (Loh 118–119). For young marginalized Britons like those portrayed in Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (2006), a racialized urban youth identity is a construct that can be embraced, celebrated, and even performed, with the performance itself holding a sense of social empowerment (see Grzegorczyk 2015). Certainly, this is the reasoning of the main character from Alex Wheatle’s The Dirty South (2008), Dennis, a Brixton teenager who contends that “if you’re a wannabe rebel from the street … you wanna do something that really fucks off your parents, your grandparents, the Feds and those Tory voters who listen to the Today programme on Radio 4. You become a Muslim. Simple as” (104). Yet it is interesting that the performance of a racialized identity in these texts is often at odds with the young characters’ background as second-generation children of immigrant parents from whose cultural beliefs they feel isolated due to their British upbringing. At the same time, such performance becomes a statement of protest against the ideological contexts in which the young ethnic subject’s resistant (and often violent, hypermasculinized, and self-destructive) behavior needs to be understood. The hyphenated identities that are negotiated under global conditions in the novels discussed here reflect the difficult relationship between local and national singularities and intercultural and transnational positions. From Bali Rai’s The Crew (2003) and The Last Taboo (2006), through Na’ima B.

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Robert’s Boy vs. Girl (2010) and Black Sheep (2013), to Nikesh Shukla’s Run, Riot (2018), these novels can all be characterized as the “state-of-thenation” strand of subcultural literature. This type of fiction is set in the contemporary moment and addresses a range of conjoined concerns that range “from the perennial identification of youth culture with criminality, anti-social behavior and promiscuity, to … the politicization of youth in terms of class, race and/or racism and terrorist activity in the wake of 9/11, 7/7 and the wars [against terror]” (Bentley, “Subcultural Fictions” 58; see also Bentley 2014). The representation of the constructed and fluid nature of subcultural identities in these texts is marked by the possibilities and failures of different forms of solidarity—under which the discontinuities at work in the experience of hybrid youth identities in Britain might be drawn together—and by resistance to (but not without some participation in) ideological divisiveness encouraged by the politics of Western governments after 9/11. Taken together, these works might stand as an exploration and a performance, albeit from very different standpoints, of both problematic and positive aspects of subcultural affiliation and expression in the new, post-terror reality.

The Likes of Us The subcultural identities that are fictionalized in post-9/11 writing are often embattled, fluid, and contingent, but they are also telling sites for investigating the forms and operations of solidarity that might potentially be established between marginalized and oppressed groups in an evolving, and so genuinely transcultural and transethnic, Britain. Bali Rai’s The Crew (2003) uses the Famous Five story tradition to tell an altogether grimmer tale of a diverse group of underclass northern teenagers who mix optimistic multicultural expression with quiet disillusionment with their lower economic and socio-political standing while struggling against a backdrop of drugs, prostitution, and violence. The mysterious sequence of events that includes the finding of an abandoned bag overflowing with cash and the disappearance of the group’s only white member, Ellie, puts to the test not only their relations with each other and with other crews, but also their strategies for resistance against forms of individual and institutional prejudice faced by minority youth within Britain. Rai’s The Last Taboo (2006) offers an exploration of some of the excessive reactions of families, friends, and local gangs to the interracial relationship between an Asian British girl, Simran, and a black British boy, Tyrone. The consequences of the breaking of the titular last taboo bring to light the erosion and decline of the role of interethnic solidarity in contemporary Britain due to the defensive identity politics of particular ethnic, cultural, or religious constituencies. Both novels are located in recognizable, post-9/11 northern English cities, in which young characters have come to accept as normal days on which a “mosque ha[s] been firebombed and a couple of asylum-seekers … ha[ve] been savagely beaten up the road from the community centre” (The Crew 125), and

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situations in which local British Punjabi boys refer to the Muslim members of their communities using derogatory terms like “Muzzy twat[s]” and “soollah” (The Last Taboo 64, 70). There is clearly a sense here in which minority youth can miss out on potentially transformative and empowering experiences when they divide themselves internally into identifiable, closed cultural groupings, and an equally manifest apprehension of the dangers that the assertion of such estranged, closed positions represents. In telling the story of the youngsters from The Crew from the alternating perspectives of Billy, a British Asian boy who is the unofficial leader of the group, and Ellie, the youngest and the only white British member (but not the only female one), Rai offers his readers an examination of the interlocking pressures of ethnicity, class, and gender on the youth struggle toward belonging and representation. The Crew imagines a coming together of young Asian, black, and white Britons whose experiences of social estrangement and exclusion have paved the way for this imagined interethnic union; after all, growing up in the concrete, underfunded central city area, forever battling organized crime on the one hand and intensified suspicion from institutional networks on the other, as Billy tells us, “You need to have someone to watch your back—someone to go to when shit goes wrong. Most of us can’t go to the police or our schoolteachers. Things don’t work like that for us. We have to look out for each other” (17). But even in this tight-knit multicultural group whose recruits “don’t do business with racism” (8), Ellie is initially judged by Della, a young black girl damaged by the foster system, as an “impostor,” and a year after Ellie joined Billy’s crew, she still “feel[s] like [she] ha[s] to prove [her]self all the time and [she] do[es]n’t like it” (22), which points to the ambiguities and contradictions of processes of cultural self-authentication, or achieving a sense of “authentic” belonging to a subcultural group (see also Bromley 2000; Gunning 2010). And even as we see these young characters unite against pervasive systemic controls, injustices, and oppression, and “spen[d] hours talking about how messed up the world [i]s” (15), their hybridized crew is nevertheless unusual enough for this area (as one of the policemen says to Billy after Ellie’s disappearance, “Your gang are a strange bunch, aren’t they? … [R]ound here your blacks stick with blacks and your Asians with other Asians and white kids are few and far between” (68)) that the police suspect her own crew’s involvement in the white girl’s kidnapping (68–69). What both novels indicate to be more typical of contemporary subcultural alliances is animosity toward those who are not part of one’s recognizable cultural community, and in The Last Taboo, only a handful of young characters are prepared to take a stand against the everyday racism of their community members, and to translate ethically between their own situation and that of others. The accusations leveled against Simran and her brother David after the girl starts dating David’s (black British) best friend’s cousin, Tyrone, is that their branch of the family has long carried on “acting white” (18, 203–204), and has “brought shame on the family name and reputation”

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by turning their back on Indian tradition and forming close associations with black and white Britons (197). With vicious (verbal and physical) attacks coming at Simran and Tyrone as well as their more liberal friends and relatives from members of all the subcultural groups portrayed in the novel, the girl finds herself having to decide if “it really [was] worth nearly dying for something that so many people thought was wrong” (241). At the same time, Simran realizes that if a white person made any of the comments that she keeps hearing from her Asian British peers (such as her older cousin’s remark that he had failed to stay in touch with the black British boys he knew from school because “they all went to prison and [Asian lads] done all the work” (21)), their attitude would be judged as imperialist and racist. The hypocritical nature of these young men’s approach to racial identity (soon mirrored in the behavior of Asian British girls at Simran’s school, who form their own “Desi Girls Crew” and draw gang symbols onto their books and personal items and racist graffiti in the school toilets (71)) is further underlined in the novel by scenes such as the one in which an all-Asian British football club accuses their all-white opponents’ team of “pure” racism in their selection of players (19–20), or when one Asian British player’s rant about “‘[f]uckin’ black, banana-eatin’ monkey bastards” combines British Asian, south-east Asian, and black American slangs’ linguistic influences, something that David is quick to notice: “Seein’ as how you hate black people so much, it’s funny that you try an’ talk black,” he tells the rest of the team before he finally quits as their player and sits on a bench with the supporters of the other team, which includes his best friend, Dean, and his cousin Tyrone (134). From this perspective, it is equally ironic that Simran and David are denounced by their friends and cousins for being antiAsian in that they dislike bhangra (18, 203), a form of music which, through its fusion of Punjabi and Bengali traditional folk music with popular black American music genres could, after all, be seen as the “opening up of a selfconsciously post-colonial space in which the affirmation of difference points forward to a more pluralistic conception of nationality and perhaps beyond that to its transcendence” (Gilroy 62). The novel reveals exclusionary subcultural units that are isolated from each other despite the fact that many of their concerns around the power structures that foster inequality and oppression are strikingly similar. Part of the development of the two novels’ recordings of young people’s efforts to gain legitimacy within subcultures, through cross-identifications or inter-subcultural violence, respectively, is to place these efforts in narratives of cause and effect with pervasive racism in concrete practices of regulating subjects through urban planning, education, employment, or police profiling. Thus, the neighborhood that Billy’s crew hardly ever leave provides a microcosmic view of a divided nation: none of the crew members are blind to the problems of drug dealing or prostitution—which to them are “just a part of life, like trees in the country or red buses in London. They are like local attractions, only more hazardous to your health” (The Crew 16)—and

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unlike the old Victorian train station, which has recently “been put through a clean-up,” since it is the “first thing that visitors to the city would see,” the area where these teenagers live has been neglected by the council and is neither representable nor represented (37, 38). The underprivileged children that grow up in the area “have to go to war every day just to get an education and then fall at the entrance to uni,” with the knowledge required for them to survive in this harsh environment coming from unlikely sources, such as Billy’s Rastafarian stepfather, Nanny, who is “like the ghetto professor and everyone knows him. Sometimes … the Crew listen to him for hours” (16, 21). Despite the lack of employment opportunities anywhere except in the construction industry (where Billy finds it impossible to hold down a job due to the “other lads … all be[ing] loud-mouthed white blokes who’d thought it was clever to call [him] Gunga Din and tell [him] that [he] was all right for a Paki” (124)), The Crew’s main character still harbors ambitions for an alternative career: “I knew what I wanted to do—go to college and finish my education, be a journalist or something—but it seemed like a distant dream … Apparently I had no respect for the system, which was fine by me. The system didn’t respect me either so the feeling was mutual” (131). Where other gangs in Billy’s neighborhood take on children “looking to step up their station in life and crime is usually the only way they can do that” (14), he decides to lead his crew differently and to “lead [him]self [s]traight out of [t]here” (18); the obstacles that most often block his path, however, are connected with the police’s stubborn identification of the ethnic subcultural subject with a potential criminal suspect (see also Delsol and Shiner 2015; Ambikaipaker 2018). It is the resentment on the part of Billy and his crew of such discriminatory profiling that engenders their further marginalization and culminates in the release of violent energies at later points in the story. As with The Last Taboo—whose characters’ social ambitions (when set in contrast, through flashbacks to the 1970s, with the socio-political realities and lived experiences of Simran’s father and grandfather) are shown to be more achievable than those of previous generations—the youth violence in The Crew is established as a consequence of the self-defeating patterns of social interaction in which its young characters are engaged. When Billy’s crew act out against the politics of differential distributions of resources within contemporary maps of power, and The Last Taboo’s gangs deploy the very exclusionary assumptions on which this politics is based, these young people are, in effect, involved in the curbing of their own opportunities for social mobility. The aggressive hypermasculinity at work within these narratives can be read as both a protest against the exploitation and oppression of minorities systemically inherent within the British social scene and as a defense against an insecurity of hyphenated identities among ethnic minority teenagers. But these young characters’ articulation of “compensatory” or “protest” masculinity not only pushes them into further conflict with authority, but also brings them little “benefit from the patriarchal dividend” (Connell 79; see

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also Alexander 2000; Walker 2006). As the young male characters in Rai’s novels supplement their “testosterone-fuelled games” of violence with heroic games that involve “playin’ like feds” and “playing at being detectives” on the one hand (175, 42, 93), and with misogynist practices on the other (taking the form of “driving around the streets … whenever the sun came out, whistling at any girls they passed” (The Crew 92), or of “coming out with a whole load of nasty thoughts about [their girlfriends] and what [they were] going to do with [them]” and what sexual feats they supposedly performed with “[t]hem student bitches” (The Last Taboo 99–100, 227)), their female peers’ sober assessment of these antics is that of “silly little boys” playing at big men (The Crew 56, The Last Taboo 1). Interestingly, such performance is also informed by the dominant, globalized constructions of masculinity in popular culture, with Billy imitating his (all-white and allmale) heroes from the Anglo-American crime novel (The Crew 93), and Simran’s cousin Satnam appearing to be modeling himself on “some Bollywood bad bwoi” (The Last Taboo 17). The powerful influence of globally valued cultural signifiers on ethnic and subcultural formation of identity is gradually unfolded in both texts in ways that link the subcultural subject’s appropriation of the dominant capitalist paradigm of the globalized market economy to the reduction in the subversive potential of subcultural membership (see also Bentley 2015, esp. 62–64). Thus, while the hypermasculinized and globalized nature of their performance continues to mark the presence of a “subcultural force refusing to remain hidden” (Upstone 167), it still fails to give these subcultures either access to the upper echelons of British society (from which exclusion for the ethnic subject, as Colebrook reminds us, “has been enforcement, never an option” (49)) or the respect that they seek from each other. It is characters like Billy, Simran, or Tyrone—who are prepared to step outside inter-subcultural (and interethnic) conflict, and, in the case of the two boys, to reject to a large extent the subcultural normalization of misogynistic and violent masculinity (a rejection that is echoed by other gangaffiliated contemporary characters, such as bookish Jas in Malkani’s Londonstani (2006) and artistic Lemar in Wheatle’s Liccle Bit (2015))—that create a truly empowered identity different from those around them. Even so, they, too, are repeatedly held back because of the rigidity of both mainstream cultural and subcultural conventions. If straddling the divide between inside and outside space, between bedroom and street, is the fundamental condition of adolescence (see Baker 2004; Lincoln 2012; Croft 2018), then the way Rai’s characters navigate these spaces, and the way in which subcultural space itself is organized in his novels can certainly be seen to emphasize the difference and the dislocations that are part of the hyphenated, ethnically hybrid condition. And while the articulation of displacement and dislocation is not one that lends itself easily to mapping, the young characters in The Crew and The Last Taboo also tend to simultaneously occupy two different subcultural categories as identified by Jo Croft (2018), that of the “wayward youth” and the “teenage

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dreamer,” while displaying the inescapable inbetweenness of second-generation immigrants to Britain. The category of the “wayward youth,” as Croft sees it, can encompass not only “dissocial” and “delinquent,” but also “dislocated” and “mobile” adolescents (222). Therefore, it proves an apt description both for “young black, Asian or white lads withered by heroin and crack abuse, shadows that leapt out as you passed, sticking you with blades and taxing your mobile and money,” who are housed in Billy’s neighborhood’s underground car parks, or what he perceives as “ready-made lairs for modern-day Fagins” (The Crew 80), and for the novels’ main protagonists, who, in states of distracted movement, dissociation, and exposure, can occasionally be seen to make aimless journeys around their towns. Whenever Billy or Simran embark on such journeys, it is seemingly less to pursue and more to avoid new ways of thinking and feeling, or as Ian Hacking would have it, to “eliminate self” (198). But as these voyages of self-elimination sometimes end with Rai’s characters coming to harm and enlisting the sympathy of others, their newfound awareness of the seriousness of the issues that they face (and the helpfulness of people from outside their culture) is also shown to lead the two protagonists towards selfdiscovery (The Crew 72, The Last Taboo 215–216). Moreover, their heightened vulnerability in the outside spaces of their communities (where even the back alley that forms the official territory of Billy’s crew or the community center where David and Dean are used to socializing can be taken over by hostile gangs) stands in marked contrast with the safe space for cultural exchanges that is provided by these teenagers’ bedrooms. The importance attached to this private (yet obviously shared) reflective space in the two novels can be linked to the experience of “teenage dreamers,” who wish to be somewhere else, but are “unable to pursue a linear version of worldly progression” (Croft 220), here due to the limitations of their marginal racialized positions. The novels find that the repressive institutional and communal regulatory forces that bring these young people together also cause them to look for an intimate space that might facilitate dialogue and a common language with which to then articulate a vulnerable and hybrid existence. Like most contemporary subcultural fictions by British Asian and black British authors, The Crew and The Last Taboo indicate that, even as the meaning and nuance of subcultural affiliation are often overlooked in the dominant presentation of a homogenized formation of deviant, delinquent youth, subcultural belonging can still carry weight in ways that allow ethnic minority youth to resist the attempts of the dominant cultural discourse to impose fixity upon them. But unlike in many of these novels, in Rai’s books the possibility of the subculture as a space of productive negotiation of cultural hybridity into a coherent and liberated identity—that is, an ethnic counter-culture capable of conjuring a kind of inter-racial collective from the individual experience of oppression and material dispossession—stands or falls here on young characters’ recognition of and openness to the values of others, including their parents’ generation. Rather than moving away from the older generations’ emphasis on collective loyalties like the majority

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of youth in their respective neighborhoods (something that Tyrone learns to understand better as a result of his research into how his family used to live when they arrived in Britain in the 1950s: “mostly our older people had to stick together and that,” he tells Simran, “and now us young ones are messing it up” (The Last Taboo 172)), Billy’s and Simran’s multi-ethnic groups of friends actually listen to the opinions of their elders and benefit from their knowledge (“It might sound like a weird notion,” Billy confesses to the reader, “but I reckon Nanny’s beliefs are just as valid as other views and I love to sit and discuss things with him” (The Crew 20)). And while some of the adults portrayed in these novels are shown to react violently when addressed in this way (and to head toward hardened, inflexible versions of themselves when faced with the idea of their young relatives finding forms of congress across ethnicities (The Crew 104, The Last Taboo 196)), Billy’s and Simran’s relationships with their parents (and, in the case of Simran, also with her grandfather) reveal a kind of reciprocal engagement that enables youth agency and the very forms of shared thinking across the limits that divide these communities that many of their members appear to reject. Thus, it is surprising perhaps that, for all his attention to the transformative capacity of the interstitial, subcultural space to recast the world by opening selves to translation, Rai’s literary rendering of inter-ethnic, anti-racist solidarity offers little convincing evidence of his young characters’ lasting social agency or progressive potential. If these novels are capable of offering a transformative rendering of the world, it is through processes in which the ideological codes of interpellations existing in the material world are addressed and reshaped. Their political work is done in recognizing the failures of apolitical multiculturalism and opening up the potential for a different relation to community.

Resistance through Ritual The sort of interrogation of subcultural identity that allows for an address and assessment of the roles into which ethnic minority youth are interpellated in post-terror Britain that is carried out by The Crew and The Last Taboo is also present in Na’ima B. Robert’s Boy vs. Girl (2010) and Black Sheep (2013). Unlike Rai, however, Robert chooses to respond to the narrative structures within which young diasporic Britons find themselves entering into post-9/11 local and global communities by exploring the appeal, the limitations, and the potential of Muslim, as opposed to ethnic or subcultural, self-identification. Boy vs. Girl offers its readers access to the outlooks, ambitions, social interactions, and cultural habits of British Pakistani twin siblings, Faraz and Farhana, who are pulled between competing cultural allegiances. As both siblings navigate the interstices of ethnic, religious, and subcultural divisions in contemporary Britain, we can also discern a divide in their lived experiences along the line of gender. Black Sheep engages in a similar plurality of perspectives, interspersing its first-person

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account of the daily struggles of Dwayne, an aspiring rapper drawn into a criminal lifestyle after having grown up in a poor, violent Brixton neighborhood, with chapters being narrated by his new girlfriend Misha, an ambitious, university-bound daughter of an overprotective local councilor single mother, who left the area in which Dwayne still lives when Misha was a little girl. Black and Asian British boys are shown in these novels to be particularly vulnerable to attention from and exploitation by members of gang-style subcultures: “[T]hat’s just how it works where we come from,” Dwayne’s reformed friend and surrogate older brother Tony explains to Misha after she eventually learns of the younger man’s criminal past. “Everyone is in a crew— or wants to be in one. The crew is your family, your protection, your identity” (Black Sheep 359); “It’s like the streets are claiming them one by one,” Faraz hears from a Muslim community care worker Imran, and when looking at his peers at their local mosque, the boy himself thinks of them as the “ones [who] aren’t on the streets yet” (Boy vs. Girl 129, 76, italics mine). Yet the evocation of vulnerability here has just as frequently to do with the young female characters from ethnic minorities, who find it equally if not more difficult to control the terms of their own entry into language and representation. While both novels can be seen to represent, in the words of Nick Bentley, “aspects of the typical Bildungsroman novel with subcultural affiliation presented as part of the process of working through adolescence” (“Staring” 185), such identities are thrown off in order not to allow these young characters to establish themselves in the dominant culture of the larger society or the marginalized culture of their families and communities. Rather, this is done to develop a sense of rootedness in Islamic tradition from which they feel at least in part excluded by their upbringing in the British Pakistani or Afro-Caribbean communities within Britain. Much like Rai’s fiction, Robert’s novels present the opportunities for the young minority subject’s access to higher education and to legitimate, secure employment as severely limited. The racial prejudices ingrained in the British education system are seen to give whole generations a view of school as a “holding cell for … black boys … until [they]’re old enough to go to jail” (Black Sheep 81), and Black Sheep’s Dwayne knows full well that “there ain’t no teachers … who believe that any of [them] are even gonna pass [their] exams, let alone go to college or university” (109). The charge entailed by the accusations that the only way in which a black British boy (or “your lot,” as Dwayne is labeled by one of his teachers) could possibly receive full marks on an assignment is through dishonesty (Black Sheep 84), or that Asian pupils are typically a “waste of space, … [a]bsolutely nothing going for them whatsoever” (Boy vs. Girl 138) ultimately relies on the view of the young black or Asian British subject as suffering permanently from thwarted psycho-cultural development (see, for example, Gillborn 2008; Archer 2008). It comes as no surprise then, especially in a climate in which young people quickly learn that there “[a]in’t no good jobs for black boys anyway” (see also Rollock et al. 2015), that children as young as Dwayne’s

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ten-year-old brother Jay and his classmates are led to conclude that “school’s for losers who ain’t got no sense” (106). The street life of their peer groups offers these characters both the prospect of a steady income (Black Sheep 31, 106, 235, Boy vs. Girl 172, 175), and the chance to repudiate their parents’ middle-class ambitions and to reclaim misperceptions about the post-9/11 moral panic around young ethnic subjects through a violent assertion of cultural difference: “They hate us and they want to keep up down in every way they can,” Faraz’s new protector and gang leader Skrooz tells him, “But they don’t know that lads like us, we don’t want a piece of their bloody Middle England. We don’t want their City jobs and poxy universities. We make it so that they are pissing themselves about our neighbourhoods, so scared they can’t even come here cos we rule” (Boy vs. Girl 178). Indeed, there are moments in both novels where the moral conscience of their young (male) characters gives way to the resignation of what Croft (2018) would call “suggestible gang-boys”: “After all, this was reality he was dealing with right here, not some spiritual utopia,” Faraz thinks to himself after drifting into membership of Skrooz’s gang. “Besides … his reputation at school had received a huge boost” (Boy vs. Girl 176). At the same time, the upwardly mobile path pursued in Black Sheep by Misha’s mother, whose aspirations have been internalized by the main protagonist herself, is revealed to be restricted in its own way. Misha’s world might be one of “privilege and opportunity” (361), but it is still “riddled with racism” (34), and the girl is forced by her mother to cultivate a certain image of herself as a model minority high-flier and to decide upon a career in the sciences rather than in her beloved linguistics, all at the cost of erasing Misha’s links with the Brixton community—which her mother dismisses as ghettoized and unwilling to assimilate—in which she thrived for most of her childhood. The various forms of resistance seeking to overcome racial prejudice and to support those operations of representation that allow positive affirmations of hybrid youth identity to be made and heard can be read here as being linked to the language and creativity of the new youth urban cultures. In Boy vs. Girl, it is arts that bind Faraz—in a shared refusal of the sociocultural status quo—to an urban Islamic youth movement practicing an ethics of care and a commitment to equality and fostering cultural understanding and exchange through public arts projects as part of a wider effort to present an alternative to gang culture; in Black Sheep, Dwayne’s street poetry is in part the vehicle for the book’s critique of marginalization and criminalization of urban youth on the grounds of race, and in part a critique of dominant discourses refusing young ethnic minorities access to unmediated forms of representation and appearance. But where arts and language open up the space of freedom for these characters from a dominant culture that belittles the young ethnic subject’s cultural expressions and transactions, the acts of using language as an oppositional and subversive force also reveal the scaffolding that holds these voices in place. If appropriating the “highly

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inflammatory language of the racially prejudiced … forces readers to confront their own fears and concerns” (Colebrook 46)—an assault on culture that allows the audience to feel a certain consciousness of their own skin, their own clothes, their own cultural identity—it nevertheless also reproduces the language of Western power and prejudice, as in the scenes in which Dwayne and Skrooz refer to their own communities by drawing on racist terms such as “niggaz” and “Pakis,” respectively (Boy vs. Girl 54, Black Sheep 177). Neither can the idea of “rewriting the script” (Boy vs. Girl 71, Black Sheep 82, 256) fully accommodate gender difference: the young Muslim women in these novels find it hard to make their voices heard both due to the social norms that regulate their behavior within their own culture (Boy vs. Girl’s Farhana is frequently silenced, spoken about rather than to, and made to forgo her active participation in cultural ritual) and because of Western misconceptions and false representations of Muslim women as utterly deprived of agency. This is registered most clearly in the episode that details Misha’s outrage at Dwayne’s attempts to teach her about Islam, in which she remarks thoughtlessly to her Muslim schoolfriend, “If he thinks he’s going to get me hiding behind a scarf, chained to the kitchen sink with ten children, he’s got another think coming” (Black Sheep 289), whereas when Farhana starts wearing the hijab in public, her English teacher, who habitually encourages her female pupils to express themselves freely, tells the class that she is “sure that Farhana is much too smart to end up in a burqa” (Boy vs. Girl 118) (see also Abu-Lughod 2013; Ahmad 2017; Tarlo 2017). It is not until Boy vs. Girl’s Farhana and Faraz and Black Sheep’s Dwayne resolve, in gestures of new communal belonging, to make a firm commitment to following Islamic principles that a range of ideological fault lines drawn in the wake of 9/11 and 7/7 become visible in their own family and community circles. What we observe in this cultural here-and-now, as do Farhana, Faraz, and Dwayne, is a reductive view of the Muslim other from the position of a more or less normalized West, even among the families that are, in fact, practicing Islam. Thus, in Boy vs. Girl, the siblings’ mother tells Farhana that the girl “do[es]n’t need all this hijab, jilbab, nigab nonsense” and that she cannot pray at the mosque with other Muslim women not just because “while [they] are living [in Britain], [they] should try to blend in, not stand out” but also so that she does not “com[e] home brainwashed and full of crazy ideas” like “wanting to marry some fanatic with a big beard” (7, 157), whereas their father interrogates Imran thoroughly about his motivations before letting him put up his arts organization’s posters at the mosque for fear of “end[ing] up causing trouble for all the Muslims in this country” by supporting “something political,” which to him means anything from terrorist-friendly activities to anti-war rallies (77). Similarly, in Black Sheep, Dwayne is able to interpret Misha’s reluctance to discuss his newly adopted religious beliefs with him as his girlfriend’s concern about Islam posing a violent threat to the Western (and Christian) identity in which she feels secure (276–277). And while Dwayne’s own first thoughts on Tony’s

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conversion to Islam were replete with “[i]mages of the Twin Towers crashing down,” and he was indeed anxious about being radicalized into “some Al Qa’eeda ting, … blowing up planes and stuff” (145), he soon discovers Islam’s commitment to preserving an open-ended plurality within Muslim communities that actively try to “better [themselves], build something for the next generation,” and to obliging its followers to do good without regarding some part of the population as socially redundant (173, 243). As a result of his new religious stance, for the first time in his life, Dwayne “feel[s] good about himself, about being black” (173), and after his shahadah, he has a sense of being “cleansed” and “ready for a new chapter of his life,” one in which he can live up to what is asked of him as a Muslim (274)—just like Faraz and Farhana, whose stricter observance of Muslim rituals makes them feel stronger and more spiritually aware (132), as well as more connected both with one another (132), and with their Islamic peers (115, 221). Where the cultural zeitgeist, under twenty-first-century conditions, has cast the hybrid, constructed, and performed nature of ethnic subcultural identities as the key to the young minority subject’s social freedom and empowerment, in Robert’s novels it is possible to see what Dave Gunning would describe as the “tension between living within the tenets of Islam and negotiating a feasible position within twenty-first-century [Britain]” (103). Boy vs. Girl’s Farhana is one visible example of the way in which “grow[ing] up in a society where everything is calling out to you, offering you forbidden things” while wishing at the same time to stay true to one’s Muslimness can lead to feelings of disorientation and thwarted obligation, and her own sense of split subjectivity, or “mild schizophrenia”—which, from her observations, is a “condition that practically all the Asian girls she knew suffered from”—is paralleled in the two novels when Faraz and Dwayne start to assess their own responses to the appeal of street life (42). At the same time, if these characters gradually turn to their Islamic identity as a “communal rallying point to resist racist pressures” that instances an alternative to subcultural association (Gunning 15), for many of their peers Islam is the “hottest thing to hit the streets since hiphop” (Black Sheep 157). The popularity of “this new Muslim vibe” (Black Sheep 157) is illustrated by Black Sheep’s so-called “Muslim Boys,” whose “role models were Al-Qa’eda, the ultimate enemies of the system,” and by Boy vs Girl’s “trendy hijabis,” girls who have “gone the ‘hijabi fashionista’ route,” showing off their hijabs worn with the latest Western fashions and expertly applied make-up (Black Sheep 267, Boy vs Girl 185). This new popularity can be explained by way of Judith Butler’s theories of performativity, used in one strand of post-subcultural approaches developed over the last two decades to “emphasize the way in which an individual’s consumption of, and affiliation to, subcultural identity is fluid and dependent on context” (Bentley, “Subcultural Fictions” 55), and by the assumption of the eagerness with which marginalized youth might seek to identify with what they perceive as the “renewed ideological power of the Muslim world” (Loh 118). The gang

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subculture itself no longer promises prestige that replaces the core values of the mainstream culture—values like ambition or conformity—with an alternative set of principles (see Osgerby 2014); gang membership is now seamlessly assimilated into a globalized capitalist society and relies on conformity to the conventions that facilitate unimpeded consumption: “[T]here is only one language that we speak around here,” Faraz learns from Skrooz, “only one language everyone understands. That language is money,” and the boy’s awe of Skrooz’s flashy car and of the sleek new phone that he gets from the gangster is echoed in the perception among Dwayne’s crew that one has somehow “arrived” through being able to afford “the designer kicks, the crisp garmz, the stuff that made [them] look and feel good” (Boy vs. Girl 172, Black Sheep 31). By contrast, Islam provides Robert’s main characters with an ideological code through which a more productive anti-racist critique of the systems that construct social capital in Britain springs, emerging from the community structures re-established by young minority Britons themselves. The failure of the existing modes of subcultural resistance to normativity sustained by post-9/11 framing of social reality and the lack of social solidarity among and within ethnic minorities (whose members are often themselves guilty of cultural discrimination) can enable the fashioning of anti-racist communality around religious bases. With the politicization of youth shaped by anti-racist resistance to the state- and media-driven demonization of young British Muslims post-9/11 (and 7/7), the link between religion, politics, and cultural consumption in contemporary subcultures becomes increasingly complicated. Yet Robert’s novels ultimately present their young characters’ embracing of Muslim identity not in terms of a retreat into restrictive stereotypes or a capitulation to the performative reality of ethnic belonging, but as an attempt at agency in which the ideas of social freedom and cultural tradition would be fused. The moments when they lack the confidence to transcend stereotypes in this way put Faraz and Dwayne in trouble with the police and expose their loved ones to danger, and are presumably intended to demonstrate the consequences of the selfdefeating patterns of violent social interaction in which most of the ethnic minority young men in these texts are engaged. In the end, however, the expressly oppositional character of social mobilization aligned with being Muslim offers a focus for young people to unify in one community and address their immediate local situation. One of Dwayne’s crew’s rival gangs changes their name from “Peel Dem Crew” to “Pray Days Change” and “were trying to straighten up: some of them had become Muslim, others were trying to make money from music instead of drugs” (Black Sheep 370), and as suggested by the last scene of Boy vs. Girl, Faraz is probably already contributing to the Islamic urban arts project (256). And so, what begins to emerge is a concept of communal progression based on the use of faith against the circumstances of cultural oppression and developing in difficult tandem with the simultaneously self-damaging and liberating forces of subcultural capital.

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Running Riot in the 2000s Nikesh Shukla’s Run, Riot (2018) is a fine example of subcultural fiction in which youth become politicized in post-terror, increasingly divided, and conflicted Britain. Set in a run-down tower block in a large city around a single night following the politically sanctioned murder of an ethnic minority teenager and culminating in a riot, the novel has chilling echoes of the tragic events of the Grenfell Tower fire (of which Shukla himself speaks as his inspiration in the Author’s Note) and of riots like those in 2011, when disaffected youth were protesting against an inequitable social system, indifferent political elites, and police brutality. In the story of the concerns and violence encountered by a close group of young minority Britons living in an inner-city area that is about to become gentrified, these grievances are very much alive: the British Asian twins Taran and Hari’s mother earns a salary “[w]hich is supposed to be enough. But it isn’t” working in a hospital where she is “racially abused on a daily basis by Leave voters who can’t bear the thought of a South Asian nurse touching them to insert an IV or take their temperature or hold their hand as they spasm in pain” (52, 13); their local MP never replies to Taran’s email about the sudden, inexplicable rise in rent on her family’s previous home (which they could subsequently no longer afford due to her late father’s then deteriorating health) (92); and the police justify their strip-search of Hari in front of onlookers (“a copper shov[ing] two rough fingers up inside him and whisper[ing], ‘What you hiding?’ as he searched every contour with his finger”) with a throwaway line about the boy “fit[ting] the profile” (33). The lived experiences of the twins’ best friends, Anna and Jamal, further exemplify the ever-stricter antiterror and anti-immigration regulations enforced by the UK’s post-9/11 governments in the name of national security, with Anna’s racially profiled father imprisoned under counter-terror laws because of fabricated evidence (78), and Jamal’s refugee parents being deported after losing their leave to remain but insisting that the boy should stay in Britain with his uncle, who is forever absent, as his guardian (51–52, 62). Against this background, Shukla’s book explores both the communal imperatives for and the limitations of youth political resistance to the material and representational racial inequalities perpetuated in contemporary Britain. The primary means by which Run, Riot communicates the development of political engagement among its young characters is through the use of space to map power relations, its protagonists caught in the crossfire of the nation’s and the city’s physical reinventions. On the one hand, there are what Sunaina Maira has called “surveillance effects” as “produced in the post-9/11 moment for those who are constructed as racialized … objects of permanent surveillance” (195). Accordingly, Shukla’s young protagonists find it next to impossible to escape detection by what turns out to be the surveillance state, in that “in all the communal areas they were always being watched” thanks to omnipresent cameras (158), and a helicopter over the estate must mean

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either the presence of the media (whose reports invariably frame the area as the urban environment where “[b]ad stuff … happens” and never show the “[nice] bits,” yet make the residents recognize that “[s]omeone is always watching” (12)) or else “some weird security shit” (9), with self-surveillance becoming a way to “preempt preemptive surveillance” (Maira 207), as characters like Hari learn to constantly look around “for passers-by, for police, for CCTV cameras, for anything that might incriminate [them]” (26). On the other hand, local diversity is under threat from twenty-firstcentury cultural gentrification: entire buildings are being repossessed by the malevolent property development company NextGen, whose glossy brochures feature scenes like those “from Blade Runner, all futuristic and clean and perfect looking… All these people eating fish dinners on the balcony, laughing into their glasses of white wine. The models are all white people too” (197), and buildings whose rooftop infinity swimming pools with exclusively white swimmers (who, ironically, have “generic tribal tattoo[s]” (81)) shown against the backdrop of a skyscraper-strewn city might remind the reader of real-life city beautification projects aimed at Britain’s highest earners (see, for instance, Jennings 2019). The rapidly changing landscape makes the book’s main characters doubt whether the property developers expect them to live side by side with the new residents (81), some of whom already inhabit the area’s new blocks of posh student housing, making Jamal “sick of telling people he and Hari ain’t dealers” (73). And then there is the way in which the “Firestone House” tower block itself appears both immediately threatening and weary of its own state of dilapidation; it might be the hub of this community, but as a result of its frequent anthropomorphization (it “feels alive … [a]nd judgmental” (12), “groans” and “trembl[es]” at various moments in the story, “like the world rests heavy on its shoulders” (60, 84), and holds these young characters “captive” until very late in the narrative (208)), the building becomes a psychological space in which its inhabitants’ anger, disappointment, and sadness at their economic disempowerment and diminished social mobility might be contemplated. But Shukla’s use of space can also be seen as more generally reflecting the social subjugation of childhood, and the novel shows its young protagonists trying to carve out a space for themselves in the fissures of an adult-dominated society in which children are “always being told to be quiet, to not worry, to stop thinking” (199, 11). One such space is the roof of their tower block, from where they “can see the weather approaching,” as Hari puts it, reminding us that the contemporary typically comes to appear to the youth living through it to be potentially transformative, “[They] know what’s coming and what’s gone. [They]’re the present” (8). No such places, however, are available to the younger children in the neighborhood, who are missing out on opportunities for play not only on the estate (at one point Taran sees two small children “running their scooters up and down the corridor, because where else can they play?” (92)), but also in the recreation grounds situated on their way from school to the estate (which they “don’t really go through

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because all the white kids hang around on the swings and you ain’t welcome” (143)). Again, the de facto racial segregation of urban spaces as presented in the novel has an uncanny parallel with recent media stories that have drawn attention to the realities of Britain’s segregated playgrounds, revealing that the children of social tenants are frequently barred from communal play areas in new urban housing developments (see Grant 2019; Grant, Mohdin, and Michael 2019). With the hard-won communal spaces for adolescents (such as the youth center or the music studio) having already closed down or being about to disappear due to the council’s efforts to open the area to gentrification (“You need to be further out,” NextGen’s henchman Patterson tells Taran and Hari, “Let the people who will enjoy the proximity to all the bars, clubs and restaurants pump money back into the city; let them have this space. You can just have your own little enclaves on the outskirts” (249)), Shukla’s protagonists start seeking a way to make another, more culturally diverse and politically aware future possible for the neighborhood. Indeed, it is up to the young generation to advocate any change in the status quo, as the adults around them are either too broken by their immediate environment and social exclusion (like Taran and Hari’s overworked mother, whose long shifts force the twins to fend for themselves, and Jamal’s neglectful uncle, who is “too drunk some days to remember his nephew even exists” (214)), or too complicit in the system that sustains social inequalities (like Anna’s mother, who works for the city’s corrupt mayor). Much as Rai did in The Crew, Shukla also challenges the stereotype of delinquent “hoodies”—even as he nods toward it in the figure of CJ, Hari’s nemesis and brother to Sim, the murdered young man (and Taran’s boyfriend), who sees drug dealing as an “industry that ain’t ever going away” and that will enable him to pay his university fees (195). Thus, while all that the reporters ever want to film in Shukla’s fictionalized neighborhood are “the threatening yoots with their hoods up” (13), and while the responsibility for the area being in ruins is usually placed by its residents at the door of “[k]ids, feral kids, lawless kids, smartphone kids, grime kids, estate kids, ends kids, feckless kids, ya-get-me kids, kids who don’t give a shit, kids with no rules, unruly kids, kids kids kids” (132), it is the shady officials, businessmen, and policemen who conspire to help NextGen to obtain city contracts fraudulently—all so that the company could demolish the properties in the area and bring in a new type of resident—that are guilty of the most violent crimes in the novel, including the kidnapping and murder of teenagers. The brutality and ruthlessness of these officials is later matched by the heavy-handed police officers in riot gear who physically attack the area’s most vulnerable inhabitants. In contrast, Run, Riot’s main protagonists are seen to defend themselves against these attacks and to assert their social and political agency by acting in a lawful and (mostly) non-aggressive manner. Long before Sim’s murder, Taran had been channeling her outrage in the face of intolerance and injustice into powerful rap music that not only shames those who hold the power of the nation state yet

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who would never actually meet someone like herself (“brought to this nation/To be not seen, not heard” (64)) to discuss the issues that affect her, but also strives to build a “history of this block and this area and these people, the ones who you never see or read about or hear from” (15). Similarly, the other young characters in Shukla’s novel had been planning to assume the acceptability of society by subscribing (unlike the protagonists of such subcultural novels as Malkani’s Londonstani) to a “paradigmatic [middle-class] value system predicated on self-improvement” (Colebrook 49), only to then, like Anna, who intends to become a barrister, challenge the existing social system from within. Another form of resistance emerges in the novel only after Sim is murdered and its young characters find themselves on the run from the police, and that is the use of the cybersphere to get a political message across to the public (see also Maira 2016). Eventually, other community members start “retweeting it. Sharing it. Reposting it. Whatever they need to do to get the message out there” (244), in a sign of (partial) victory for these young people’s cause. It is important to bear in mind that these sites of resistance are not without problems. On the one hand, that Taran sees her rapping as both a strategy of empowerment and a potential source of a sizeable income (“She has every confidence that when her mixtape drops, that’ll be it. Extra funds to help them all” (181)), and that NextGen bring back an internationally famous rapper born in the area for a “nice free concert from a local celebrity done good” (172)—which successfully distracts the community from the company’s wrongdoings—highlights the subcultural subject’s dependence on the mainstream culture’s industries. On the other, the potential of Internetbased social and political activism is undermined by the behavior of a group of students who witness a policeman’s brutal attack on Anna and her neighbors “with ennui,” filming what is happening on their mobile phones but not intervening (205), which raises the question of a certain “inert passivity yielding no actions, let alone ethical ones,” as Susana Onega and JeanMichel Ganteau would describe it, on the part of some of the audience that is targeted by any activist’s Internet postings (65). It is also worth noting that Run, Riot’s subcultural identities might be seen as being reconfigured in a kind of “new parochialism” that Dave Ellis has identified in Courttia Newland’s and Alex Wheatle’s fiction, and that “draws upon an intensified sense of affiliation to a local area, estate or postcode” (61), with the challenge for twenty-first-century thinking about subcultural resistance being to find a means of recognizing and bringing the traffic between the local and the global to language. At the same time, the new appreciation that the young characters in Shukla’s text gain for how connected their community’s members are, while, as Jamal thinks of it, “existing side by side like it’s not a strange thing that we’re all shoved into this space together” (215), can clearly extend beyond their local communities, as it emerges, just like this particular crowd’s “unity against a system” (230), from the unequal conditions of social and political life. The novel’s closing call for a unified, “loud”

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and “calm” message about the contemporary period’s raging inequalities— coming, unsurprisingly from the young character with the biggest political platform, the celebrated rapper Rage (254)—seeks to gesture beyond the limits of localized political resistance to exclusionary and prejudicial policies under twenty-first-century global conditions, to a future in which new forms of solidarity activism might be possible. For the British diasporic writers discussed in this chapter, the struggles of ethnic minority youth for recognition under new, post-9/11 frames that structure how we understand and identify vulnerability and its socio-political implications are often attended by bringing subcultural affiliations in dialogue with already existing alliances and new sites of contact formed around anti-racist cultural, religious, and political activism. Their narrative styles, whether attempting to close down the distance between the subject and object of narration through multiple experiencing narrator-characters, as in The Crew, The Last Taboo, and Black Sheep, or producing the sense of an external, more critical perspective through third-person focalized narration that is nevertheless attuned to the outlooks and codes of behavior of the characters that it describes, as in Boy vs. Girl and Run, Riot, augment their emphasis on collective articulation of the subcultural (and subaltern) identity. The limitations of their young protagonists’ resistance call for some critical reckoning from young readers themselves in considering how the framing of social cohesion and immigration issues in the post-9/11 and 7/7 context bears on the positioning of ethnic minority youth in contemporary British society. But while their fictional representations of hyphenated identities are anything but uncritical celebrations of multicultural solidarity, it is nevertheless the case that they suggest the outlines of solidarity that is “generated by engaging in political struggle based on overlapping cultural processes and intersecting histories” (Maira 259; see also Prashad 2000). We can see in them an increasing investment in the transnational and the global as post-terror geographies of social regeneration and political liberation, and an emphasis on the capacity of youth culture to determine the way in which we imagine and hope for a truly democratic global space to be produced.

Works Cited Abu-Lughod, Lila. Do Muslim Women Need Saving?Harvard University Press, 2013. Ahmad, Fauzia. “Do Young British Muslim Women Need Rescuing?” Young British Muslims: Between Rhetoric and Realities, edited by Sadek Hamid, Routledge, 2017, pp. 39–59. Alexander, Claire. The Asian Gang: Ethnicity, Identity, Masculinity. Berg, 2000. Ambikaipaker, Mohan. Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Archer, Louise. “The Impossibility of Minority Ethnic Educational ‘Success’? An Examination of the Discourses of Teachers and Pupils in British Secondary Schools.” European Educational Research Journal, vol. 7, no. 1, 2008, pp. 89–107.

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Baker, Sarah. “Pop in(to) the Bedroom: Popular Music in Pre-teen Girl’s Bedroom Culture.” European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2004, pp. 75–93. Bentley, Nick. “Staring at the Rudeboys: The Representation of Youth Subcultures in Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani and John King’s Skinheads.” Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change, edited by The Subcultures Network, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014, pp. 175–192. Bentley, Nick. “Subcultural Fictions: Youth Subcultures in Twenty-first-century British Fiction.” The 2000s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction, edited by Nick Bentley, Nick Hubble, and Leigh Wilson, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, pp. 53–82. Bromley, Roger. Narratives for a New Belonging: Diasporic Cultural Fictions. Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Cohen, Stanley. Folk Devils and Moral Panics. 1972. 3rd ed. Routledge, 2002. Colebrook, Martyn. “Literary History of the Decade: Fictions from the Borderlands.” The 2000s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction, edited by Nick Bentley, Nick Hubble, and Leigh Wilson, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, pp. 27–52. Connell, R. W. Masculinities. 1995, Polity, 2005. Croft, Jo. “From Wayward Youth to Teenage Dreamer: Between the Bedroom and the Street.” Youth Subcultures in Fiction, Film and Other Media: Teenage Dreams, edited by Nick Bentley, Beth Johnson, and Andrzej Zieleniec, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 219–236. Delsol, Rebekah, and Michael Shiner, eds. Stop and Search: The Anatomy of a Police Power. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Ellis, Dave. “Styles, ‘Codes of Violence’: Subcultural Identities in Contemporary Black Writing of Britain.” Youth Subcultures in Fiction, Film and Other Media: Teenage Dreams, edited by Nick Bentley, Beth Johnson, and Andrzej Zieleniec, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 59–72. Gillborn, David. Racism and Education: Coincidence or Conspiracy?Routledge, 2008. Gilroy, Paul. Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures. Serpent’s Tail, 1993. Grant, Harriet. “Too Poor to Play: Children in Social Housing Blocked from Communal Playground.” The Guardian, 25 Mar.2019, https://www.theguardian.com/ cities/2019/mar/25/too-poor-to-play-children-in-social-housing-blocked-from -communal-playground. Accessed 19 June 2019. Grant, Harriet, Aamna Mohdin, and Chris Michael. “More Segregated Playgrounds Revealed: ‘We Just Play in the Carpark.’” The Guardian, 30 Mar.2019, https:// www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/mar/30/we-just-play-in-the-carpark-more-se gregated-playgrounds-revealed. Accessed 19 June 2019. Grzegorczyk, Blanka. Discourses of Postcolonialism in Contemporary British Children’s Literature. Routledge, 2015. Gunning, Dave. Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature. Liverpool University Press, 2010. Hacking, Ian. Mad Travellers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses. Harvard University Press, 1998. Jennings, Will. “The Skyscraper Infinity Pool—Sorry, but Where’s the Diving Board?” The Guardian, 7 June2019, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/jun/ 07/skyscraper-infinity-pool-london-design-gimmick. Accessed 19 June 2019. Lincoln, Siân. Youth Culture and Private Space. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Loh, Lucienne. “Postcolonial and Diasporic Voices: Contemporary British Fiction in an Age of Transnational Terror.” The 2000s: A Decade of Contemporary British

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Fiction, edited by Nick Bentley, Nick Hubble, and Leigh Wilson, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, pp. 115–144. Malkani, Gautam. Londonstani. 2006. Harper Perennial, 2007. Maira, Sunaina Marr. The 9/11 Generation: Youth, Rights, and Solidarity in the War on Terror. New York University Press, 2016. Murphy, Neil, and Wai-chew Sim. “Introduction.” British Asian Fiction: Framing the Contemporary, edited by Neil Murphy and Wai-chew Sim, Cambria Press, 2008, pp. 1–10. Onega, Susana, and Jean-Michel Ganteau. The Ethical Component in Experimental British Fiction Since the 1960’s. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. Osgerby, Bill. “Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change: Theories, Issues and Debate.” Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change, edited by The Subcultures Network, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014, pp. 1–45. Prashad, Vijad. The Karma of Brown Folk. University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Rai, Bali. The Crew. Corgi Books, 2003. Rai, Bali. The Last Taboo. Corgi Books, 2006. Robert, Na’ima B. Black Sheep. Frances Lincoln Children’s Books, 2013. Robert, Na’ima B. Boy vs. Girl. Frances Lincoln Children’s Books, 2010. Rollock, Nicola, et al., eds. The Colour of Class: The Educational Strategies of the Black Middle Classes. Routledge, 2015. Shukla, Nikesh. Run, Riot. Hodder Children’s Books, 2018. Tarlo, Emma. “Re-fashioning the Islamic: Young Visible Muslims.” Young British Muslims: Between Rhetoric and Realities, edited by Sadek Hamid, Routledge, 2017, pp. 151–170. Tew, Phillip. The Contemporary British Novel. Continuum, 2004. Upstone, Sara. British Asian Fiction: Twenty-first-century Voices. Manchester University Press, 2010. Walker, Gregory W. “Disciplining Protest Masculinity.” Men and Masculinities, vol. 9, no. 1, 2006, pp. 5–22. Wheatle, Alex. The Dirty South. Serpent’s Tail, 2008. Wheatle, Alex. Liccle Bit. Atom, 2015. Young, Jock. “The Role of the Police as Amplifiers of Deviancy, Negotiators of Reality and Translators of Fantasy.” Images of Deviance, edited by Stanley Cohen, Penguin, 1971, pp. 27–61.

4

The Reluctant Terrorist

While the effort to deal with escalations in violence due to political conflicts is not exclusive to twenty-first-century children’s fiction, following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and 7/7 there was a profusion of fictional comment for the young on the damage these attacks and their repercussions have done to the way that we think about global relations. The contemporary children’s novel decries the abhorrent violence of these acts, yet it also points toward the retributive cycle of violence and counter-violence that depends on the anachronistic binary division between “us,” who are never terrorists, and “them,” who are, and against whom, therefore, violence is justified in the name of self-defense. It is worth bearing in mind that a large group of children’s texts written in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks implicitly supported the wars against terror and the policies that attend them. As Clare Bradford (2005) has illustrated, these earlier fictional treatments of terrorism often rely on the “axis of evil” rhetoric in a conservative defense of new disciplinary measures taken to prevent terrorism. Even so, a vast number of later children’s novels can be viewed as having reinvigorated the trend for postcolonial children’s fiction to think beyond the binary logic of imperialism that initially permitted the separating of the fearsome barbaric other from the civilized colonial self, the same static binarism that responses to 9/11 and 7/7 have often invoked. Works by Sam Mills, Claire McFall, Malorie Blackman, Nicky Singer, and Sarah Mussi, which orchestrate different kinds of encounters between victims and perpetrators, between “us” and “them,” might be seen to perform the possibility of successful communication across this tribal divide, offering to readers a distinctive hybrid perspective that emerges amidst the devastation. With a particular focus on how these writers imagine radical new subject positions from which to resist the call on both sides to violent extremisms, and new forms of ethical opposition to the bipolar view of the world that has accompanied the wars around terror, I investigate how such imaginings draw attention to the powerful shaping force of recovered cultural narratives and reconstituted social imaginaries as an alternative reaction to situations of terrorist violence. This chapter looks at novels that seek to merge the terrorist’s and the victim’s perspectives, or to see through the eyes of an unwilling or unknowing participant in terroristic acts. In staging this kind of encounter, such texts aim

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to explore the origins and workings of terrorist organizations, as well as counter-terrorist policies. At the same time, they push young readers toward a thoughtful and imaginative engagement with different forms of violence that are connected with resistance to political repression and injustice, and an increasing awareness of the ways in which the binary opposition of the West and the nonWest, or “us” and “them,” can be seen to underpin both the rhetoric of terrorism and its various manifestations. The terror-saturated dystopian worlds fashioned in these books allow the authors to raise crucial questions about the rightness of waging war on the abstract concept of “terror,” which exists forever in potential terms. They also prompt the reader to ponder the justification of the state’s recourse to counter-terrorism legislation that seeks to criminalize not just terroristic practices, but also any departure from the state’s perspective on terror, and any critique of its repressive measures, which those in power see as radical positions in their own right. In what follows I aim to bring into critical relationship the concepts of terror, counter-terrorism, fear of the other, sovereignty, power-knowledge, cultural memory, and imaginative compassion. I address the question of how the frightening figure of the terrorist is invoked by the state to justify its use of extreme disciplinary measures, while the regimes of violence, whether of the state or of the insurgent variety, are reiterated without end in the name of sovereignty and self-legitimation. If, as Elleke Boehmer has argued, the “‘War on Terror’ is a hostage to its own imperialising fortunes,” inasmuch as it implies that terror is all-pervasive, and so “it must constitute the primary mode of sovereignty of the counter-terroristic state itself” (“Postcolonial Writing” 145), then both the state’s power and the insurgent’s power are terroristic, with the landscape of terror including not just physical violence, but also the discursivity of legislation and dominant cultural narratives, together with the virtual power and materiality of surveillance technology. The post-9/11 children’s novel is committed to reading the import of the effects of terror in the light of the ever-increasing regulatory power achieved by the state and the military as a result of the disruption of everyday life caused by terrorist acts. As such, it can be seen to challenge the priority of interpretative frameworks that make horror and outrage possible in the face of certain kinds of violence, insisting on the validity of such affective responses in the face of the violence exercised by both insurgency movements and legitimate states. By the same token, post-9/11 children’s fiction often seeks to supply a better understanding of what has been lost due to regulatory policies grounded in a differential way of marking a cultural identity, finding ways to cross cultural divisions and give expression to a common humanity. The novels examined here see such reconciliation of differences among subject positions as a practice that must repeatedly consult both the past and the future, while their movement of “going between worlds” carries with it particular imaginative and ethical possibilities, tying in with the “characteristic postcolonial processes of migration and translation” (Boehmer, Postcolonial Poetics 53).

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The Will to Dissent Sam Mills’s Blackout (2010) and Claire McFall’s Bombmaker (2014) are children’s novels written in a long dystopian tradition that enlarges young readers’ perceptions of the political, cultural, and economic power imbalances at the heart of global modernity by laying bare the institutional and ideological processes whereby such imbalances can lead to a heightening of systemic violence. But these texts are also good examples of the development of the critical dystopia that emerges after 9/11 and 7/7. Here are novels that, like all dystopian fiction for the young, open a space of opposition for the young subjects who have been forced to operate within oppressive power structures (see also Bradford et al. 2008; Hintz and Ostry 2003; Hintz, Basu, and Broad 2013; Grzegorczyk 2015); yet the focus is on the state’s targeting of radical subjectivities by means of wars against terror and on these radical subjects’ own wars of resistance. It is that indefinite extension of the war on terror, in which—in the context of a newly terror-saturated global order— the pursuit of sovereignty through political violence is legitimized, in the words of Judith Butler, upon the problematic differential claim that “certain lives are worth saving and others worth killing” (Butler, Frames 162), that gives the post-9/11 children’s novel part of its unsettling contemporary relevance. Blackout envisages a near-future Britain of authoritarian anti-terrorist rule that operates by means of censorship, behavior-altering drugs, and public executions; Bombmaker’s Britain has disintegrated into cultural tribalism and political violence as a result of a worldwide economic crisis, the effects of which have led England to erect border walls so as to ward off its (banished) Scottish, Welsh, and Irish neighbors. In these conditions of war without limits and restraint, the freedom of individuals is extremely curtailed, while resistance to disciplinary power is almost inevitably deemed to work in the service of terrorism. Among the key features of the regulatory, censorious regime in Mills’s alternative Britain are the mobilization of citizens, young and old alike, in defense of the nation against terrorism (the main protagonist, Stefan, explains his fear of the school bully: “We were all told to film suspicious behavior and show it to our teacher, so you never could tell how Jasper was going to slant or edit it” (30)), close surveillance of the entire population (“bloody CCTV,” one of the characters laments, “in Victorian times, they moralised, now they have this synthetic moralising, these cameras that watch us and remind us to be good” (196)), control of each individual’s movements (whenever someone tries to challenge the curfew, the police “turn up, zap their ID cards and pack them off into a van” (46)) and communications (social media websites keep shutting down while the “Censorship check[s] all the messages and suspicious comments” they want to investigate (37)), and full oversight over what circulates as public knowledge. Likewise in Bombmaker, the English government is identified by the main character, Scottish teenager Lizzie, as “playing big brother” with the help of an intrusive ID

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card scheme and “sharp cameras [that] kept watch for anyone whose face didn’t match their card” (39). Armed GE (Government Enforcers) officers are shown to be patrolling both the CCTV-monitored city streets and the heavily mined border structures cutting the Celtic nations off from England (topped with surveillance towers, these walls, we learn, “made the Berlin Wall look like a garden fence” (119)), but just as in Blackout, the state also relies on ordinary citizens who have internalized its controlling gaze and are rumored to get paid “for every successful [Celt] capture, and for collecting information” (122). In Bombmaker and in Blackout, the waging of war against enemies within becomes conceived as a condition necessary for the continuation of the nation, to the point where every citizen “has the power of life and death over his or her neighbours, if only because of the practice of informing” (Foucault, Society 259; see also Reid 2008), creating the conditions whereby life itself becomes the referent object for regulatory and normalizing mechanisms. It is this post-terror docility of self-disciplining bodies—afforded by the emergency powers that the state has assumed in the name of security—that provides the means through which war can be continued here under the aegis of peace. What both Mills and McFall crucially identify is the way in which the regulation of populations through surveillance and biopolitical control represents a new means of gaining power over lives and knowledges. Early in Blackout, for instance, we learn that ArkQ, a terrorist group responsible for the bomb attacks on London and the destruction of the Houses of Parliament eight years before, found inspiration for their murderous plot in an action-packed literary thriller, which provided the state with a rationale for various forms of censorship: “For God’s sake, this is England, not Iran! We’ve never had this sort of mad censorship before,” Stefan’s father says to the officials, imploring them not to confiscate any more reading material from his bookshop. “We’ve never had this sort of terrorism before, either,” the censor responds, “New measures are required. The laws have been passed” (11). While books are being banned or rewritten in order to “promote the positive development of mind or the safety of the nation” (39), the charge of terrorism is used to suspend civil liberties, including the right to free expression, and to quell any internal dissent that would bring to light the lived, material effects of systemic violence. However, those who maintain critical views on any aspects of the increasingly draconian state policies—like human rights and environmental protesters or angry refugees who lost their homes to rising seas, yet received no help from the British government—have braved the stigma of being labeled as terrorist sympathizers and continue to oppose state coercion and violence (ranging from interrogations and brainwashing through explicit torture to public hanging) from within the wider insurgency movement. Stefan’s discovery that his father is aiding writers who were branded as terrorists is what turns him into an unwilling collaborator, one who is deemed by the state to be a threat to the security of the nation but who himself has never diverged from public opinion that condemns anti-state

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sentiment and conduct. Bombmaker’s Lizzie is similarly entangled in the illegal activities of a London-based group of Celtic insurgents, whose Welsh-born leader, Alexander, had saved her life the previous year by rescuing her from the state’s armed forces. Having already been branded with a Celtic knot tattoo that allows the GE officers to shoot any suspected Celt on sight, the girl is pressured to act as Alexander’s bombmaker, which she does with a mixture of relish at being able to punish political institutions that rule by fear and terror, and horror at being asked to kill people indiscriminately. The tattoo—variously pictured as a “deformity” and a “barcode” to be covered up (39, 58), and a sign of resistance and resilience to be celebrated (57, 222, 302)—marks her out not only as a potential terrorist suspect posing a risk to national security, but also as an ideological threat to the socio-political status quo under which whole populations have been rendered destitute and abject in the name of life necessity. Much like the alarmed and self-protective reactions to Lizzie’s tattoo from a variety of English people throughout McFall’s novel (92, 232, 295), Mills’s protagonist’s uncritical acceptance of mainstream counter-terrorism rhetoric can be seen as reflecting his internalization of the climate of fear produced by the state through a set of disciplinary tactics that have the population as both targets and foot soldiers (as when individuals are called upon to remain vigilant about and report other people’s “suspicious” behavior to the state (21, 164, 241)). At the same time, these tactical mechanisms turn each individual’s life into a generalized matter of the collective body of a population “affected by overall [biological] processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness, and so on” (243), to draw on Michel Foucault’s discussion of sovereign power and biological control in Society Must Be Defended, to the extent that the storing of biological data (“Nothing to hide, nothing to fear,” says the poster at the community building where young people in Blackout need to have their fingerprints, iris photos, and DNA swabs taken before turning sixteen (20)) becomes another way of asserting control over, apprehending, or recruiting the lives of the population as a whole. In Bombmaker, biopower and information technology are employed by the state to strip its putative enemies of both political and human status, as biological material records and rapid information exchange allow for immediate identification by the police of foreign or non-English DNA, upon which any captured Celt is tattooed, fingerprinted, swabbed for cells, and released “like animals … into the wild” on the other side of the border tunnel (26; see also Foucault 2003; Houen 2008). In both novels, this expansion of the sovereign state’s power over the individual body and the whole population works in tandem with the media’s heightening of a certain paranoia in which fear is directed at the faceless figure of the evil terrorist and individuals are invited to ask not “if” but “when” the next attack will occur; in the absence of other voices from the public sphere of debate, the media have assigned themselves the task of structuring (and then pandering to) popular sentiment about the terrorist

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threat. Following her successful mission to reopen the English border, symbolically and literally, by blowing up part of the Welsh border wall, Lizzie wonders if the “bitter, twisted words of the reporter” recounting these events are “what he’d say if he weren’t censored” (McFall 183). In a related way, media reports in Blackout give Stefan grounds to assume that the Words, the insurgent group his father has been helping, are highly dangerous: “They were on the news—they’re terrorists!” he exclaims, frightened by the implications of siding with someone against whom war is being waged through both governmental and media networks. But what he learns from the wanted writer himself is that the government would have everyone believe that modern terrorists “ma[ke] al-Qaeda and the IRA look like angels in comparison—it’s all completely overblown and over-hyped so that they can use our fear to control us and make new laws. As for the Words— they’re a group who were set up … to help protect writers and bloggers who are being persecuted by the government” (Mills 54). Critical, here, is the tension between the public’s fear of being caught up in terroristic violence, their fascination with violent spectacle, and their desire for violent retribution. The gruesome spectacle of public executions (held once a month in Trafalgar Square in Blackout and occurring randomly, usually as a result of the body searches employed by the GE patrols, in Bombmaker) is not designed to restore the balance of justice, but “to make the public feel safe” through a shoring up of sovereign power (Mills 18). These strategies for normalizing state violence for the purposes of just wars and limiting the reach and terms of critical debate can in fact be seen as having psychological terrorization as their effect, which is especially visible among the new generation. In Bombmaker, this is most pronounced in Lizzie’s preference of a stifled, torturous existence under the protection of Alexander to braving London’s tightly controlled central zones where the GE badge and gun are “all the authority … needed” for a Celt to be shot (219); just as importantly, however, we are told that “[s]elective blindness was the first survival tactic [English] parents taught their children” in this post-crisis reality (231). Examples of these processes can also be seen in Blackout, where Jasper, Stefan’s bullying classmate, is too afraid of the surveillance of CCTV in the school canteen to buy more sweets than is allowed (Mills 134), and Sally, another pupil in their class, is arrested over an anti-government cartoon she posted on her MySpace page (35). While Stefan may wish to celebrate his sixteenth birthday by attending a public execution (“I couldn’t help feeling a secret thrill at the thought of seeing [a terrorist] die. Stoning was even better than hanging” (19)), and his favorite literary characters spy on terrorists and win medals for reporting them to the state (18), he is terrified of earning the label of a terrorist sympathizer even before he finds out about his father’s collaboration with the Words: he constantly reminds himself to “always keep [his] thoughts locked in [his] head” and decides not to keep a diary, knowing that his own words could well become “trip-wires” (36). When the boy sees two police officers outside

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the classroom door immediately after he shows evidence of independent thinking on what counts as radical material within the public domain, he does not know that they are waiting to arrest Sally and is overwhelmed with fear; his stomach is “churning nervous vomit” and his thoughts are filled with “stories [he]’d heard in the playground about how they tortured terrorists” (33). Indeed, in McFall’s representation of post-crisis Britain, only the youngest (and therefore the easiest to control and to instruct in ideological matters) Celt children are allowed to stay in England after the dissolution of the UK (26), while in Mills’s alternative Britain a range of disciplinary techniques is directed specifically at the young generation and includes “good behaviour pills,” strong medication used to keep any young rule-breakers under control (91), as well as “enhanced interrogation” of young people regarded as at risk of radicalization who are placed in the Institution, a state organization initially established to reform underage criminals (84). Blackout’s Stefan does get sent to the Institution after his father’s arrest, and he is subjected to torture; but even though he comes to realize that it is impossible to escape being identified as a terrorist once such identification takes hold, and is later forced to go on the run accompanied by Omar, one of the wanted writers from the Words, he is so afraid of what happens to those acting outside the law and without state backing that he can hardly allow himself to lose faith in the state: “They punished terrorism and rewarded honesty,” he tries to convince himself. “Sooner or later, things would work out” (Mills 165). The boy goes as far as to make an attempt to rationalize the state’s involvement in the death of his mother, once he learns that she was not killed in a car accident, but rather was mistaken for a terrorist and tortured to death (“I had tried to persuade myself that the State was not to blame … I guess the police and the government made a mistake … and they were only doing their best to protect the country from terrorism” (177)); in reality, however, he is well aware that “it’s naïve to believe the state has a conscience” (262). In fact, the more access Stefan has to what Foucault terms “subjugated knowledges”—or knowledges disqualified by the state from the public domain in order to “promote the centralization, normalization and disciplinarization” of the dominant discourse of war (Society 288)—the more he is able to think critically about the taken-for-granted effects of the infinitely coercive antiterrorism measures taken by the state, even while enviously observing “how easy [other people’s] lives were … Their minds were full of an innocent, white emptiness” (Mills 153). The fractured and highly controlled state of affairs in Mills’s and McFall’s novels can be viewed in the light of theories of sovereignty and subjection in Foucault’s collection Power/Knowledge, where he argues that “There can be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses” (93), and traces the coercions and subjugations whereby dominant discourses and practices secure their own status as rational and legitimate, justified by a naturalized norm. Thus, a Foucauldian approach to these novels might focus

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on the texts, literary or otherwise, banned by its authoritarian state for articulating knowledges and experiences that complicate nationalist narratives of war. To the extent that the regulation of public knowledge is a way of establishing what will and will not count as reality, it clearly emerges as a new strand of power that enforces the state’s monopoly on justified violence. One could wonder what it is about books like The Catcher in the Rye or the Harry Potter series that makes them so incendiary that they present a risk to the security of the nation (though the reader of Blackout might be surprised to hear that both these examples are among the most frequently challenged—and censored—books of the 2000s, as tracked by the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (n. pag.)), yet Stefan quickly discovers that the undistorted truth of the banned books calls into question the reality around him (Mills 141). When it feels as though words are “fuses” and books “bomb[s] waiting to ignite” (42), then it is no surprise that a popular writer can be seen as a threat by the government, and that even an awareness of the constraints on what can be read or heard is not admissible as part of classroom debate (Stefan’s classmates are ignorant of the very existence of original versions of Rewrites (32–33)). If terror is invoked by this government to wield unlimited power through war-withoutend, we might ask if there is a limit to be achieved in terms of its censorious practices, such as the monitoring and curtailing of Internet content and electronic communications described in McFall’s novel (111, 182–3). Mills’s answer to this question is to be found in her fictional state’s seemingly inevitable support of calls for all the rewritten books to be censored once again (117), and Blackout’s exploration of far-reaching anti-terrorism measures appears particularly salient at a time when an actual British citizen can be detained for suspicious activity after reading a book about Syrian culture while flying to Turkey for her honeymoon (Cain n. pag.). Equally importantly, however, rather than romanticizing all resistance to the nationalist and repressive ideology of the era, both Mills and McFall attempt to show that there is a broader symbiosis between the different forms of extremism that emerge within contemporary life, and that different forms of violence, whether state-sponsored or perpetrated by insurgency groups, fuel and sustain each other in arresting cycles of injury and retribution. On the one hand, we see in the two novels that the shoring up of challenged national sovereignty, when enacted at any cost, results in quelling public debate, suspending human rights and civil liberties, and torturing or killing in the name of peace. On the other, the tactics used by the insurgents are shown to be not so different from the mechanisms of state violence. In Bombmaker, Lizzie quickly learns that Alexander’s criminal activity “brought in wads of cash, but did nothing to further the ‘cause’” (61), and it is his “total and utter control” over every aspect of the girl’s life (including the disciplining of her very body, which is frequently sexualized, dehumanized, and endangered by Alexander’s behavior), a control that contains echoes of the state disciplines of the body and regulations of the population,

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that eventually convinces Lizzie to seek new models for the politics of resistance (111). Her final escape to Wales with Alexander’s more principled younger brother, Samuel, does nevertheless ensnare her in further ideological complications: “Was life in Wales going to be any better than Alexander’s London?” she ruminates ruefully on Samuel’s idea to work with resistance fighters in his home country. “Yes, the cause was noble, but it was Samuel’s fight,” she thinks to herself on the novel’s final page, her own belief in the justness of the violence committed by an insurgency remaining unconvincing (372). In Blackout, too, we discover that there are factions of the supposedly peaceful resistance movement that believe the only way out of the impasse is through further violence and that are willing to sacrifice individuals like Stefan’s father to achieve their ends: “I’d thought that their way of protest was through pen and ink and the printed page,” the boy says mournfully and asks, “At the end of the day, were the Words really any better than the State?” (259). That Stefan and his father eventually form their own resistance group that is “genuinely committed to nothing but the printed truth,” while the novel’s final and direct address to the audience commends their purchase of Blackout, “now renowned for being in the Top 10 of most dangerous Banned Books of all time”, further highlights the relation between the power of discourse and the force of violence (294). There might be a “curious knot” between the novelist and the terrorist, as Peter Boxall writes, echoing the protagonist of Don DeLillo’s 1991 novel Mao II, in that both “desire to sculpt the forms in which we experience our collective reality” (124), but the novelist seeks those “forms of being that can close cultural division rather than widen it” (160), thus offering the reader a chance to imagine a future in which violence might be minimized. Complicating the binaries that underscore the common understandings of violence and terrorism, Blackout and Bombmaker are notable examples of novels that go beyond the two-camps division and break the bonds that hold the terrorized and terrorizing subject in place.

(Ig)Noble Cause The same brokering of cultural difference is true of Malorie Blackman’s dystopian novel, Noble Conflict (2013), in which a differential way of regarding two populations, the Alliance and the Crusaders, relies on the “war on terror” rhetoric portraying the former as superior in every way to the latter and in need of protection from them. Set on an Earth that has been largely turned into a bleak wasteland as a result of nuclear apocalypse, Blackman’s post-disaster narrative, like Mills’s Blackout, is fictionalized through a young protagonist who is slowly piecing together the truth about past disasters and contemporary conditions of war. Kaspar, however, is a Guardian of the Alliance, a recent graduate from the Academy who gets to live out Stefan’s fantasies of defending the nation against terrorists. Accordingly, the anti-terrorism measures providing the state and the military

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with powers to monitor, control, and constrain each individual can be used by the young Guardian on his quest for the truth, but, like the protagonist of Blackout, Kaspar is quickly disciplined for the pursuit of knowledge from outside the circumscribed public domain. His persistence in seeking answers to the questions that emerge for him in the light of the strange patterns behind terrorist attacks on the Alliance might be traced to his internalization and transformation of what is, perhaps, the central tenet of counter-terrorism: that the “price of peace is eternal caution” (Blackman 243). Yet this persistence also results in his finding and cultivating an empathetic recognition of an interdependency, or a conjunction between self and otherness that could form the basis for a truly progressive global community. Kaspar’s initial attitudes to the Crusaders are important in this context: he joins the Academy to defend the ideals of the Alliance and protect its population from what is described to him as a “mob of homicidal terrorists intent on death and destruction” (6), so he is surprised that the first terrorist he encounters is not “someone bigger, more threatening, possibly ranting and perhaps planting bombs” (22); rather, the Insurgent looks like an ordinary boy, “[n]o horn or tail, no fangs, just nondescript” (25). Half way through the narrative, we see Kaspar admit that “all the fixed points in his life seemed to have disappeared,” including his “unshakeable views about ‘us against them’” (172), but it is those early confrontations with the Crusaders, among them his meeting of Rhea, the young female insurgent who saves his life, that first make him realize that the stories he hears from his supervisors about “savage,” “mindless,” “ruthless” fanatics who are bent on the destruction of the Alliance sound distinctly “rehearsed, like they’d been delivered many, many times before” and leave no room for doubt or ambiguity (97). Counter-terrorism is thus shown to be equally as concerned with perception as it is with policy; it is “rhetorical,” to use the words of Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass, “in that a primary concern for officials in their ‘War on Terror’ is the public perception of their actions” (29). In the case of Noble Conflict, the intensifying counter-terrorism calls upon interpretative frameworks that function by differentiating between those on whom the Alliance way of life depends and those who appear as what Butler calls “living figures of the threat to life” and against whom war can then be righteously waged (Frames 42). By assigning Kaspar the public relations task of “wowing the crowds” and “flying the flag” after the boy’s early actions as a Guardian establish his military bravery (45, 46), his commanders are giving ordinary individuals the idea of the extraordinary human with whom they can identify, or the “patriotic hero who expands [their] own ego boundary ecstatically into that of the nation” (Butler, Precarious Life 145): “TV laps this stuff up,” Kaspar’s boss remarks cheerfully. “The good citizens of the Alliance get to see what vicious bastards the terrorists are and what selfless paragons of virtue we are. It reminds them to support us and to give us information. It boosts recruitment too” (43). The war on terror is conducted in the name of the civilized, virtuous self against the barbaric,

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inhuman other, with the Alliance priding themselves on the Guardians’ use of only non-lethal weapons and on allowing some of the Crusaders to live among them as long as they contribute economically to the host state and submit to stringent regulatory controls. These larger socio-political norms operate in ways that involve certain parochial frames that govern the field of perception and, more specifically, bring a specific image of the Crusaders into focus in order to control affect. For Butler, there are two distinct but related types of normative discourse deriving from wars against those considered less than human: one produces a “symbolic identification of the [Levinasian] face [of the other] with the inhuman, foreclosing our apprehension of the human in the scene; the other works through radical effacement, so that there never was a human, there never was a life, and no murder has, therefore, ever taken place” (Precarious Life 147; see also Levinas 1961/1991; Levinas and Kearney 1986). The media coverage throwing into relief the insurgents’ purported barbarism, savagery, and ignorance (“You people of the Alliance love to tell all kinds of ridiculous tales about us Crusaders,” Rhea tells Kaspar, “D’you think we haven’t read some of the stories you record about us on your datanet” (203)) represents an effacement through representation (the Insurgents are perceived as “savage, evil” precisely because “[t]he historical texts all said so” (172)), but some of these normative frameworks work precisely through occlusion, that is, by providing no narratives of past conflicts between the two populations, or of non-Alliance casualties. In fact, Kaspar spends many days “trawling fruitlessly through cyberspace” in search of any concrete “facts” about the Insurgents and their motives (“Hard facts on their religious beliefs? None. Good intel on their personal lives? Zero” (245)), slowly realizing that the “official records weren’t just useless, they were lies” (150–151, 247). The records also state that one of the tasks of the High Councillors has been to reconstruct historical texts “from what little data remained” after the Crusaders “sought to erase [the Alliance], not just from the future by depriving [them] of [their] present, but from history itself” (133), yet together with Kaspar we discover that it is the Alliance officials who are to blame for the destruction and misuse of historical data in an attempt to conceal the truth of their own involvement in past and present wars, and of the continuities between them. The final part of the novel reveals that not only are the Alliance High Council and the military responsible for the extremely brutal attacks designed to keep the population in a state of terror (and intent on making a spectacle of violence inflicted on children and civilians, as opposed to the intelligence-gathering subversive actions of the insurgents, who avoid casualties wherever possible), but they have built their society on the genocide of the Crusaders, whose land they appropriated after causing the nuclear cataclysm that destroyed their own. The barbarism at issue here has, in truth, been the barbarism of the “noble cause” obscuring from view the real victims of these wars, or the Crusaders who have been either murdered or placed in a physical state of suspended animation and endlessly tortured

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so that they would not be able to use their tele-empathic powers. Horrified by his own complicity in this long-standing violence, Kaspar now recognizes that the state makes use of humanitarian rhetoric to deflect attention from its own systemic cruelty, and he sees its mechanisms of material and discursive control for what they are—a working example of power-knowledge. He knows that the form of empathy exhibited by the Crusaders meant “shared fears and feelings, memories and emotions outside the scope and control of the Council” and that “they would never tolerate that,” which is why they are so terrified that anyone in the Alliance might develop these tele-empathic skills, and why they add inhibitory chemicals to the country’s water supply (311). After all, it is Kaspar’s openness to alternative narrations, or, as Boxall would describe it, this “permeability of the boundaries of the subject,” that decenters him from the Alliance supremacy, even though his mother’s insistence that he only eat food grown on his uncle’s farm and drink the water from his well is what removes him from the state’s biopolitical control and allows him to develop tele-empathy in the first place. Here the novel brings into relief the role of cultural memory in the construction of counter-hegemonic subject positions. In fact, this form of memory provides an understanding of a shared condition of precariousness, while deriving from it a renewed sense of collective responsibility for the physical lives of others. Kaspar is told by Rhea that “all [dead Crusaders’] memories and all the things [they] know are passed on as common knowledge to the ones still living,” which is “how [they] evolve,” namely, by “making sure [they] don’t make the same mistakes as [their] ancestors” (317, 319). Cultural memory, therefore, takes on a collective value, and Blackman’s novel can be said to advocate what Andrew Mahlstedt has called “residual epistemology,” a way of knowing that is bound up with norms of recognition, and that draws on what has been left behind by previous storytellers, thus assuming an “always-mediated engagement with others” (472). Indeed, whose stories are recognized as legitimate, admissible, and valuable will influence how Kaspar’s country will be rebuilt, and apprehending the limits of existing norms of recognition, Blackman seems to propose, might open the space for ethical judgment and practice that seeks to safeguard all lives in their precariousness. Similarly to Blackout, Noble Conflict ends with a protagonist, Kaspar’s librarian helper and confidante Mac, exposing and countering the hypocrisy, lawlessness, and brutality of the state through a public forum (a datanet blog in this case). The point is to demonstrate that, over the question of responsibility, individuals should not look to the state or the military, but to themselves: “Each and every Alliance citizen is as guilty as those in the High Council for how we have treated the Crusaders,” Mac writes; “We stopped thinking for ourselves because it was easier to let others do our thinking for us” (356). Both Stefan’s and Mac’s direct addresses to their audiences might be understood in relation to what Foucault (1984/2001) says in his final book about parrhesia, the titular fearless speech, which can take the form of

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“truthful political criticism” (56), here marking the awakening of the public consciousness from extreme ignorance. In Foucauldian terms, the two characters thus become political truth-tellers who recognize it as their duty to take a stand against the state and show that “people accept as truths, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment in history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed” (in Martin 10). There are grounds for hope, then, and a phoenix rising from the ashes stands in Mac’s blog post as a metaphor for the practice of truth telling; this hope, however, hinges on the Crusaders’ continued ability to look for less violent responses to loss and injury (“Let’s hope,” Kaspar says towards the end of the novel, “as the shoe is on the other foot, that the Crusaders find our Alliance shoes a bad fit” (348)), and on the defeat of those who reproduce infinitely humanitarian justifications for war. But to take up the challenge of nonviolence in this way is inevitably fraught with difficulty, for, as Kaspar hears from Edwin, another librarian, “The past has a way of clinging on. Don’t be so eager to dismiss it” (Noble 348). The fact that the reminder comes from another character who has access to a broad cultural knowledge, albeit mostly censored by political and other authorities, thwarts the kind of unambiguous ending geared toward an easy resolution of conflict and trauma, and, together with the direct address in the novel’s closing sentences, turns the ethical task of critique back onto the reader.

Tell-Tale Hearts While all of the books discussed in this chapter share a fascination with the ways in which new subject positions, and new forms of imaginative congress between those on opposite sides of the divide between us and them, can emerge in response to the violence of terror and counter-terror, it is Nicky Singer’s The Innocent’s Story (2005) and Sarah Mussi’s Bomb (2015) that most fully explore the experience of seeing at once through the eyes of the Western victim and the anti-Western terrorist. In The Innocent’s Story, Singer imagines a 13-year-old British schoolgirl, Cassina, who emerges from the violence of a terrorist event in the form of a para-spirit (a small, shapeless mass of mistlike particles), which enables her to witness the world from the perspective of various hosts, including those who are responsible for the attack that killed her, as well as to communicate with other para-spirits comfortably housed in their minds. Bomb is focused through the experience of a London-based sixth-form drama student from Somerset, Genesis, whose former relationship with an increasingly radicalized teenager Naz makes her a target for a terrorist cell that drugs her and straps her body into a suicide vest so that she could become an agent of mass destruction. The two novels trace the impact of the shifts in the forces that shape the young protagonists’ perspectives on the possibility of an ethical commitment to finding a nonviolent solution to political situations of conflict. In doing this, Singer and Mussi offer an account of the emergence of a “new global citizen” (Head 145),

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conceived as a cosmopolitan, or someone for whom “global questions of responsibility” will outweigh national allegiances and fundamentalist responses to political problems, but who will also account for them (147). The “breaking up of the fixity of identity” in these texts, or a yielding to the ties that loosen the bonds of one’s own being, does not simply take the characters here beyond themselves; it also “facilitate[s] the approach to the Other” and makes the assumption of ethical responsibility for that other possible (Versluys 182). From the very beginning of these novels, the violent appropriation of childhood by terrorism has a chilling effect, whereby the reader becomes peculiarly conscious of child vulnerability in times of terror. Singer’s and Mussi’s openings—similarly to that of Bombmaker, in which Lizzie is presented as both terrified and hesitant while assembling a bomb—stage their young protagonists’ encounters with terror as resulting in the brutal expulsion of their selves from their accustomed positions: almost as soon as we meet The Innocent’s Story’s Cassina, she tells us, in a second-person address, that she “got blown up. Boom, boom, explosion, … blasted limb from limb” (1); our first glimpse of Bomb’s Genesis is that of an unconscious girl being dressed by two men in a vest packed with explosives. Cassina herself notes the abrupt change in her perspective “from participant to observer” (Singer 5), and the direction initially taken by the two narratives is toward their main characters’ ultimate sense of disembodiment and disempowerment. At the same time, running throughout the novels are these girls’ own feelings that they have long been shaped by others’ perception of them, yet their actual lives have failed to attract serious attention (Singer 31, 205; Mussi 33–34, 390). The novels are built, in one sense, so as to investigate the fluidity of identity, and explore the struggles of their young characters to determine the angle at which to enter the post-terror world. These struggles are set against the background of fictionalized global conflicts—in which youth identities are said to be more and more often fashioned by fundamentalist ideologies (with teenagers like Naz “want[ing] to commit to something bigger, more meaningful and more powerful” (Mussi 31)) and in response to state-sponsored violence (Akim, the suicide bomber from The Innocent’s Story, was five years old when he was shot by soldiers for firing paintballs to try to create the national flag on the walls of the sacred city from which his people were exiled (Singer 109–110)). And the way in which the fluidity of the young protagonists’ bearings acquires a larger ethical significance pivots less on childhood vulnerability or innocence than on the Western child’s guilt: Cassina’s for the death of her younger sister Aelfin in the same attack that turned her into a para-spirit (since the girls would not have stopped at the shops on their way home if she had not insisted on it) and for ignoring the suffering of others (“[M]aybe if one person suffers anywhere in the world,” another para-spirit, Padua, tells the girl when she protests the innocence of the people killed by Akim, “we all have blood on our hands” (Singer 124)); Genesis’s guilt is centered around putting her

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friends at risk (and causing the death of her best friend Holly at the hands of anti-terrorist police) when she turns to them for help after learning of the role that was assigned for her to play in the terrorists’ plan. The lack of fit between young people’s sense of themselves and the society in which they are answerable to and responsible for others becomes the major focus of these novels. But where this permeability of the boundaries allows Singer’s and Mussi’s main protagonists a continued negotiation of selfhood (and of membership of a global community) through dialogue, in the case of many other young characters in these books it permits rapid radicalization. Thriving in their fictional Britains are anti-Western fundamentalisms that share important characteristics with real-life Islamic extremism (such as the idea of martyrdom as militancy (see, for instance, Janes and Houen 2014)), yet are shown to coexist with the internal and external threats coming from radical Islamists in The Innocent’s Story and to interleave their religious ideology with secular elements that include global financial networks and celebrity and media culture in Bomb. Therefore, while in Singer’s novel young men like Akim and his terrorist cell leader, Habril, are thought to have joined the Haliki sect because of the West’s coldness to the destitution and loss of T’lanni lives due to state violence (141)—as Western countries “beam [their] culture and [their] ways into [T’lanni] cities via television, via the internet” yet supply the T’lannis with “expensive Coca-Cola and drugs [their] companies have dumped” instead of much needed water and life-saving medicine (152)—the Brightness Brotherhood in Bomb appeal to Western teenagers via global and local media adverts and celebrity conversions (22–23, 31). The sect’s members, calling themselves Lumins, strategically provide young people such as Naz with the “identity they’ve always longed for” (“[W]e were all doing it,” Genesis reflects on the exorbitant sales of the “Lumin-cool gear” among teenagers, “Those black tees with SONS OF THE SUN—DEATH IS A DUTY; VICTORY OR MARTYRDOM; LIFE IS A STRUGGLE, DEATH A RELEASE screened across them. The black durags, the camouflage trousers. Those crazy crazy crazy boots. Dark glasses. Sexy smiles. We weren’t thinking about cult messages and killing. We just wanted to look cool” (34)), and manage to terrorize whole communities by declaring that “joining the Brightness is the only sure way [for their children] to stay safe” from being taken hostage and turned into suicide bombers (56). The inclusion of these young people into politically, culturally, and religiously constructed terrorist groups to which they can belong with assurance is a symptom here of the re-arranging of their worlds around the lines drawn by terror and counter-terror. But even as the young generation are shown in these novels to be heading toward more unstable, permeable, and radical versions of themselves, Singer and Mussi demonstrate how counter-terrorist violence can accelerate this kind of retreat, as it applies its exclusionary policies to rationalize the infringement or suspension of human rights under conditions of terror. The Innocent’s Story’s Cassina is clearly used to certain norms that have been

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operative in establishing who is terror’s victim (and so entitled to a rightbearing status and protection as a citizen) and who is the perpetrator, and one of the things that emerges from the attack that kills her is her realization that “normally everything comes to you packaged, people tell you what to think, frame events for you. Well, here … no one was framing the event, it was just happening” (5); it is when the bombing leaves the girl free to think for herself, and open to new ways of conceiving of global relations, that the consideration of whose lives are worth saving, valuing, and grieving can be reassessed. After the novel’s final confrontation between violence and non-violence, faith and extremism, and fantasy and reality, Cassina cannot help but infer that—even though “‘[r]esisting arrest’ and ‘endangering the public’ were phrases bandied about”—the counter-terrorist agents “just wanted to shoot [Habril], so they did” (205). Relatedly, in Bomb Genesis comes to recognize that the heightened security measures adopted by the British state in response to the steep growth in Brightness terrorism (measures that include the Deadly Force policy of shooting potential suicide bombers without warning, citizenship-stripping of extremist supporters, and new anti-radicalization duties for public bodies (178, 176, 179)) not only failed to protect her from the Lumin, but exposed her to the violence wielded by the state: she sees the police shoot Holly, whom they mistake for herself, and ends up running from both the security and terrorist forces, helped by Holly’s brother Dave, himself an army soldier. There does appear to be some common ground, then, in how increasing willingness to sacrifice human lives on the part of both sides, insurgent and counter-insurgent, amounts to the hardening of faith in the benefits of reciprocal violent action—which includes sacrificial reciprocations—or to a determination “to outdo the effectiveness of [one’s] enemy’s tactics by showing [one’s] preparedness to make greater sacrifices” (Houen, “Reckoning Sacrifice” 583; see also Houen 2010). The two main characters’ own readiness to take or exchange lives for the purposes of reciprocal violence is framed in these novels by their intermediate state between the material and the spiritual, or between life and death. In The Innocent’s Story, Cassina’s first reaction on realizing that one of the hosts whose bodies she has entered, and who miraculously survived the same attack that ended her life, is in fact the terrorist who carried out the bombing is to attempt to exact revenge on him: “Maybe I will be able to encircle his heart, maybe if I clench what’s left of myself about him, I’ll be able to squeeze the breath from his body. I will kill him as he killed me, as he killed Aelfin, as he killed all those others at the station.” But in trying to harm Akim—and just as, surprised and frightened by her own “flush of excitement,” she hesitates and is about to loosen her grip on his heart— Cassina injures herself instead, and the momentary dispersing of the particles allows the girl to edge toward the knowledge that “If you’re into revenge, you’re no better that they are” (99). Suspending ethics when combating one’s enemies is what the girl considers again, if only for a moment, when she hears

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Habril threatening a seven-year-old girl, Mary, who reminds Akim of his dead daughter, to coerce the younger man into executing another attack: “I’ve become really fond of Mary, but actually, wouldn’t it be better for Habril to shoot just one child rather than for Akim to blow up who knows how many strangers?” (158). Bomb places a similar emphasis on the dangers of imagining oneself into the thoughts of the terrorist other; indeed, Genesis confesses to the reader her enjoyment of the privileges granted to her by the very act of wearing powerful explosives. The girl understands that she has a “hideously new and deadly power: at some level [she] can decide who lives, who dies” (she even thinks of a grumpy-looking elderly man in front of whom she pushes in a shop queue: “I could blow him up with the flick of a wrist”), but she also knows that she can use the destructive might that the Brightness have given her together with the vest against them (75, 233, 159). And yet, just like Cassina, Mussi’s young protagonist has it in her to prevent Dave from beating one of the terrorists to death (“I’m even thinking: Instant justice. Cheaper. Quicker. What they all deserve … But then I think, Holly wouldn’t have wanted that” (187)), and stops herself from killing Naz so as to frustrate the final part of the terrorists’ ruthless plot (“Am I not using the same logic? Resorting to his same violence?” (401–402)). Pushed beyond the limits of their minds and of their selves, both Cassina and Genesis learn to see that feeling affinity with others gives a new sense of purpose. The former recognizes the importance of agency thanks to “[s]pending all that time as a para-spirit, when [she] couldn’t change a thing, couldn’t make a difference” (209), and the latter discovers that the position of the victim can have its own potency, or “feeling of destiny,” partly because of her ability to see spiritual visions of being bound by ethical obligations to and among the living (308). The novels’ performance of their characters’ peculiar alienation from reality—this opening of gaps between mind, spirit, and biological material—can therefore be seen as establishing an intimacy that prompts both the characters and the readers to bear witness to what remains suspended in post-terror interpersonal relations. If one of the central aims of the post-9/11 novel has been to use the terrorist event’s “capacity to dismember” to propel its readers towards a distinctive hybrid of Western and non-Western perspectives that arises from the wreckage (Boxall 13), then Singer’s and Mussi’s novels situate themselves squarely in that tradition by reaching out to the mind of the anti-Western fundamentalist to gain understanding, as Jean Baudrillard has put it, not just of “what goes on in the terrorists’ organization” but also of what arguments reside “in their heads” (17). It is certainly important to acknowledge that where Cassina’s search for answers as to why Akim “press[ed] the button on so many lives” pulls her to his mind “like a magnet” (105), Genesis—her body trapped in a suicide vest that “feels moulded to [her] skin … like it’s some huge bombcancerous scab … drawing on [her] energy, feeding on [her] life blood” (214)—similarly looks to Naz for an explanation of “why he turned his back on [her], on everything, and joined [the Brightness]” to help plan an attack “condemning [thousands of people] to a horrible death” by nuclear radiation

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(385, 393). The violence of this battering of one’s self against the limits of the other (and, in the case of The Innocent’s Story’s Cassina, the actual “invasion of privacy” of another’s body (15)) is balanced against the insight granted by the blending of individuals’ perspectives. Crucially, there is room in this meeting of mindsets for a recognition of some commonality among antagonists (like when Cassina hears one of Eric Clapton’s songs in Akim’s brain and thinks of the young T’lanni as a “citizen of the world, [her] world” (80)) and of the incommunicability of difference (one example of which is the way in which Mary and Cassina react to the nature of Akim’s prayers, the little girl asking him if he is a robot, and the para-spirit shouting “Abracadabra” at him and thinking his brain is “like a computer in safety mode” when she hears him chanting (66, 78, 90)). But even when the difference between the terrorist and his victims is restated, the role of imagination and empathy in establishing intercultural relations continues to be subject to scrutiny (“[I]f you don’t stand in the soft shoes of those pushed down,” Cassina is told by Padua after she discovers that the older spirit is Habril’s mother, who sacrificed her life for five-year-old Akim, “if you don’t look at the world through their eyes, just once; if you don’t try to imagine then … you haven’t done enough” (153)); at the same time, such a framing is taken further in the suggestion—paralleling what Ian McEwan (2001) argued in the wake of the 9/11 attacks—that imaginative compassion could make terror attacks impossible for their perpetrators (“[M]aybe that’s it, why the recruits keep coming,” Cassina thinks, “Because most of them die, because most of them never have to look at the damage, actually put their fingers in the blood” (158)). Both Singer and Mussi imagine a further coming together between the child victim and the terrorist (between Cassina, Mary, and Akim and then between Aelfin and Akim in The Innocent’s Story, and between Genesis and Naz in Bomb) at the end of their novels, with Akim’s act of saving his supposed victims highlighting how difficult it becomes to take others’ lives if you exercise moral compassion for them and gain a new perspective on their loved ones’ losses. What emerges from the violence of terror in these books is a new kind of subject, one who is able to overcome the East-West oppositions of the post-terror era, and who seeks to reshape the worlds transformed by hatred and violence according to a vision of a disembodied, global unity. Their agency being severely restricted throughout the novels, Cassina (newly reborn thanks to Akim’s sacrifice for Mary) and Genesis (whose plight remains unknown as Mussi leaves her story with an open ending) can be understood as looking for ways to stop the reiteration of the norms of violence, and to stay responsive to the others’ claims for equal conditions of livability. The now immortal Cassina avows a “credo [of] step[ping] forward, … do[ing] whatever is in [her] power to make things better” and “try[ing] to stand in other people’s shoes” (Singer 209–210); Aelfin reaches out to Akim in the heavenlike space in which he joins her after giving up his life for others, and where they learn that love, forgiveness, and community—pursued as alternatives to the violent logic of retribution—can

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make them “powerful enough to light this whole universe” (216); and Genesis recognizes that the “meaning of life” is “to carry [one’s] burden [of responsibility for others] into the unknowing future” (Mussi 412). In one sense, as Boxall would have it, this merging of “us” and “them” is the outcome of terror wars, of the meeting of supposedly oppositional perspectives “in violence and in death” (140). But from another viewpoint, the undoing of the boundaries that separates one’s self from others is the mark of the narrative that seeks to exceed the limits of the oppositional thinking that terror events and counter-terror processes set in train (see also Boxall 2013, esp. 128–140). As such, narratives like Singer’s and Mussi’s perform the possibility of new hybrid subject positions waiting to be born, and rethink life itself as a necessary set of relations to one’s others. Children’s fiction of the twenty-first century has developed a form with which to deal with the politics of terror and counter-terror while recognizing that modern sovereign power seeks to divide us and forms the field in which certain populations are rendered suspect, abject, and faceless and, when lost, are not worth public grieving. With Mills, McFall, Blackman, Singer, and Mussi, this apprehension of how easily human life is erased coincides with a focus on what might galvanize an ethical and political opposition to the losses the war on terror entails, in novels that are shaped by a new, post-terror dystopianism. The apocalyptic fears and futures envisaged here allow these writers to articulate how the binding of local histories and cultural narratives and of terrorist and victim perspectives are necessary for finding a basis for community at a time when communal modes of being are not made available by global networks. The forces that brought the characters in these novels to the point at which their view of reality is fractured, their access to their pasts and the ability to bequeath their accumulated wisdom to the futures denied to them, are also those that lead to an acceptance of war as the norm of political life. The ethical imperative in these conditions seems to be to reimagine the possibility of community on the basis of a shared understanding both of the persistence of anachronistic divisions between “us” and “them” in the global imagination, and of the difficult necessity of thinking through and beyond these divisions. By creating a new kind of subject that emerges from a crossover of knowledges and perspectives, a subject ready to bear moral responsibility under these disarticulated geopolitical conditions, the novels discussed here have spoken a counter-narrative to the two-tribes rhetoric. They have sought to move beyond the violence of terror wars to perform the possibility of this new kind of imaginative convergence and have become part of the process of giving the West’s others visibility and recognizable humanity.

Works Cited American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. “Frequently Challenged Books,” 2017, http://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallenged books. Accessed 19 Nov. 2017.

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Baudrillard, Jean. “The Spirit of Terrorism.” The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays. 2002. Translated by Chris Turner, Verso, 2012. Blackman, Malorie. Noble Conflict. Doubleday, 2013. Boehmer, Elleke. Postcolonial Poetics: 21st-Century Critical Readings. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Boehmer, Elleke. “Postcolonial Writing and Terror.” Terror and the Postcolonial: A Concise Companion, edited by Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, WileyBlackwell, 2010, pp. 141–150. Boxall, Peter. Twenty-First Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2013. Bradford, Clare. “Children’s Literature in the ‘Age of Terrorism’: Subtexts in Literary Responses to September 11, 2001.” Magpies: Talking about Books for Children, vol. 20, no. 1, 2005, pp. 20–23. Bradford, Clare, et al. New World Orders in Contemporary Children’s Literature: Utopian Transformations. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?Verso, 2009. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2004. Cain, Sian. “British Woman Held after Being Seen Reading Book about Syria on Plane.” The Guardian, 4 Aug.2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/ 04/british-woman-held-after-being-seen-reading-book-about-syria-on-plane. Accessed 22 Nov. 2017. Foucault, Michel. Fearless Speech. 1984. Edited by Joseph Pearson. Semiotext(e), 2001. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972– 1977, edited by Colin Gordon. Translated by Colin Gordon et al., Harvester, 1980. Foucault, Michel. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. Translated by David Macey, Allen Lane, 2003. Grzegorczyk, Blanka. Discourses of Postcolonialism in Contemporary British Children’s Literature. Routledge, 2015. Head, Dominic. The State of the Novel: Britain and Beyond. Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. Hintz, Carrie, Balaka Basu, and Katherine R. Broad, eds. Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers. Routledge, 2013. Hintz, Carrie, and Elaine Ostry, eds. Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults. Routledge, 2003. Houen, Alex. “Reckoning Sacrifice in ‘War on Terror’ Literature.” American Literary History, vol. 28, no. 3, 2016, pp. 574–595. Houen, Alex. “Sacrificial Militancy and the War on Terror.” Terror and the Postcolonial: A Concise Companion, edited by Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, pp. 113–140. Houen, Alex. “Sovereignty, Biopolitics and the Use of Literature: Michel Foucault and Kathy Acker.” Foucault in an Age of Terror: Essays on Biopolitics and the Defence of Society, edited by Stephen Morton and Stephen Bygrave, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 63–87. Janes, Dominic, and Alex Houen, eds. Martyrdom and Terrorism: Pre-modern to Contemporary Perspectives. Oxford University Press, 2014. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. 1961. Translated by Alphonso Lingis, Kluwer Academic, 1991.

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Levinas, Emmanuel, and Richard Kearney. “Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas.” Face to Face with Levinas, edited by Richard A. Cohen, State University of New York Press, 1986, pp. 13–33. Mahlstedt, Andrew. “Landmines, Language, and Dismemberment: Mia Couto’s Imperial Residues.” Textual Practice, vol. 27, no. 3, 2013, pp. 459–478. Martin, Rux. “Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault.” Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, edited by Luther Martin, University of Massachusetts Press, 1988, pp. 9–15. McEwan, Ian. “Only Love and Then Oblivion.” The Guardian, 15 Sep.2001, https:// www.theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/15/september11.politicsphilosophyandsoci ety. Accessed 21 Nov. 2018. McFall, Claire. Bombmaker. Templar Fiction, 2014. Mills, Sam. Blackout. Faber and Faber, 2010. Mussi, Sarah. Bomb. Hodder Children’s Books, 2015. Reid, Julian. “Life Struggles: War, Discipline and Biopolitics in the Thought of Michel Foucault.” Foucault in an Age of Terror: Essays on Biopolitics and the Defence of Society, edited by Stephen Morton and Stephen Bygrave, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 14–42. Singer, Nicky. The Innocent’s Story. Oxford University Press, 2005. Versluys, Kristiaan. Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel. Columbia University Press, 2009. Zulaika, Joseba, and William A. Douglass. “The Terrorist Subject: Terrorism Studies and the Absent Subjectivity.” Critical Studies on Terrorism, vol. 1, no. 1, 2008, pp. 27–36.

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Recent political discourse invokes vulnerability to others to justify recourse to coercive precautionary measures and explain the exercise of state power at the expense of collective dissent. At a time when various forms of terror and counter-terror permeate the world order, new divisions accompany the social and political transformations of the century, while walls and other border structures are being promised, erected, or rebuilt, purportedly to allow contemporary society to inhabit this rapidly changing world more securely. That youth culture has become increasingly engaged with these difficult issues is clear, for instance, from the rise in popularity of political vocabulary among the young entrants to the BBC’s creative writing competition 500 Words. As a result of research analyzing the entries, the Children’s Dictionaries team at Oxford University Press declared “trump” to be the Children’s Word of the Year in 2017 (with “wall,” “Brexit,” and “alternative facts” also featuring prominently across over 131,000 submissions (Pickles n. pag.)), a year after the title was awarded to the word “refugee,” which had appeared in a vast number of the just under 123,500 short stories written by children between 5 and 13 years old (Erizanu n. pag.). The vulnerability of certain groups of people under the transformed conditions of the new century has influenced children’s thinking and creativity. At the same time, the anxieties of a mainstream Western culture that shores up its borders against what it perceives as alien—and that relies on anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant paranoia narratives to reconstitute some imagined wholeness—have contributed to the proliferation of children’s novels designed to foster ethical responsibility for the other. A large group of recent children’s novels that includes works by Miriam Halahmy, Sita Brahmachari, Robert Swindells, and Rachel Anderson have repeatedly placed ethical emphasis on the exposure to and obligations toward one’s others in their writings. With an eye to the contemporary children’s novel as an expression of a common humanity that involves young readers in a recognition of its fundamental condition of precariousness, I bring into critical conversation the discourses of postcolonialism, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and human rights, as well as the ethics of cohabitation. This ethics, as understood by Judith Butler, follows from a

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particular kind of solicitation that compels us to recognize and enact the “bonds of solidarity that emerge across space and time,” or to be responsive to those who are outside our immediate sphere of belonging but whom we cannot will away without undermining our humanity (“Precarious Life” 135). Post-9/11 children’s novelists have played their part in establishing children as agents of social change, mainly through constructing young protagonists as inherently empathetic and intensely responsive to those other lives. The child characters in the contemporary novel for the young are often described as making sense of the harms of othering and working to achieve new, cross-cultural and cross-generational alliances that undermine the present differential way of regarding populations. Speaking about an increasingly virulent racism against refugees and migrants, Butler argues that “a passionate commitment to the everyone and the anyone” is integral to “entering into a common world … with those who are at risk of not counting” (“We Are Worldless” n. pag.). The challenge is then to maintain an ethical obligation to those whose difference from us seems to be quite marked, including those who have been described by the state and the mainstream media as threats to the core of our culture, nationhood, and identity. The conflation of recent anti-terror laws and practices and the state regulation of migrant populations provides an operative framework within which certain lives are regarded as less worthy of protection. The texts examined here are concerned with the possibility of communication across the tribal divide between “us,” young Britons, and “them,” migrants and asylum seekers, which would speak a counter-narrative to the state’s and the mainstream media’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. Different kinds of intercultural cooperation are undertaken self-consciously by the central characters in these novels within and across generations. This chapter reads these alliances as embodying an active form of cosmopolitan solidarity against the treatment of immigrants in Britain that is based on ideas of mutuality and the incommensurability of difference. When situated within the postcolonial field, conventionally seen as concerned with the politics of division and separation, these texts can be read to facilitate a critical consciousness of the need to think and act transculturally, while obliging us to recognize that, under the mechanics of Western systems of representation, “speaking with” others can become “speaking for” others in terms not of their making (see, for instance, Spivak 1988; Ahmed 2000; Morris 2010). To put it another way, such writing seeks out transcultural understanding that “brokers compassionate connection while recognising the limits of the threshold” (McLeod 12). The young protagonists here can be seen to reflect upon the limits of their globalized yet invariably parochial milieus and come into their own as agents for change, often as a result of intergenerational conflict, or of finding agency within a critical relation to the present constructions of otherness; they then bring about a new form of responsiveness to migrants among all generations and manage to build more welcoming communities.

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High Rise In Rachel Anderson’s Asylum (2011), the rather formulaic cast of minor characters who reside in Hawk Rise, a derelict tower block that migrants and asylum seekers share with an unnamed English city’s poor and vulnerable, ensures that the reader is made aware of the links between Britain’s immigration policies, social exclusion, and residential segregation. The chapters alternate between the perspectives of two young refugees, 15-year-old Sunday, who has been brought into the country illegally and given the (unpaid) job of being Hawk Rise’s caretaker, and 9-year-old Rosa, who tries to navigate the highly complex immigration system while caring for her ill mother. Writing about Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Robert Spencer reminds us that the “migrant’s perspective … is perforce a disenchanted one” (256), and Rushdie himself describes a “migrant’s-eye view of the world” as disillusioned with the one-time certainties about the nature of reality and haunted by a suspicion of all truths and all narratives (Imaginary Homelands 394). In line with this vision of the migrant condition, Anderson’s novel exposes us to a whole range of disjunctures, pressures, and constraints that lie at the heart of her young protagonists’ predicament. The Britain that the two children reach after their respective journeys is far from the rosy picture of a “Wonderland … where … there would be no violence and the healthcare was the best in the whole world” (152), a picture painted by Sunday’s and Rosa’s relatives back at home as well as by other refugees heading in the same direction. Indeed, the country’s weather and population seem equally unwelcoming. On seeing Hawk Rise for the first time, Rosa thinks that “[i]t must be where the vagrants, the hopeless and other worthless people were sent,” and she feels “so angry that she clenched her fists inside her pockets. They’d been tricked into coming here. She was not worthless. She had the sachet of coloured felt-tip pens she’d won [at school for industry] to prove it” (38). Sunday, on the other hand, muses on the opening page that “Great Britain was never his country of first choice, nor second. He’d have preferred Canada or Germany or America. Best of all, Iceland, which, so he’d heard, was cold and treeless but democratic and respectful of human life. Britain was where he ended up” (1). Early in the novel the boy is told that the only people who wanted him in Britain are migrant smugglers and their cronies; throughout the book, he wishes he had argued with the smugglers to “send him to a more caring nation” that would value a “strong, healthy, willing incomer” (173)— unlike the British people, bombarded with popular media representations of young male refugees as threatening rather than vulnerable (see, for instance, Duffy 2016; Chouliaraki and Stolic 2017). Through these characters’ complex relationships with their hosts and neighbors, Anderson demonstrates that, in their vulnerability, immigrants have no choice but to rely on the hospitality that others are prepared to offer them. The systematic mistreatment to which immigrants are subjected in Anderson’s story, ranging from verbal abuse to dehumanizing policies, does

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not accommodate what Edward Said in his essay “Reflections on Exile” (1984/ 2001) judges to be the twentieth-century state’s reinvention of the term “refugees” to denote large groups of “innocent and bewildered people requiring urgent international assistance” (181). Rather, similarly to the recent Eastern European or Latin American incomers into British society, and much as the Commonwealth migrants after the Second World War, these new arrivals may be understood to carry with them not just an unwelcome reminder of the loss of imperial prestige, but also the prospect of a reverse colonization, thus threatening, in the eyes of those who see the best source of solidarity in cultural homogeneity, the cohesion of the British nation (see Gilroy 2005, 2006). The socially and ethnically divided landscape of Asylum provides a warning that chimes with Malachi McIntosh’s description of the dominant representations of immigration as sustaining the current schisms running through the nation: the political discourse in Britain has routinely presented new entrants as having the “potential to undermine the state through an essential disconnection from the nation,” which is all the more affecting given the post-9/11 and 7/7 climate of heightened security concerns (73). While pressures on the government to restrict immigration to Britain dominate the news headlines found in the novel in ways that many readers might recognize from real life, Rosa soon learns that the immigration authorities “have to check each case thoroughly to ensure there’s no threat to national security,” and that her welfare support worker’s role consists in teaching refugees who are granted temporary residence “what to do to tidy up their lives into the British way” (11, 34). Ironically, Rosa’s (and Sunday’s) experience in Britain is that of being repeatedly denied fundamental human rights—and of mobilizing crosscultural solidarity, returning to the “dulled,” “dejected” residents of Hawk Rise a sense of collective responsibility for the lives of one another (39)— rather than threatening to deny them to others. Sunday’s mediator status is linked to his ability to take on the kind of responsibility that Emmanuel Levinas characterizes as “answering for everything and for everyone” (Otherwise Than Being 114); that he prevails in his determination to anticipate the needs of the building’s occupants and to respond to their many requests in the most positive and caring manner is significant both in terms of the Levinasian concept of subjectivity as realized through giving oneself up to others and of imposing an ethical obligation upon others to find forms of cohabitation distinguished by a commitment to equality and cooperation. For Levinas, one’s subjectivity is formed through relations with others (we exist, he argues, “through the other and for the other” (Otherwise Than Being 114)), and yet those who act upon us clearly remain other to us, with responsibility being derived not from sameness but from an exposure to otherness: “It is the ‘here I am’ said to a neighbour to whom I am given over, by which I announce peace” (“God and Philosophy” 184). Of course, there are contradictions in Levinas’s position on being addressed by and bound up with others, and his affirmation of certain forms of nationalism raises key questions about the conditions for moral

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responsiveness; accordingly, after Butler, I read Levinas against himself here, or against the exclusionary assumptions by which his philosophy is sometimes supported (see Butler 2012). If Anderson’s protagonists make various kinds of sacrifices in acting for others, their Levinasian subjectivity emerging “for the other,” there is also a Butlerian undercurrent in the novel of an apparent “intertwinement” between all those other lives and the characters’ own that “extend[s] beyond the religious and cultural communities,” which Levinas sees as a “necessary condition and limit” to ethical relations (“Precarious Life” 140). Having lived through terror and violence, and been forced to leave their elderly relatives behind, the two young refugees find themselves caring for, and then being cared for by, a group of people of various ages who have themselves experienced uncertainty, displacement, and violence. When Rosa spends the night in the flat of Mrs. Ndebele (who says that “it [i]sn’t right for Rosa to be alone” after her mother is taken to hospital, even while Rosa decides that “it [i]sn’t safe for [an] old woman with shaky hands to be left on her own, specially when the stairwell outside was so dark” (238)), the girl discovers that the childhood home back in Asia that Mrs. Ndebele lost in her youth before marrying a British soldier was in a rural village very much like Rosa’s own. The legal status of many of Hawk Rise’s residents is as precarious as that of the newcomers, too, and Sunday is often asked to help his neighbors with documents like visa applications, being more attentive to the vulnerable than the welfare workers at the People’s Advice Bureau, as attested to by all those he helps (90). In Asylum, the council-owned tower block provides not just a backdrop but also a means of focusing relations of care: Sunday is prepared to devote his life to others yet is also dependent on those others, and the residents, young and old, quickly agree to keep an eye on the boy, who lives “in the comfortless, cookerless, windowless storeroom next to the boiler room” (95), taking turns to leave food and domestic items for him to find; in a similar way, Rosa’s persistent efforts to create a vegetable garden among the “piles of refuse and small patches of sour dust” in the building’s forecourt win her the help of the initially skeptical tenants (207). Even though the communal sampling of the radishes grown in the garden that occurs in the final sections of the novel is overshadowed by the approaching demolition of Hawk Rise, the memories of such get-togethers later cause the again homeless Sunday to reflect that “it was not the quality of the construction but the quality of the people which rendered a place habitable” (274). The clear call to community is also a call to cross cultural boundaries—to ignore “some of the very terms through which contemporary global conflicts are conceptualized” and extend our ethical obligations to those who appear to test our sense of belonging (Butler, Frames 156)—while moving towards the recognition of our common humanity. This is the kind of recognition that Rosa’s mother, Lila, edges toward in her dazed, dream-like state when she thinks that “Perhaps the many countries of the world were not so far apart as she had feared.” But maybe, Lila adds, “they were further and nobody

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ever got back to where they started” (67), and so there is a suggestion in all of this that what is shared is a generalized condition of precariousness, a frailty that relies on a conception of the subject as fundamentally dependent on a world of others who constantly challenge the horizons of the life that they hold in common. In the case of Anderson’s novel, the life that the young immigrants share with their new neighbors is alienatingly non-rural: “There were rules about urban life he was going to have to learn quickly,” Sunday realizes, “He prayed that, in God’s good time, he would fit into this ugly landscape as if he belonged” (13); on the other hand, being denied growing space is felt most acutely by Rosa, who wants fresh vegetables similar to those her grandfather grew before their village was destroyed, yet struggles to clear enough space to put in any seeds, since “[i]t seemed that the wasteland around Hawk Rise was well recognized … as the most convenient dumping ground” in the city (134). In addition, through episodes such as the one in which Sunday suffers racist abuse from a smartly dressed couple who stop their car in the building’s courtyard to dispose of an old, broken-down fridge, as well as bags of rubbish, and who comment loudly that the “whole block was a blooming garbage tip,” the novel demonstrates that what makes anti-immigrant attitudes possible is the failure to see all lives as valuable, recognizable, or indeed worth preserving—“waste of space,” the couple call all “foreigners” when mocking the boy (116). At the same time, the literal and figurative wasteland surrounding Hawk Rise is transformed through the two children’s persistence into a thriving oppositional space marked by what Butler would describe as a “sustainable interdependency” established on the grounds of equality (“Precarious Life” 149). Unable to partake in the totality of the city they live in—a city sheltering ongoing antagonisms that can be linked to the imprint of colonial history on its carefully regimented social spaces—Anderson’s protagonists may be said to transform this particular space into a “dwelling place” in accordance with the Heideggerian notion that “mortals ever search anew for the essence of dwelling” and that “they must ever learn to dwell” (363, italics in the original). Thus, to properly dwell in this complex cultural reality, where precariousness cuts across categories of identity, we need not just to build, but also to think about the wider question of dwelling, for “[b]uilding and thinking are … insufficient for dwelling so long as each busies itself with its own affairs in separation, instead of listening to the other” (362). In Asylum, it is whose lives count as valuable, and whose stories are eligible for cultural and institutional recognition that matter for how the community is (re)built. Particularly important, then, is the voicing of Sunday’s and Rosa’s perspectives in ways that counter dominant Western narratives. These narratives are presented in various forms, including immigration workers’ framing of asylum seekers as “illegals who arrived with invented tales of political suffering in order to scrounge off the UK’s medical system” (166–167), challenged throughout the novel by the resurfacing of the children’s traumatic memories

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of the very real violence from which they escaped, and colonial-period fictions like The Secret Garden, used by the girl’s schoolfriend Jules to describe Rosa’s attempts to create her garden (“you know, the lonely waif who comes from faroff Eastern lands where everybody’s died and then she turns out to have green fingers”), to which Rosa replies matter-of-factly: “No green fingers … . All very clean. And no secret. This is share for all the peoples of my home” (218). Despite the narrative impetus toward cross-cultural, intergenerational collaboration, the laying bare of the problems that have to be addressed in order for British society to embrace a new, redemptive inclusiveness is accompanied by an equally powerful recognition of the limitations of individual acts of solidarity. The burden of acting upon or ethically soliciting others to live together across differences falls entirely on the young protagonists, who have already been let down by ineffective adult figures such as Rosa’s mother. The girl reflects on how “[i]t was hard being strong for two of them. Some days, [she] wanted to howl like Granpap’s dog pulling on its chain” at their support worker (33–34), who herself “knew she hadn’t shown enough commitment to these two. One of the difficulties was she hardly knew them. She hadn’t had time to study their file. They’d been passed on to her, like a pair of nearly new shoes” (166–167). The scripted response of the immigration officers who interview Sunday appears similarly inadequate, and they too are aware of their own passivity: “Doesn’t make sense, does it?” one of them mutters, “Picking up kids like this, then chucking them out on the streets. We ought to be doing more for them than that” (188). The children seem more suited to the task of actively contesting the status quo, since what is needed, as Rosa puts it, is “[l]ess talk talk”— something that in Rosa’s experience does not necessarily lead adults to action, which she believes is desperately needed—and “more work work” (199–200). Moreover, the communitarian ties that these characters forge at Hawk Rise are only temporary: after its former residents are rehoused, and the building itself is demolished, the alliances inevitably fall apart; no longer proximate to the children in a physical sense, the dispersed Hawk Rise community cannot protect Rosa from further racist attacks and remains ignorant of Sunday’s deportation. By highlighting the discrepancy between local assertions of community bonds and global forms of ethical connections, the novel makes clear the need for a global connectedness with, and obligation to, those whose lives are not always perceived as counting.

Hidden Depths Robert Swindells’s Ruby Tanya (2004) and Miriam Halahmy’s Hidden (2011) are further examples of the cosmopolitan variety of the post-9/11 children’s novel in that they represent the emergence of a global context for all of Britons’ interactions with others in their fictional exploration of how two particular communal enclaves are affected by issues of immigration and the UK’s asylum policy. In Swindells’s novel, the interpenetration of the

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global and the local comes to the fore in the enmities and friendships between the population of a traditional English village and a recently arrived group of asylum-seeking Muslims housed in a former RAF base just outside its borders. Despite a ferocious campaign against the presence of asylum seekers in this village community by her local property dealer father, 12-year-old Ruby Tanya develops a close bond with one of the newcomer schoolgirls, the kind and loyal Asra. However, after a student teacher is killed in a bomb explosion at the school, Asra’s fellow countrymen immediately come under suspicion as possible culprits, and Ruby Tanya ends up trying to prevent the deportation of her new friend’s family by hiding Asra in an old ruined farm. Halahmy’s main protagonist, 14-year-old white Briton Alix, growing up in an enclosed community of Hayling Island, is similarly caught up in global conditions as she becomes aware of the policies and attitudes toward asylum seekers in Britain, and decides to help her new refugee schoolfriend Samir to harbor an injured illegal immigrant, whom the teenagers have saved from drowning in the sea following a horrendous journey from the Middle East. Both texts interrupt their young protagonists’ preconceived notions about how community is to be understood, an interruption that opens up to critical thinking the manner in which the language of post-9/11 global conflicts, to use Butler’s vocabulary, “dispose[s] us in advance towards certain kinds of moral responses and normative conclusions” (Frames 156). The new social relationships into which the main characters enter in both novels serve to disrupt conventional ways of talking about race and immigration, and this disruption of anti-migrant discourse—a discourse that collapses the fear of immigration into the fear of terror—extends to other adult and child characters’ perceptions of the racial codes and violence around them. The cosmopolitan ethics that Swindells and Halahmy sketch out here require young people to be catalysts for a change in view of our obligations to others, obligations that, in the words of Kwame Anthony Appiah, “stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of shared citizenship” (xv). The young characters in the two novels mediate the concerns and needs of immigrants by enabling crossidentifications, that is, facilitating a sense of affinity—a brokering of cultural and historical difference that approaches but does not appropriate singularity (see McLeod 2011)—between the lives of those who reside within and outside their recognizable communities, whose exclusionary norms they no longer see as just and therefore ethically binding. That Hidden’s Alix defends Samir against racist bullying from young local thugs in the book’s opening chapter, yet soon after is shown to be worrying that the boy’s aunt is making balaclavas (rather than baklava) in preparation for a terrorist attack (which Alix thinks Samir’s brother must be planning because of his fierce looks), highlights how easy it is for the young to internalize anti-Muslim ideologies. Later in the novel, however, Alix comes to realize that immigrants can be culturally misrepresented, especially

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by mainstream media commentators: she learns, for instance, that Mohammed, the injured man whom the young people are helping, was in fact a student of engineering back in Iraq (“What did he do there? she asks initially. “‘Builder, plumber?’ I’ve read in the papers that’s what most foreigners do” (66)), who fled the country after being tortured by the Iraqi militia due to his links with the British army. The inability to contextualize the conflation of immigration, foreignness, and terrorism might be viewed as the result of what Paul Gilroy has described as the “militarisation of everyday life and the elevation of security over the other functions of government, particularly when they are associated with the comfort blanket of imagined monoculture” (“Multiculture” 30–31). This increasing securitization of public and private spaces is a post-9/11 trend that has seen ordinary citizens asked to act like foot soldiers “robust in the face of terror” and remain on guard against anyone who looks as if they were of Arab descent, including recent arrivals and those who immigrated into Britain several decades earlier (“Multiculture” 30). One example of this approach is when Ruby Tanya’s father explains his dislike of asylum seekers as follows: “Doesn’t matter where they are, city, town or village. Terrorists slip in with ’em, see? They look the same, the authorities can’t tell the one from the other. That’s why [immigration ha]s got to be stopped, now, before it’s too late” (73). In a related way, the self-consciousness of the Islamic immigrants in Swindells’s novel extends to a recognition of the everyday social and political practices of labeling Muslim communities as suspect; the leader of Ruby Tanya’s community is able to foresee accurately how the villagers will react to the school explosion: “a lot of people think that’s exactly what we are,” he says, “mad bombers with beards and turbans. When people die, when children are hurt, people don’t think … We must prepare ourselves” (5–6). Even when the Muslim characters in these novels are shown as embracing the role of the good immigrant, intent on “learning to be English” (Swindells 5), and adhering to the values of what Gilroy has dubbed the “‘fit in or eff off’ assimilationism” favored by British politicians and popular media (“Multiculture” 39; see also Shukla 2016), varieties of hostile interaction develop in the two texts alongside echoes of recurring popular stories about the migrant subject’s laziness, untrustworthiness, and criminal or terrorist motivation. Especially important here is the young characters’ initial failure to counter these narratives (but not the physical violence that they underlie, which is something that both Ruby Tanya and Alix stand up to from the very beginning), caused mainly by feelings of powerlessness in the face of adults stepping into their socially sanctioned positions of authority (Swindells 46, Halahmy 88–89). It is the growing sense of injustice and of duty toward vulnerable others that spurs these girls on at various later points in the stories in their difficult struggle to make all lives livable and equally deserving of cultural and institutional recognition, and to affirm the ultimate value of cross-cultural solidarity. The apprehension of one’s being as dependent on a world of others who are neither the same nor different is a profoundly transformative matter for the cosmopolitan children’s author, as made clear through the importance

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accorded to the power of imagination to free the young subject from solipsistic individualism (as well as a myopic, nation- and race-centered vision of community) and to generate new modes of sociality. Accordingly, new habits of thought are engendered in Swindells’s and Halahmy’s novels when the narratives of Muslims tortured or killed elsewhere in the world encroach on the lives of their white British protagonists. When Ruby Tanya discovers that the “Lamp the Camp” protest organized by her father (in which a group of villagers blow their cars’ horns and direct glaring headlights at the asylum seekers’ wooden huts one evening in a “sort of son et lumière show. A bit of fun,” as a protester tells the media (71)) brought back to Asra’s family and neighbors memories of attacks in their home country, which started in a similar way, and in which whole villages were burnt to the ground and their inhabitants killed, she is horrified by the suffering that her father’s actions has caused: “No, Asra, I cried, not in England … I suddenly saw they’d had no way of knowing, no way of knowing they weren’t about to be butchered; that it couldn’t happen here. A demo … had almost terrified the lives out of Asra’s people, because my father had dreamed up Lamp the Camp knowing absolutely nothing about the world they’d come from” (80). Ruby Tanya is further made aware of how markedly different the two girls’ lives have been when Asra tells her that, unlike her white British friend, she is not afraid of hiding in the ruins by herself: “Why should I be scared?” she asks. “It’s an old empty house, no planes come, no men with guns. I see ghosts … but they do not live here, I bring them with me. They live inside my head, so for me everywhere is haunted” (127). Likewise in Hidden, on learning the full story of the atrocities committed by the Iraqi fighters against Mohammed’s family, Alix acquires a new global cognizance and wonders, “How can just words do that to you? … Everything out there is just the same as it always is. Only nothing’s the same anymore” (111). Stories like Mohammed’s are shown to have the effect of bringing the fate of previously geographically distanced others near, and for Alix, “It’s as if all those pictures from the telly just appeared in [her] bedroom” (112). Moreover, while realizing that this reversal of distance and proximity must be reminding Samir about the torture and death of his parents, Alix also recognizes both the singularity of their life experiences (“Samir’s been through such a horrible time and all that’s happened to me is that I’ve been left looking after Mum” (72)) and their inseparable commonality with each other (“But it seems to me that we are a little bit the same. Samir has to do everything alone, like me” (72)) (see also Schoene 2009; McLeod 2011). Ruby Tanya and Hidden are therefore informed by an understanding that giving voice to and imagining the multitudinous diversity that is the global population encourages empathetic identifications that allow young people, in Arjun Appadurai’s words, to “consider migration, resist state violence, seek social redress, and design new forms of civic association and collaboration” across national and cultural boundaries (6). As a result of the imaginative possibilities of stories, these young characters feel obligated not just to seek to

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preserve the life of the other who in this way solicited their attention, but also to promote the rise of cosmopolitan consciousness in their local communities. As the young protagonists in these novels become implicated in lives that require protection from harm and injustice, they find themselves reliant upon the help of adults, some of whom appear rather clueless when it comes to acting, or indeed interacting, in a cosmopolitan fashion. Both novels’ main characters hesitantly seek out the parental guidance that they feel they need to fully grasp the socio-political reality they are waking up to, but, suspicious of their parents’ lack of political agency (or, in the case of Ruby Tanya’s father, of his far-right leanings), neither protagonist is prepared to confide in them about the radical actions that the teenagers are taking to aid others in distress. In both texts it is the grandparents rather than the parents (though in later sections of Swindells’s novel Ruby Tanya’s mother seems to be giving unspoken approval to the girl’s plan to help Asra) who lend the young characters moral or material support. In Ruby Tanya, the main protagonist’s grandmother agrees first to provide the girls with food and some camping necessities when Asra goes into hiding (“The optimism of youth,” she notes. “Still, I agree we’ve got to try… [Y]our old gran’s on board, sweetheart. Anything that screws up those gangsters at Westminster has got to be worth doing” (144)), and then to take responsibility for Asra when the government eventually allows the Muslim girl to settle in England (246). In Hidden, the memory of the bravery of her late grandfather in his youth during the rescue of British troops from Dunkirk strengthens Alix’s resolve to save the life of Mohammed: “It’s my turn now,” she reflects when recalling her grandfather’s war stories. “No need to be asked twice, like Grandpa said” (87). In a way, the two texts parallel the trajectory of Asylum: the impulse toward intercultural solidarity lies with the young, as does any dynamic challenging of the injustices of the contemporary globalized world. But unlike in Anderson’s book, in Swindells’s and Halahmy’s novels some of the adult figures of authority are willing to help the young protagonists transform the way in which power functions in a multicultural society. These figures range from a local policeman, the school’s head teacher, and the village newspaper editor in Ruby Tanya, to pro-immigrant campaigners and the head of the school in Hidden. At the same time, the insistence of certain adult characters in the two texts that their communities can deliver on a promise of hospitable cosmopolitanism (“Colour’s only skin deep… We Islanders have always welcomed visitors,” Alix’s elderly neighbor insists in Swindells’s book (224); in a similar vein, Ruby Tanya’s mother contends that Britain “[ha]s been a byword for fairness, for tolerance. A byword for freedom. We’ve taken [refugees] in, treated them like parts of ourselves and life’s gone on” (109–110)) is set in contrast with their passivity in responding to the insular racial violence to which both the newly arrived and established immigrants are repeatedly subject. It is, therefore, left to young characters such as Alix and Ruby Tanya to attempt to trigger genuinely ethical action in multicultural spaces where the physical proximity of others is sometimes

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mistaken for amicable cohabitation with them, and where, as Berthold Schoene describes it when expressing his suspicion of overly cheerful renderings of British multiculturalism, “[e]veryday living practices remain at the mercy of ideological control, and any openness there is, more often than not strictly confined to the relative inconsequentialities of everyday intercourse, can effectively be proscribed at a moment’s notice” (4). The fact that the adult British villagers in these texts fail to either recognize or mobilize effectively against the incidents of racist violence occurring in their midst also underlines, in Miranda Fricker’s words, the “epistemological suggestion that social power has an unfair impact on collective forms of social understanding” (148). From this perspective, the powerful tend to articulate their social experiences with cognitive confidence and communicative facility (much like the British, who, according to Hidden’s Samir, “think that everything has to be fair and if it isn’t … go on the telly and make a huge fuss” (113)), whereas the powerless find themselves at a “hermeneutical disadvantage,” that is, prevented from protesting their ongoing mistreatment, let alone securing effective measures to stop it (Fricker 151). The latter is a condition that Ruby Tanya makes explicit when Asra ruminates that her community is unable to correct the false claims the media make about them because “[they] have no paper of [their] own so [their] voices are not heard” (69). This asymmetry in turn gives rise in the two novels to the ethical suggestion that it is children who are uniquely capable of overcoming routine social interpretive habits and engaging compassionately with the immigrants’ formerly occluded experiences. Here, the working of an ethical obligation—an obligation, as Butler would have it, to give face to immigrant lives rather than to efface them, relying on discursive frames that “will bring the human into view in its frailty and precariousness” to incite resistance to violence (Frames 77; see also Levinas 1961/1991, 1982/1989)—is greater upon a child’s sensibility. This represents a challenge to the attitude held by those who, like Ruby Tanya’s father, believe that a 12-year-old is “nowhere near mature enough to understand the ins and outs of what’s being done to our country” (67). Indeed, the young characters in Hidden and Ruby Tanya gradually arrive at an ethical understanding of the social experience of the migrant subject, for whom neither the home nor the host country is safe from violence. As these young people try to make sense of the harms of identity prejudice against immigrants—which they come to see as driving what Fricker (2007) has called “testimonial injustice,” with the majority of Britons giving a deflated level of credibility to immigrants’ stories—they find that it is possible to enter sympathetically into the world of others on their own terms, listening to and learning from their experiences and ways of life. Both Swindells’s and Halahmy’s main protagonists remain convinced that “[i]n fact there aren’t many horrible people” in their neighborhoods who would fail to react with moral horror to the traumatic losses suffered by refugees; there are only people easily susceptible to authoritative discourses and prejudicial ideologies. Thus, the two young protagonists take it upon themselves to

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mediate among different standpoints, providing common ground for “evaluating stories together” as a way of “learning to align our responses to the world” (Appiah 29). Thanks to their efforts to assert discursive lives for immigrants beyond the dominant frames sustaining a binary opposition of “us” and “them” (and, in the case of Alix, a successful attempt to redefine “them” as bullies and racists (Halahmy 251)), the villagers in both novels are forced to consider what they might have in common with, as well as what sets them apart from, those seeking refuge among them. “Imagine if you had to go and live in Iraq,” Alix tells the students, teachers, and parents gathered at the school for a meeting at which Samir’s life story is received with apparent indifference. “We sit in our safe little houses and walk on our safe little beaches while there are people suffering and dying and being beheaded in their own homes. People like you and me and our families, school kids and mums and dads and grannies and babies and, and …” (251–252). Alix therefore takes her listeners between and beyond two ethical imperatives: on the one hand, the cosmopolitan commitment to recognizing both the crossovers with one’s cultural others, and the political realities that are difficult to cross out, and on the other, the ethical obligation to alleviate the suffering of others that is grounded in a shared precariousness. In a similar way, Ruby Tanya’s intervention on behalf of Asra (inspiring her grandmother’s open letter to the local press) leads to an editorial “invit[ing] village parents to try to imagine how they would feel if they had to fly home at the end of a holiday, leaving their child wandering somewhere in Spain, hunted like a criminal.” The editor expresses his firm belief that “[i]f Asra Saber was a village child, … [its residents’] hearts would go out to her parents and [they]’d all be helping in the search” (202), and the end of Swindells’s novel sees the same people “who’d flocked to hear [Ruby Tanya’s father] speak out against asylum seekers” bombarding the newspaper with letters “demanding not only that Asra should be allowed to settle in England, but that her parents be brought back too” (245). Gestures of solidarity in the face of immigrant suffering come not only from adults but also from young villagers in the endings of both novels, where other children seem as ready as Alix (or Ruby Tanya) to “steer [their] own course” when it comes to realizing a truly cosmopolitan society while the rest of the community “[wi]ll just have to keep up with [them]” (Halahmy 253). At this point, schools and playgrounds become places of cross-cultural exchange and the negotiation of stories between young people who recognize, and commit to establishing, the equality of all others, while the novels bring further coherence in place of division, exclusion, and effacement, and put into practice Rushdie’s insistence that literature is one site where the process of “trying to understand the people well enough so that [one] could hear them speak” might take shape (“Fiction” n.pag.).

A Change of Climate Sita Brahmachari’s Red Leaves (2014) and Tender Earth (2017) are good examples of the representation of ethical obligations emerging not just within but also outside the cultural contexts of a shared life grounded in

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physical proximity. Red Leaves presents the personal stories of characters with a variety of cultural backgrounds: the families of Aisha, a 13-year-old Somali refugee who feels newly uprooted (this time from her loving home in London) when her elderly foster mother Liliana announces that another family is eager to adopt her; and Zak, the 12-year-old son of recently divorced eminent parents (British war journalist mother and American professor of history father) who is taken care of only by his Sri Lankan housekeeper after moving into Aisha’s neighborhood. There is also the local carpenter’s family who used to seek shelter from Second World War air raids in a bunker situated in nearby woodland, and whose wartime children now speak to Aisha and Zak in dreamlike visions that help the two characters overcome their loss of faith in the ideas of home and community. All of these narratives link together into a complex, multicultural, and cross-temporal web. The third novel in a series that tells the story of the Levensons, a London-based family with Indian and Jewish roots, Tender Earth shows how Laila, the family’s youngest member, comes into her own as a moral agent while asserting a degree of independence from a large cast of characters already committed to safeguarding the lives of those who are far away: her sister Mira, who has travelled to Kolkata to help out at their aunt Anjali’s refuge for street children; Laila’s friend Kez’s family, who have sponsored a little disabled girl from the refuge; or Mira’s friends, Jidé and Millie, who are leaving for Rwanda to do volunteer work with the poor; to name but a few. At the same time as Zak, Aisha, and Laila make their own commitment to the other—and, in Hegelian terms, find their moral consciousness while retaining a sense of self within the family, where they have the “self-consciousness of [her] individuality in this [familial] unity” of self and other (148)—child readers’ attention is directed to issues that they are likely to have encountered only at a geographical or cultural distance. Such encounters occur in the two novels through campaigns run by charities to raise awareness of the greater precariousness of certain kinds of lives (incorporated into Tender Earth in the form of an “I am a Refugee” poster that Laila sees on the underground) or through news accounts of the sufferings of the displaced from conflict-torn regions (eagerly awaited by the main protagonists in Red Leaves, with Zak worrying about his reporter mother and Aisha hoping for a sign of life from her missing father, and shown to elicit affective responses from Tender Earth’s Leyla, Laila’s Iraqi refugee friend’s mother, and Dara, Kez’s Kindertransport refugee grandmother), and reporting of public demonstrations organized in the West to highlight these vulnerable people’s plight. “When I watch the news it never feels like the world is all connected up like this,” Tender Earth’s protagonist Laila says on discovering that her late grandmother, the activist Nana Josie, marched against a war that later affected Pari’s family (254), and together with Laila, readers learn to see these forms of connectedness in ways that confront the problem of how “community” is to be understood and compel them to register in the public sphere their resistance to perceived injustices. Missing family members tie Brahmachari’s,

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Anderson’s, Swindells’s, and Halahmy’s novels together, allowing British-born characters like Zak and Laila to empathize with migrants’ experiences of displacement, loss, and separation: “Our whole town was shelled … flattened,” Pari tells Laila in a scene that ends with the girls holding hands and crying, “Grey rubble and dust, houses turned into coffins. My grandmothers and grandfathers were buried there, and my cousins” (Tender Earth 322). However, by having the other children in Aisha’s class react with disinterest to the girl’s essay on the Somali soldiers who fought in the First World War (“They just seemed to think that everything was a game,” Aisha recalls wistfully (Red Leaves 125)), Brahmachari also seeks to expose what John McLeod would call a “challenging threshold between global cognisance and cosmopolitan consciousness” (8), or just how difficult it might be for some to register an ethical demand made on them by those who suffer at a distance. Aisha wishes she could find a way to remind her classmates of their ethical obligations and “make them understand what war did to you, how it tore your home apart, how one day it could drop a bomb into the middle of your world and explode everything, leaving a crater in your heart” (125). For Brahmachari, the road to cosmopolitanism is then, in effect, to use Dominic Head’s words, a “return to principles of moral responsibility in a new global context” (151). Her characters’ losses reveal precariousness—linked by Butler with a more specifically political notion of “precarity,” or a “condition in which certain populations suffer from failing … networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (Frames 25)—to be a shared condition of human life and a prime motivator in the pursuit of new possibilities for solidarity and worldbuilding. Part of these novels’ consideration of a generalized precarity as a promising site for alliances that are not grounded in physical proximity or even identification unfolds through their synthesis of past and present that bears on the narrated relation between self and others. Laila wonders if the “Connected Lands” category—which her schoolteacher encourages all children to use when introducing themselves to others in their new tutor group—“isn’t just about countries in the world; maybe it means the lands of the past too” (Tender Earth 96), and her exposure to the perspectives of her grandmother (after she acquires, unbeknown to the rest of the family, Nana Josie’s Protest Book, which chronicles her activist struggles) and Dara (whose stories of Jewish refugees displaced in the Second World War Laila hears first-hand) has a crucial impact on the girl’s ethical growth. Kristen Renwick Monroe has reminded us that the “psychological forces at work during the Holocaust partake of the same political psychology underlying other political acts driven by identity … from prejudice and discrimination to sectarian hatred and violence” (4); but when Laila cites learning lessons from past traumas like the Holocaust as one of the reasons for studying history, she realizes that “[her] list is homework and [war refugee Pari]’s is actually her life,” and that “if you’re involved in things it feels different” (Tender Earth 251–252). This new way of thinking about historical

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persistence can also be seen in Aisha’s attempts to find a vocabulary with which to convey to her classmates that her new life is marked by insistent encounters with the old one, and that the present is always somehow possessed by the past: “She’d rehearsed in her head plenty of times what she would like to say to them, but never would: Do you know what it’s like to leave your dad behind, knowing he’s been taken as a prisoner; … to have to step off a plane into a cold new country, with no one to love you? That’s not history. That’s my life” (Red Leaves 125). But if we see in Red Leaves an effort to stimulate a new understanding of the reality of the past, this is done in the full knowledge that, as Peter Boxall would have it, the “mechanisms which make the past accessible to us … have suffered a catastrophic malfunction” (45); indeed, Zak’s discovery of a piece of his new house’s history, an engraved fragment of plasterwork in the “pile of crap” left by the builders that “he’d been mouthing off about,” leads to his realization of the limitations of our relationship to history: “if history was so important to everyone around here,” he asks “how come they’re so busy blasting away all traces of it?” (66, italics in the original). It is significant that Zak’s struggles to give a voice to the family of “strangers who had lived a century ago” (and were, in fact, a family of carpenters who played a part in building most of the houses on his road, but then lost three of their young men in the two World Wars) go beyond the level of official record and into local knowledges that have been insufficiently explored, producing a kind of merging between these different perspectives from which new social and political possibilities might originate. In drawing attention to the processes by which historical truth slips through the net of official narratives, Red Leaves suggests that such truth has ethical value, in that, as its young protagonists learn through the course of the novel, the “act of remembering is love” (251). By acknowledging the contaminating effects of war practices and unequal political conditions, together with the damage inflicted by past violence on the living tissue of the present, these novels achieve more than simply being a lesson in how history repeats itself; readers are drawn into the interrogative processes of narratives whose protagonists learn to constantly question the taken-for-granted character of norms that determine whose lives will count as valuable. This new capacity to ask what it is like to be the subject whose recognition, representation, and rights are in dispute empowers the young people in these texts to challenge what Butler has termed “First World complacency” in order to try to build different modes of sociality and politics “on the basis of vulnerability and loss” (Precarious Life 8, 20). In Red Leaves, the local school’s commemoration of Britain’s involvement in the two World Wars prompts Zak to ponder the state’s position on what it means for violence to be just or justified (22). As he sees it, contemporary society itself is at war (“People die all over the world, every day, fighting and killing each other” (20)), and so rather than celebrating any kind of war effort, with the norms that frame it being necessarily violent, we need to make a call for a politics of non-violence (“If being a pacifist means refusing to have anything

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to do with killing, then that is what I am” (108, italics in the original)). Relatedly, whereas Tender Earth’s characters like Dara and Pari are haunted by past losses, Laila dwells on present failings and silences: horrified at the defacement of graves (including Dara’s husband’s) in the Jewish cemetery, the anti-immigrant sentiment Pari has been facing both in and outside school, and the racist aggression and abuse she sees Janu suffering on a London tube train, Laila is moved to act: “I have to think of something I can DO about this … This is not a time to stay quiet. Nothing’s healed. I’m not going to let [Dara] think that it’s all happening again and we’re just going to sit by and watch” (376). Indeed, with the suffering of others in mind, Laila organizes an anti-racist vigil dedicated to Dara and her husband during which she and her schoolfriends go barefoot in the snow-covered cemetery, thus gathering struggles against racism within a cross-cultural and cross-temporal framework; their bodily enactment of vulnerability is shown to be “for others,” as Levinas would say, extending ethical connections beyond what we might rightly call global ones, to the bodily sensations that bind together different temporal modes, or what has been and what could be done to produce a radically new future. Such creation of affective bonds between first-generation trauma survivors and a new generation of Britons is a strategy often used by contemporary British novelists to convey the “possibility of regeneration and renewal” (Pellicer-Ortín 56). In highlighting that Laila witnesses the pain of past and present traumas by adoption through acts of empathetic solidarity, with other characters across both Red Leaves and Tender Earth becoming inspired and called upon to make ethical moves toward their others, Brahmachari articulates young people’s potential for forging connections across cultures and generations. But if Brahmachari’s novels, in reaching for the bonds of a shared humanity that could broker difference, set home against world—and see the particular as inevitably bound up in the global (and historical)—it is also the case that they testify to both the urgency and the difficulty of a global ethics in a time when, in the words of Elleke Boehmer, “[i]ntricate and deathly forms of terror and counter-terror … interpenetrate the global order” (“Postcolonial Writing” 146). For the older generation depicted, it is a shock to watch whole populations plunged into insecurity and fear: “[A]ll these apartheids now,” Nana Josie’s friend Simon observes with reference to the post-9/11 climate, “all harder to fight against in their own way” (Tender Earth 156). Living in the city, for instance, is framed within the current antiterror discourses as already a “security risk” (Tender Earth 4); at the same time, the practices of fingerprinting and video monitoring schoolchildren sustain an atmosphere of constant emergency and nonspecific alarm (Tender Earth 82–83), while wearing a hijab can make a girl a distinctive target for Islamophobic abuse (Red Leaves 89). In mainstream media, immigrants tend to receive less recognition than native Britons (with Red Leaves’ Liliana vowing to fight the differential of power at work when Zak’s disappearance garners far more public attention than Aisha’s (152–154)) or to be discursively

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constructed as less than human: “Listen to the language they use!” Dara exclaims. “Quotas, swarms … as if people are insects—or vermin!” (Tender Earth 189). Yet echoes of populist rhetoric are evident even among the views voiced by British schoolchildren, and when a girl from Laila’s group is told that attending secondary school can open the door to other languages, cultures, and religions, she mumbles under her breath, “Like we need any more doors open? I know where I’m from!” (Tender Earth 72). Asked to remain in a state of perpetual alert, and in response to the conditions of heightened susceptibility to injury, many of the protagonists’ fellow Londoners turn to reactionary populism and a prejudicial perception of Britain’s immigrants, but there are many other people in Brahmachari’s novels who oppose the newly intensified racialized ways of seeing and judging others in the name of national security. In Tender Earth, those who attend to the suffering of others can most often be seen taking to the streets, with Laila herself taking part in her first large protest march only weeks before she organizes the vigil. In Red Leaves, such people are shown to focus instead on demanding and devising policies that would actively preserve those other lives, with Zak’s mother “[being] rich enough to sit at home doing beauty treatments, but instead … trying to make the world a better place” in her job as a war correspondent, and Aisha planning to become a lawyer to “defend people who suffer what [she has] suffered” (55, 236). Similarly to Asylum, Ruby Tanya, or Hidden, it is the moral transformation of Red Leaves’ and Tender Earth’s young protagonists that is pivotal in how they provide vehicles for both the reader and most of the other characters to enter sympathetically into the lives and the suffering of others. True to the motto that it takes from Maya Angelou’s All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, Red Leaves offers its young protagonists a homelike “safe place where [they] can go as [they] are and not be questioned”—in the form of Home Wood, the local woodland to which Aisha and Zak escape, independently of one another, when at their most vulnerable, and whose sheltered yet communal feel (which may be attributed in part to the ghostly appearances and material traces of another defenseless family who sought refuge in the very same space during wartime) helps the practices of compassion and alliance to assemble across distances. For Zak, “becoming entangled in the branches of all of the stories that were taking place in this wood”— stories that include Aisha’s testimony about the horrors from which she fled to Britain—produces a new understanding of why his mother feels so compelled to act against global violence through concrete means (105). Aisha, on the other hand, is unsettled when she finds it hard not to begrudge Zak (and later Iona, an outwardly rude yet deeply fragile homeless girl who moves into the bunker in which the two children are already staying) her woodland shelter, which she knows makes her morally no different from “those people who went on about migrants invading … on the radio or TV, or even in earshot of her in the street” (243). Readers then witness her conscious efforts to respond ethically rather than defensively to what affects her from the

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outside, and it is through opening herself up to this imposition that Aisha achieves a new kind of freedom; she is able to let go of her traumatic past and transcend individual interest, “stepping into her own future” in a way that implies a commitment to the equal value of lives (312). The novel thus demonstrates what Martha Nussbaum has called the “ability of compassion to cross lines of time, place, and nation” (11), while acknowledging the influence of positionality, and the relationship between inside and outside, self and other, on their characters and readers. This is similar to the ethical position put forward in Tender Earth, where Laila’s feeling of dissatisfaction with her level of social involvement and her longing to be “part of something bigger than [herself]” are used to signal her readiness to enter into a new stage of moral understanding (235). This type of development, or the child’s induction into the “philosophy of right,” is linked in Hegel’s ethical theory to the individual’s self-actualization as a subject and citizen (Hegel 1820/1893; see also Sainsbury 2013), and the young characters’ questioning of “where [they] belong in the world,” their “waking up to what’s ahead of [them]” is part of this developmental framework (188). An adolescent’s awakening to morality is also clearly present in Laila’s father’s childhood interviews with his own father about his antifascist struggles. The girl’s father describes these exchanges as his younger self saying “I want to understand what’s going on in the world, I’m not a kid any more” (266). Reading is offered here as another transformational activity, a form of being called up in ways that compel one’s concern, in keeping with Boehmer’s recent characterization of the practice as an “engagement with other consciousnesses and other imaginations” to an extent that makes transnational identifications possible (“Differential Publics” 12). Interestingly, Laila’s overnight reading of books like I Am Malala, kept secret from her family, both indicates her rebelliousness and marks her as a privileged character, who, unlike Pari, for instance, can not only afford books, but also has a comfortable, warm space in which to read them. In fact, embodied in Laila’s interactions with others throughout the novel is her growing recognition of her own cultural privilege and rights-bearing status. It is through committing to affirm the lives of those commonly regarded as culturally alien and morally suspect, while assuming responsibility for mobilizing new social formations bound not by the presumption of familiarity but by an enduring obligation to others, that the girl finds a sense of purpose in a capacity for relational intimacy and gains a fresh perspective on the value of togetherness. If Tender Earth’s main protagonist becomes increasingly less solipsistic as the novel progresses, then toward the end of the book she is capable of seeing herself objectively, with the kind of detachment that is usually shown by an omniscient narrator, as both an individual subject and a “link” between the different groups of people coming together around her (350)— much like Zak, whose forest encounters with others take the boy “out of himself” and leave him feeling as if he was a “link in a chain that winds way, way back” (33). Red Leaves reaches for various forms of contact

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across time and space as the connection upon which ethical action can be generated, and it is Zak’s struggle toward historical accuracy (which culminates in the recovery of silenced and occluded stories) that makes it possible for the local community to reach beyond its own sealed borders and form alliances focused on opposition to situations of forcible exposure to precarity. This is paralleled in Tender Earth, where the expressions of solidarity that Laila witnesses and inspires during the protest march and the vigil respectively allow her to remain hopeful about the possibility of a better future to come. Laila is thus led to a more qualified understanding of what Nana Josie tries to convey in her Protest Book “about how standing together makes you feel stronger, even if you can’t see how it changes things straight away” (391). Yet again, however, the burden of responsibility to the other is located with (if eagerly taken up by) the young generation. Even while Laila’s and Kez’s parents try to shield their children from the images of conflict, violence, and death whenever they appear on the TV screens in their homes, other adults (including Dara) firmly believe that “it’s up to [young people] now to get the heart of this world beating again” (Tender Earth 344). In Red Leaves, too, it takes the desperate actions taken by young people in their attempts to recover what has been lost or forfeited to drive the whole community to reinvigorate their relations of care. This comes too late, however, for the locals to learn more of the details of the neighborhood’s history from the only surviving member of the family of carpenters (who dies before the children return from the wood, “with no one to pass [his] stories on to, or to sit with [him] at the end” (314–315)). And then, at the protest in Tender Earth, Laila sees London’s communities as she has never seen them before—there are whole families there, carrying newborns and pushing prams, and “total strangers are actually talking to each other, laughing and joking,” thus making efforts of solidarity habitual to the young (229). Adding to Laila’s attempts to forge new alliances that assemble across distances so as to achieve their ethical goals are her cousin Priya’s creation of a “Holi Spring” music video in which child dancers in Kolkata merge with a group of dancers in New York in a fusion of colors, as well as Janu’s barefoot journey around the world, both operating as forms of ethical solicitation that go beyond the collection of funds for a new orphanage in India. Importantly, by the end of the novel Laila’s family learn the truth about her activist achievements and celebrate them with their own gestures of inclusive solidarity with their extended community. The young characters in the two books emerge as sources of hope precisely because they are “trailblazers in their different ways” (Tender Earth 37); ultimately, it is the younger generation’s ingenuity and commitment to equality that bring about various forms of solidarity and facilitate ethical life in the novels, and so encourage young readers to work thoughtfully through their moral reckonings. In what could be considered an expression of solidarity between their adult authors and child readers, the works discussed in this chapter invest in

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young characters as willing subjects who are ready to engage in and mobilize alliances aimed at sustaining life on egalitarian terms. These young protagonists make their appeal to audiences that are more inclined to respond to the like-minded, and who often trump difference with sameness, and therefore any opening up to the impositions coming from across linguistic, cultural, or national borders must at this stage be regarded as provisional. But while such texts do not offer an assurance that the struggles to extend equality regardless of background or circumstance are likely to cease soon, they clearly recognize young people’s growing socio-political agency and put their trust in children’s ability to think their way into future cosmopolitan solidarities that would break the barriers of the post-9/11 experience and cast of thought. The opening of these communities to new political and social possibilities demands some critical reflection from readers themselves to consider how a shared condition of precariousness bears on our ethical obligations to one another. There is a new mode of connectedness that is coming to consciousness in the contemporary children’s novel, one that tears down cultural walls and collapses spatial and temporal distances.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. Routledge, 2000. Anderson, Rachel. Asylum. Hodder Children’s Books, 2011. Appadurai, Arjun. “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination.” Public Culture, vol. 12, no. 1, 2000, pp. 1–19. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. Penguin Books, 2006. Boehmer, Elleke. “Postcolonial Writing and Terror.” Terror and the Postcolonial: A Concise Companion, edited by Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, WileyBlackwell, 2010, pp.141–150. Boehmer, Elleke. “Differential Publics—Reading (in) the Postcolonial Novel.” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, vol. 4, no. 1, 2017, pp. 11–25. Boxall, Peter. Twenty-First Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2013. Brahmachari, Sita. Red Leaves. Macmillan Children’s Books, 2014. Brahmachari, Sita. Tender Earth. Macmillan Children’s Books, 2017. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?Verso, 2009. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2004. Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 26, no. 2, 2012, pp. 134–151. Butler, Judith. “We Are Worldless Without One Another.” Interview by Stephanie Berbec. The Other Journal, 26 June2017, https://theotherjournal.com/2017/06/26/ worldless-without-one-another-interview-judith-butler/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2018. Chouliaraki, Lilje, and Tijana Stolic. “Rethinking Media Responsibility in the Refugee ‘Crisis’: A Visual Typology of European News.” Media, Culture & Society, vol. 39, no. 8, 2017, pp. 1162–1177. Duffy, Kate Scarlett. “There’s a Reason the Teenage Boys I Work with from the Calais Jungle Look So Old.” The Independent, 21 Oct.2016, https://www.indep

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endent.co.uk/voices/calais-jungle-children-teenage-boys-refugees-young-men-lookolder-age-assessment-reason-why-a7373146.html. Accessed 2 Oct. 2018. Erizanu, Paula. “‘Refugee’ is Children’s Word of the Year.” The Guardian, 26 May2016, https://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2016/may/26/refugee-is-childrensword-of-the-year. Accessed 2 March 2018. Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press, 2007. Gilroy, Paul. “Multiculture in Times of War.” Critical Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 4, 2006, pp. 27–45. Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia. Columbia University Press, 2005. Halahmy, Miriam. Hidden. Meadowside Children’s Books, 2011. Head, Dominic. The State of the Novel: Britain and Beyond. Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Ethics of Hegel: Translated Selections from His ‘Rechtsphilosophie’ 1820, edited by James Macbride Sterrett, Ginn, 1893. Heidegger, Martin. “Building, Dwelling, Thinking.” Basic Writings. Harper & Row, 1977, pp. 343–364. Levinas, Emmanuel. “Ethics and Politics.” 1982. The Levinas Reader. Translated by Jonathan Romney, edited by Sean Hand, Blackwell, 1989, pp. 289–297. Levinas, Emmanuel “God and Philosophy.” 1975. The Levinas Reader. Translated by Richard A. Cohen and Alphonso Lingis, edited by Sean Hand, Blackwell, 1989, pp. 166–189. Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise Than Being, or, Beyond Essence. 1974. Translated by Alphonso Lingis, Kluwer Academic, 1991. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. 1961. Translated by Alphonso Lingis, Kluwer Academic, 1991. McIntosh, Malachi. “The Exigencies of Exile and Dialectics of Flight: Migrant Fictions, V. S. Naipaul, Kiran Desai.” Reworking Postcolonialism: Globalization, Labour and Rights, edited by Pavan Kumar Malreddyet al., Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 72–86. McLeod, John. “Sounding Silence: Transculturation and Its Thresholds.” Transnational Literature, vol. 4, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1–13. Monroe, Kristen Renwick. Ethics in an Age of Terror and Genocide: Identity and Moral Choice. Princeton University Press, 2012. Morris, Rosalind C. Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea. Columbia University Press, 2010. Nussbaum, Martha C. “Compassion & Terror.” Daedalus, vol. 132, no. 1, 2003, pp. 10–26. Pellicer-Ortín, Silvia. “The Ethical Clock of Trauma in Eva Figes’ Winter Journey.” Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction, edited by Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau, Rodopi, 2011, pp. 37–60. Pickles, Matt. “‘Trump’ Revealed as Children’s Word of the Year.” Oxford Arts Blog, 15 June2017, http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/arts-blog/trump-revealed-chil drens-word-year. Accessed 2 March 2018. Rushdie, Salman. “Fiction Saved My Life.” The Independent, 11 Apr.2008, https:// www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/salman-rushdiefiction-saved-my-life-807501.html. Accessed 21 Oct. 2018. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. Granta, 1991. Said, Edward. “Reflections on Exile.” 1984. Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays. Granta, 2001, pp. 173–186.

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Sainsbury, Lisa. Ethics in British Children’s Literature: Unexamined Life. Bloomsbury, 2013. Schoene, Berthold. The Cosmopolitan Novel. Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Shukla, Nikesh. The Good Immigrant. Unbound, 2016. Spencer, Robert. “Salman Rushdie and the ‘War on Terror.’” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 46, no. 3, 2010, pp. 251–265. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 271–313. Swindells, Robert. Ruby Tanya. Yearling, 2004.

Conclusion A Score for Stories of Compassion and Solidarity

The post-9/11 children’s novel recognizes that a “radical reaccentuation” of its modes of writing is required to register the ideological and political conflicts that are among the slow consequences of death-inflicting terrorist acts (Gray 30). The novel comes into being in the interplay between what is and what might be, as it finds itself caught between confronting the shocks and traumas that terror inflicts on whole populations and imagining a way forward into a different future that involves a passage through the problem of defensive responses toward terror’s slow violence to mass-based collaboration across cultural and national boundaries. The young people in the novels discussed across the previous five chapters tend to pursue this kind of future, their resistance to the current global networks for the distribution of cultural power emerging largely as a result of ethical obligations imposed upon them by others. Anticipations of such a future in these texts are inseparable from the development of a new kind of global thinking, or a way of conceptualizing the relationship between local environments and the larger world as a whole, that means “accepting and negotiating the multilocality and cross-temporality of ethical connections we might rightly call global” (Butler, “Precarious Life” 138). By forming alliances across the lines of race, culture, religion, and nation, these protagonists open themselves up to another set of ethical responsibilities, which powerfully evoke the idea of the child as inherently communicative and particularly alert to the dangers of othering, or, as Lisa Sainsbury would have it, as “ready to engage in unity with the world around them” (98). It is this ethical growth of innately empathetic characters, threaded through narratives of communities eroding in the shadow of terror, that I have traced through the British children’s fiction of the almost two decades since 9/11. In all the cultural forms that I have examined here, from the fictional representation of trauma, through post-migrant, subcultural, and dystopian fiction, to the cosmopolitan children’s novel, we can see the intimations of a new future of intercultural alliance. This expectancy, and a firm belief that child vulnerability and resistance need not be seen as opposites, is what writing for the young brings to the discussion on the relationship between fiction and terror.

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This book invites critical attention to what changed in the connection between children’s fiction and terror after the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks, and to why the responses to these events have endured through contemporary writing for the young. While it is true that to regard the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington in September 2001, and those in London in July 2005, as exceptional “limit events” ushering in a “new era of literary history” is to overlook the “uncanny resonances” between twentieth-century fiction like Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) or Don DeLillo’s Mao II (1991) and our own moments of terror-induced crisis (Versluys 1, Head 99, McHale and Stevenson 277; see also Gibbs 2014), it is also important to recognize a new cultural urgency to the novelistic comment on terror and its aftermath as we assess the continuing salience of the post-9/11 novel to processes of counterterrorist and counter-hegemonic resistance. Indeed, terror can be, as Elleke Boehmer has noted, “at once archetypal yet contemporary,” systemic yet unprecedented, slow yet irruptive (70). Contemporary forms of global terrorism might be seen as “limit events” in that they escape the normal conditions and processes of cognition to produce a fractured view of physical reality (Versluys 49); and terror according to this logic can be described in terms taken from Michel Foucault, as the “épistémè” of the contemporary, or the “epistemological gatekeeper that determines which ideas are allowed currency and what sciences may be constituted” (Zulaika and Douglass 29). Viewed as both omnipresent and nonspecific, terror has been set up as the West’s “self-consolidating enemy” more than anything else (Boehmer 70), while its terrifying effects have been protracted by the discourse of counterterrorism to justify a stronger assertion of sovereign control over who can be fully accepted into the polis. Under such conditions of sovereignty, terror events have been represented by the state and the mainstream media through recourse to hyperbole (see Houen 2002), as an ever-potential threat to the life of the nation, or indeed of Western civilization as a whole, thereby holding whole societies in continual fear. With both state power and insurgency thus taking some terroristic form, the fiction of the new century seeks to negotiate the turbulent political cross-currents that flow through the present, and the children’s novels that I have discussed here are good examples of the “literary writings on terrorism [that] are … experiments in the force of literature itself” (Houen 20). As it confronts the child reader with the necessity of rethinking the narratives that divide us into “us” and “them,” and while it dramatizes how cross-cultural solidarity might be enacted, such writing provides some powerful critical tools with which to address contemporary global conditions through a number of formal and thematic developments. In mapping the major developments in post-9/11 British children’s fiction, I have sought to outline a new kind of relationship between the children’s novel and countercultural politics, a new engagement of the reader’s imagination with ethical, political, and embodied lives, a new solicitation of the young audience’s identification with the other. In the ways in which these works move through endurance and into resistance, and model social action

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for structural change, I have presented their authors’ approaches to terrorism as refigurings of postcolonial and cosmopolitan literary practices, transcending even when incorporating the energies of progressive children’s writing that came earlier. A critical reading attentive to both the political and socio-cultural contexts from which these texts emerge and to the formal characteristics of this writing gives us a renewed appreciation of the value of such texts to grassroots, youth-led resistance, and of the possibilities that reside in the literary response to periods of crisis and repeat-crisis. Attempts to query the “us vs. them” binarism that the attacks themselves and the West’s political responses to 9/11 and 7/7 have imposed on the global community are indeed concentrated not only within a text’s figures and themes, but also within its structures and patterns, from indirect language and style, to juxtaposition, layering, and intertextuality, to self-reflexivity and generic instability. The readings offered thus involve what Boehmer has called a “repeated shuttling between different perceptual and cultural worlds,” a tacking that “underpins a properly interactive postcolonial reading practice” (6), such as, crucially, might be adopted by child readers as part of their interpretative practices. Importantly, the exploration of British children’s writers’ approaches to literary representation of terror and counter-terror could be broadened to include child-authored texts, like Sara Hussain’s imagined dialogue with the Manchester Arena bomber, which I have already mentioned in the introduction, or a selection of the short story submissions to the BBC’s 500 Words competition, which I referred to in the fifth chapter. Indeed, further research is called for into issues of youth creativity in post-9/11 writing for the young, such as the extent to which the creative experiences that contemporary children’s texts evoke can be read as responding to the need for new forms of art that could “act as an antidote” to post-9/11 traumas (Laub and Podell 991). The present study will also hopefully offer a stimulus to critical investigations of the real-life impact of post-9/11 children’s literature on contemporary global childhoods, or what young readers take away from these books about moving beyond terror and into desirable futures and how they implement it. Equally worthwhile would be to draw parallels between contemporary British children’s fiction about terror and post-terror writing by children’s authors from other nations. The proliferation since 9/11 and 7/7 of children’s novels attentive to the anxieties of young people’s lived experience in precarious and suspicious times necessitates a discussion of how singularly equipped writing for children is to draw its readers into cognitive processes that make possible certain kinds of intercultural interaction and understanding. In a related fashion, the post-9/11 children’s novel invites readers to see themselves as part of a diverse global community and to activate their political energies in order to oppose all forms of violence, including the violence of the state, as well as reshaping their social worlds around compassion and the imagination of the other that a sense of compassion necessarily entails. This is not to embrace without qualification the

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assumption that localized acts of compassion can always transform into a shared sense of ethical responsibility that is global in character. After all, as Martha Nussbaum has pointed out, this sentiment can also exclude those who suffer at a distance and polarize the world into an “us” and a “them,” since “[c]ompassion for our own children can so easily slip over into a desire to promote the wellbeing of our children at the expense of other people’s children. Similarly, compassion for our fellow [citizens] can all too easily slip over into a desire to make [our nation] come out on top and to subordinate other nations” (13, italics in the original). Rather, it is to suggest that ongoing critical attention is needed regarding how empathetic imagining has been used by children’s writers of the post-9/11 era to extend their audience’s circle of concern and obligation, thus making new forms of global connectedness more possible. The way in which the rhetoric of crisis regarding terror has intruded into the twenty-first-century imagination embodies the now perennial fear of the body’s vulnerability to such attacks, invariably normalized in coverage of terrorist acts by the media that typically characterize it as a “Western” fear. The prominent mediatization of the attacks that take place in the West or on its peripheries, as against terror events occurring in Muslim-majority and other non-Western countries, points to the limits imposed by the Western vocabulary of counter-terror on what constitutes a livable and grievable life (see Butler 2004, 2009), whereas the terrorists’ own rhetoric insists on enacting the injury and violence inflicted upon the non-West by Western governments back to its source, in retaliation. The gaps, lacunae, and discontinuities between these self-justificatory narratives are spaces of possibility from which the post-9/11 children’s novel construes its resistant meanings. It draws attention to newly disarticulated global conditions, but equally takes account of the intersections between Islamic and Western fundamentalisms; it speaks to global themes but invokes local, alternative stories; it seeks identification yet also demands a more capacious notion of moral responsibility. With their close attention to reading across the different cultural contexts that the text imagines and inhabits, both postcolonial and critical race scholarship and cosmopolitan criticism have proven particularly instructive as critical lenses through which to look more closely at post-9/11 children’s fiction’s transformative work upon its audience’s perceptions. And it is by building these close imaginative involvements, I submit, that such writing models for the child reader ways of mobilizing the political energies of their communities to resist and reshape oppressive structures of post-terror society and, where necessary, to begin community-building anew. In relation to the question of the “humanizing possibilities of conviviality and care,” it is instructive to consider how stories of compassion and solidarity were circulated among the British public in the aftermath of such disasters as the tragic fire in London’s Grenfell Tower, specifically “against the effects of slow violence and official indifference.” In that instance, it is telling that “central to the survivors’ descriptions of their trauma and in the terms of the appeal that they made to the world” was the language of

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humanity—“not to raise money, but in pursuit of attention, or as they put it, seeking clarity (based on commonality and heteropathic identification) rather than charity” (Gilroy n. pag.). It is the shared condition of precariousness that makes us human, as Judith Butler (2004, 2009) argues, more than any national, cultural, religious, or racial inheritance, and the hardening of our faces and strengthening of our borders in response to an impinging world only takes us farther away from the ethical attitude that we need to cultivate so as to respond to the emergencies that are before us. If this kind of humanist ethos has been conditioned by emergency circumstances, then perhaps the challenge for the post-9/11 writer is to convey a sense of urgency—without which, as Aristotle puts it, morality becomes a “watery” concern (see Nussbaum 2003)—about the violent hierarchies of superior, inferior, and non-lives in the contemporary global order that would counterpoise the rhetoric mobilized during post-terror “states of emergency” in order to justify wars against terrorism (see Morton 2013), an urgency that would inspire readers to “seek to make all lives livable and equally so” (Butler, “Precarious Life” 145). The value of such literary intervention is all the more significant when it combines with a recognition of the difficulties involved in shoring up moral judgment against the strict normative judgments that have followed with regard to terrorism. Invited by postterror writing’s overcoming of the dominant discursive oppositions between “us” and “them,” young readers step forward to critically reflect on, even as they vicariously experience something of, the effect on others of the divisive post-9/11 realities that they inhabit. The “pooling of consciousness[es],” as the novelist Mohsin Hamid has poetically described it, that such writing stimulates offers a particularly dynamic imaginative medium through which young people are reminded that vulnerability to others is fundamental to who and what we are, and that they are thus called out to shape their own ethical actions, including those resistant to our globalized, unequal sociopolitical arrangements (n. pag.). Already over-coded as rebellious by the state and the media (see, for example, Bentley 2015), Britain’s alternative youth culture can be seized upon in such a way as to explicitly oppose the strictures of racism and Islamophobia rampant in the wake of 9/11 and 7/7. As its five chapters explore a range of troubled post-terror conditions, this book has assumed that in situations requiring resistance, post-9/11 writing for the young is in itself inherently a form of activism that in turn invites active responses from its readers. Seen together, these novels have registered the broader sense of socio-cultural and political upheaval hanging over the generations of the late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries (see also Boxall 2019), and have sought to fashion a poetics of “real-world” resistance to these new world orders, even if there is no consensus as to what shape this resistance should take. The value of youth activism is evident from numerous episodes in which it is the younger generation of Britons that calls up a different kind of future, their unruly yet empathetic impulses acting as an antidote to the

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dehumanizing forces at work in post-9/11 Britain, and hinting at the possibility of a properly ethical cohabitation that the novels, however, cannot quite reach. Similar impulses may, I have argued, be generated in young audiences exposed to these texts’ political content and resistant form. If “literary writing can not only stimulate but in some cases even … simulate resistance” (Boehmer 5), then it is the task of criticism of children’s literature to draw attention to the trajectories of such resistance. Taken collectively, the novels analyzed in this study propose that what is at stake in circumstances where the recognition of the humanity of the other has been withheld or explicitly denied is not just “finding a way to react immediately and legibly but building a world together” (Butler, “We Are Worldless” n. pag.). Their political aim to extend equality of rights, regardless of background or belonging, to those others whom we have not chosen to join our communities, but with whom we have an enduring obligation to find a way to live, is supplemented by the more specific resistant practices of their young protagonists, which manifest through a range of channels, from the use of cyber-political forces in Shukla’s Run, Riot to the protest-performance of trauma in Brahmachari’s Tender Earth. That contemporary children’s literature posits young people as agents of resistance is particularly significant for the ways in which it updates our perception of the young generation at a time when the new habits of speaking up have already incubated youth-led protest movements that call for action on climate change or demand an end to gun violence (see, for example, Laughland and Beckett 2018; “School Strike” 2019). But as young people are roused to attention and animated as political actors both in real life and in fiction, not only is their political course repeatedly derailed in the post-9/11 climate—as when a teenager’s anti-fracking activism is categorized by the UK’s counterterrorism police in the same way as extremism (see Pidd 2018)—but political resistance also remains available only to a privileged few—as demonstrated by the plight of migrant children in detention centers across Europe and North Africa or at the US-Mexico border (see, for example, Smith 2016; Nielsen 2017; Villarreal 2019). It is thus in referring their readers to the limits and dangers in Western responses to contemporary terrorism and in suggesting the outlines of a new kind of solidarity that cuts across cultures in a challenge to the “us vs. them” division in social and political life that children’s literature’s political efforts are at their sharpest and most salient.

Works Cited Bentley, Nick. “Subcultural Fictions: Youth Subcultures in Twenty-first-century British Fiction.” The 2000s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction, edited by Nick Bentley, Nick Hubble, and Leigh Wilson, 2015, Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 53–82. Boehmer, Elleke. Postcolonial Poetics: 21st-Century Critical Readings. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

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Boxall, Peter. “Conclusion.” The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction: 1980– 2018, edited by Peter Boxall, Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 273–295. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?Verso, 2009. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2004. Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 26, no. 2, 2012, pp. 134–151. Butler, Judith. “We Are Worldless Without One Another.” Interview by Stephanie Berbec. The Other Journal, 26 June2017, https://theotherjournal.com/2017/06/26/ worldless-without-one-another-interview-judith-butler/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2018. Conrad, Joseph. The Secret Agent. 1907. Penguin, 1990. DeLillo, Don. Mao II. 1991. Vintage, 1992. Gibbs, Alan. Contemporary American Trauma Narratives. Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Gilroy, Paul. “Never Again: Refusing Race and Salvaging the Human.” Holberg Lecture. University of Bergen. 4 June2019. Gray, Richard. After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Hamid, Mohsin. “Mohsin Hamid on the Rise of Nationalism: ‘In the Land of the Pure, No One is Pure Enough’.” The Guardian, 27 Jan.2018, https://www.theguardian. com/books/2018/jan/27/mohsin-hamid–exit-west-pen-pakistan. Accessed 9 Jan. 2019. Head, Dominic. The State of the Novel: Britain and Beyond. Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. Houen, Alex. Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson. Oxford University Press, 2002. Laub, Dori, and Daniel Podell, “Art and Trauma.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 76, no. 5, 1995, pp. 991–1005. Laughland, Oliver, and Lois Beckett. “March for Our Lives: Thousands Join Antigun Protests around the World.” The Guardian, 24 Mar.2018, https://www.thegua rdian.com/us-news/2018/mar/24/washington-march-for-our-lives-gun-violence. Accessed 14 June 2019. McHale, Brian, and Randall Stevenson. “Coda: 11 September 2001, New York: Two Y2Ks.” The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English, edited by Brian McHale and Randall Stevenson, Edinburgh University Press, 2006, pp. 273–278. Morton, Stephen. States of Emergency: Colonialism, Literature and Law. Liverpool University Press, 2013. Nielsen, Nikolaj. “Migrant Children Endure Horrors in Libya and Italy.” EUobserver, 28 Feb. 2017, https://euobserver.com/migration/137051. Accessed 3 July 2019. Nussbaum, Martha C. “Compassion & Terror.” Daedalus, vol. 132, no. 1, 2003, pp. 10–26. Pidd, Helen. “Boy, 14, Referred to Anti-extremism Scheme over Fracking Activism.” The Guardian, 30 July2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/30/boy-14referred-to-anti-extremism-scheme-over-fracking-activism. Accessed 13 June 2019. Sainsbury, Lisa. Ethics in British Children’s Literature: Unexamined Life. Bloomsbury, 2013. “School Strike for Climate: Protests Staged around the World.” BBC.co.uk, 24 May2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-48392551. Accessed 14 June 2019. Smith, Helena. “Forgotten inside Greece’s Notorious Camp for Child Refugees.” The Guardian, 10 Sept. 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/10/childrefugees-greece-camps. Accessed 3 July 2019.

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Versluys, Kristiaan. Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel. Columbia University Press, 2009. Villarreal, Mireya. “‘You Hear Kids Crying’: Border Patrol Agent Describes Conditions in Migrant Detention Centers.” The Guardian, 3 July2019, https://www. cbsnews.com/news/migrant-detention-centers-border-patrol-agent-describes-fa cility-2019-07-03/. Accessed 3 July 2019. Zulaika, Joseba, and William A. Douglass. “The Terrorist Subject: Terrorism Studies and the Absent Subjectivity.” Critical Studies on Terrorism, vol. 1, no. 1, 2008, pp. 27–36.

Index

2011 riots in London 78 2015 shootings in Paris 12 7/7 attacks in London 1, 2, 6, 7, 12, 36, 37, 38, 45, 59, 64, 65, 85, 130, 131, 133 9/11 attacks on America 1, 2, 6, 7, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 28, 37, 38, 42, 44, 45, 57, 59, 64, 65, 76, 85, 102, 130, 131, 133 Abu-Lughod, Lila 42, 75 Agamben, Giorgio 58 Agnew, Kate 18 Ahmad, Fauzia 75 Ahmed, Sara 107 Alexander, Claire 70 Ambikaipaker, Mohan 69 Amis, Martin 2 Anderson, Rachel: Asylum 7, 106, 108–12, 116, 120, 123 Angelou, Maya: All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes 123 Appadurai, Arjun 39, 115 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 113, 118 Archer, Louise 73 Ashley, Bernard: The Trouble with Donovan Croft 4; see also children’s literature, and the racial/ethnic other, pre-9/11 Attridge, Derek 27 Baker, Paul 5, 53 Baker, Sarah 70 Banksy: protest art by 1–2; see also terror, and art and creativity Basu, Balaka 87 Baudrillard, Jean 101 Bentley, Nick 65, 66, 70, 73, 76, 133 Bildungsroman 64, 73

Blackman, Malorie 64; Noble Conflict 7, 85, 93–7, 103 Boehmer, Elleke 2, 4, 7, 48, 53, 86, 122, 124, 130, 131, 134 Boumediene, Lakhdar 58 Boxall, Peter 2, 13, 37, 50, 93, 96, 101, 103, 121, 133 Bradford, Clare 3, 85, 87 Brahmachari, Sita: Red Leaves 2, 7, 106, 118–25; Tender Earth 2, 7, 106, 118–25, 134 Breslin, Theresa: Death or Glory Boys 3; see also children’s literature, and Northern Irish Troubles Breuer, Josef 14 Broad, Katherine R. 87 Bromley, Roger 67 Bruton, Catherine: We Can Be Heroes 6, 12, 13–20 Burnett, Frances Hodgson: A Little Princess 4; The Secret Garden 112; see also children’s literature, and racial/ethnic other, pre-9/11 Butler, Judith 23–5, 27, 37, 38, 40, 59, 76, 87, 94, 95, 106–7, 109, 111, 113, 117, 120, 121, 129, 132, 133, 134 Byrne, Liam 47 Caruth, Cathy 3 Chambers, Iain 23 children’s literature: and French Revolution 4; postcolonial 2, 3, 4, 38, 65, 85, 107, 131; progressive 3, 131; and the racial/ethnic other, pre-9/11 4; and slow terror/violence 4, 129, 130; and Northern Irish Troubles 3–4; as transformative 2, 8, 27, 61–2, 72, 132, 134 child soldier 28, 29–32

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Chouliaraki, Lilje 108 Cohen, Stanley 64 Colebrook, Martyn 70, 75, 81 Conaghan, Brian: The Bombs That Brought Us Together 4; see also children’s literature, and slow terror/ violence “Condition of England” novel 64 Connell, R. W. 69 Conrad, Joseph: The Secret Agent 130 cosmopolitanism 3, 5, 6, 97–8, 106, 107, 112, 113, 114–16, 118, 120, 126, 131 counter-extremism/counter-terrorism: and anti-migrant policy and discourse 107, 109, 113, 122–3; and “axis of evil” rhetoric 85; and biopolitics 88, 89, 122; and children 1, 36–7, 90–1; and “enemy within” rhetoric 36, 39–40; and freedom 1, 45, 50–1, 55, 56–8, 60, 78, 87, 92, 93–4, 99–100, 122; and Orientalist/colonial logic 2, 3, 4, 6, 38, 45, 47–8, 56–7, 65, 85, 94–5; as rhetorical 94; and securitization of space 114, 122–3; and subjugated knowledges 91–2; and surveillance 7, 38, 52, 78–9, 86, 87–8; and youth radicalization 46–7 Croft, Jo 70–1, 74 Cross, Gillian: Wolf 3; see also children’s literature, and Northern Irish Troubles cultural difference: brokering of 68, 86, 93, 112, 113, 115, 118, 122; incommunicability of 102; incommensurability of 107, 115, 118; politicization of 38, 44, 74, 77 cultural memory: role of 96, 121–2 DeLillo, Don 2; Falling Man 50; Mao II 93, 130 Delsol, Rebekah 69 Denning, Michael 50 Dhondy, Farrukh: East End at Your Feet 4; Come to Mecca and Other Stories 4; see also children’s literature, and racial/ethnic other, pre-9/11 Douglas, Kate 6 Douglass, William A. 94, 130 Dowd, Siobhan: Bog Child 3; see also children’s literature, and Northern Irish Troubles Drewery, Kerry: A Brighter Fear 6, 12, 28–32 Duffy, Kate Scarlett 108

dwelling place 111 dystopia, critical 86, 87, 103 Earle, Phil: Heroic 6, 12, 28–32 Ellis, Dave 81 Elwick, Alex 2 empathy 13, 19–20, 48, 60, 94, 102, 115, 120, 122, 129, 132, 133; as inherent to children 107 ethics: of care 4, 23–4, 25–7, 74, 106, 110; children and 98, 107, 117, 119, 124, 125, 129, 133; of cohabitation 5, 106–7, 109, 110, 134; cosmopolitan/ global 3, 5, 113, 118, 120, 122, 129, 132; difficulty of 27, 100–1, 112, 120, 122; Hegelian 119, 124; Levinasian 18, 25–6, 109–10, 117, 122; of recognition 12–13, 23–4, 106–7, 117–18; after terror 15, 20, 38, 54, 59, 85, 103, 129; and value of historical/local knowledges 120, 121, 125; see also family, social and ethical importance of; reading, as ethical event family: and child’s development 27, 41, 48–9, 119; displacement/loss of 13, 21, 119–20; post-terror erosion of 6, 13, 14, 15, 21, 22, 25–6, 37, 43, 48, 60; social and ethical importance of 25–7, 48–9, 58, 119 fear of terrorism 1, 2, 14, 15, 17, 23, 37–8, 45, 51, 59–60, 89–90, 113, 122, 130, 132; and immigration 23, 36, 109, 113; see also paranoia, post-terror; suspect communities Fleras, Augie 36 Ford, Kieran 2 Foucault, Michel 88, 89, 91, 96–7, 130 Fox, Geoff 18 Freud, Sigmund 14 Fricker, Miranda 117 Gabrielatos, Costas 5, 53 Gálvez, Alyshia 23 Gangi, Jane M. 8 Ganteau, Jean-Michel 14, 24, 27, 81 Gardner, Sally: The Red Necklace 4; The Silver Blade 4; see also children’s literature, and French Revolution Gavin, Jamila: The Eye of the Horse 4; The Track of the Wind 4; The Wheel of Surya 4; see also children’s literature, and racial/ethnic other, pre-9/11

Index Gibbons, Alan: An Act of Love 6, 37, 39–50, 58, 59, 60; The Defender 3; see also children’s literature, and Northern Irish Troubles; The Trap: Terrorism, Heroism and Everything in Between 50–4 Gibbs, Alan 20, 31, 130 Gillborn, David 36, 73 Gilroy, Paul 5, 57, 68, 109, 114, 132–3 Gray, Richard 15, 129 Gregory, Derek 57, 58 Grenfell Tower fire 78, 132–3 grievability: and frames of war 6, 24, 100, 103, 132 Grillo, Ralph 36 Grzegorczyk, Blanka 3, 87 Gulf War: first 38 Gunning, Dave 67, 76 Hacking, Ian 71 Halahmy, Miriam: Hidden 2, 7, 106, 112–18, 120, 123 Hall, Stuart 4 Hamid, Mohsin 133 Hansen, Randall 36 Head, Dominic 38, 97–8, 120, 130 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 119, 124 Heidegger, Martin 111 Hepburn, Sam: If You Were Me 6, 37, 50–4, 55, 60 Herman, Peter 2 Higinbotham, Sarah 6 Higonnet, Margaret R. 17, 18, 19, 26 Hintz, Carrie 87 Houen, Alex 3, 13–14, 15, 31, 89, 99, 100, 130 Hussain, Sara 2, 131 hybridity: of identities 7, 65, 66, 70, 71, 74, 76; of Britain 36, 56; of perspectives 85, 101, 103 hypermasculinity 41, 65, 69–70; see also performance/performativity; self-fashioning; subcultures, youth Idir, Mustafa Ait 58 Immel, Andrea 6 injustice: hermeneutical 117; testimonial 117 Janes, Dominic 99 Jennings, Kate: Moral Hazard 50 Jerome, Lee 2

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Johnson, Catherine: Blade and Bone; Sawbones 4; see also children’s literature, and French Revolution justice: retributive 40–2, 90, 101, 102 Karmani, Alyas 47 Kazim, Raza 2 Kelen, Christopher 6 Khan, Muhammad: I Am Thunder 6, 37, 39–50, 58, 59 Khosrokhavar, Farhad 30 Kieran, David 5, 6 Kohlke, Marie Luise 19 Kuznets, Lois R. 19 LaCapra, Dominick 19, 20 Laird, Elizabeth: A Little Piece of Ground 4; Lost Riders 4; Oranges in No Man’s Land 4; Welcome to Nowhere 6, 12, 21–7; see also children’s literature, and slow terror/ violence Lampert, Jo 6, 18 Laub, Dori 131 Levinas, Emmanuel 18, 25–26, 38, 95, 109–10, 117, 122 Lewis, C. S.: The Last Battle 4; see also children’s literature, and racial/ethnic other, pre-9/11 Lincoln, Siân 70 Lingard, Joan 3; see also children’s literature, and Northern Irish Troubles Loh, Lucienne 65, 76 Lynch, Orla 43, 51, 53 MacLachlan, Kate: Love My Enemy 3; see also children’s literature, and Northern Irish Troubles MacSween, Richard: Victory Street 4 Mahlstedt, Andrew 96 Maira, Sunaina Marr 5, 78, 79, 81, 82 Malkani, Gautam 64; Londonstani 65, 70, 81 Manchester Arena: bombing of 1, 2 Marsh, Nicky 50 Massey, David: Torn 6, 12, 28–32 Matthews, Jamie 43, 53 McCulloch, Fiona 6 McEnery, Tony 5, 53 McEwan, Ian 2, 102; Saturday 50 McFall, Claire: Bombmaker 7, 85, 87–93, 98 McGillis, Roderick 3 McGowan, Will 6

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McHale, Brian 15, 130 McIntosh, Malachi 109 McLeod, John 107, 113, 115, 120 McMahan, Jeff 29 Mickenberg, Julia L. 3 Mills, Sam: Blackout 7, 85, 87–93, 96 Mitchell, Jane: Chalkline 4; see also children’s literature, and slow terror/ violence Morris, Rosalind C. 107 Morton, Stephen 2, 7, 48, 133 Mulligan, Andy: Trash 4; see also children’s literature, and slow terror/ violence multiculturalism: 3, 4, 36, 39, 59, 66, 106, 116–17; failure of 36, 72 Murphy, Neil 65 Muslim womanhood 42, 75 Mussi, Sarah: Bomb 7, 85, 97–103 Naidoo, Beverley 8, 64 Needle, Jan: My Mate Shofiq 4; see also children’s literature, and racial/ethnic other, pre-9/11 Nel, Philip 3, 8, 23 Newland, Courttia 81 Nussbaum, Martha 124, 132, 133 Onega, Susana 14, 81 Osgerby, Bill 64, 77 Ostry, Elaine 87 O’Sullivan, Emer 6 paranoia: post-terror 1–2, 23, 38, 51, 89, 106; see also fear of terrorism; suspect communities parochialism: new 81 Pellicer-Ortín, Silvia 122 Perera, Anna: Guantanamo Boy 6, 37, 54–9, 60 performance/performativity 13, 18, 65, 70, 76, 77; see also self-fashioning; subcultures, youth Pitcher, Annabel: My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece 6, 12, 14–20 Podell, Daniel 131 Poletti, Anna 6 political engagement/resistance: and cybersphere 22, 81, 96–7; limitations of 78, 81–2, 97; and parrhesia/fearless speech 96–7; youth and 2, 5, 78, 103, 106, 116, 126, 129, 131, 133, 134 Prashad, Vijad 82

precariousness: as basis of socio-political change 59, 121; of bodies 1, 5, 40, 50, 51, 54, 59, 100, 103, 106, 117, 119, 132; of borders 1, 40, 59, 106; of children’s lives 32, 39, 47, 73, 98, 129, 131; enactment of 122; as universal human condition 13, 25, 50, 54, 96, 106, 110–11, 118, 120, 126, 133; see also refugee, vulnerability of precarity 13, 27, 120, 125; see also precariousness Prevent strategy 46, 47; see also counter-extremism/counter-terrorism Puri, Pooja: The Jungle 6, 12, 21, 23–7 Qureshi, Asim 46 racism: art and creativity as resistance to 74–5, 80–1, 121; and discriminatory profiling 46, 49, 68, 69, 78; and fear of terrorism 15, 23, 45, 113; and hermeneutical injustice 117; inferential 4–5; and language 68, 74–5; and segregation of urban spaces 68, 79–80, 111; systemic 64, 66, 68–9, 73–4, 78; see also refugee, racism against; violence, as associated with racial/ethnic other radicalization: of youth 7, 36, 39, 40–2, 46–7, 51, 52, 76, 91, 98, 99 Rai, Bali 64; The Crew 7, 65–72; The Last Taboo 7, 65–72 Randall, Martin 18, 20 reading: as ethical event 27, 32, 86, 124, 133 refugee: definition of 109; and experience of disillusionment 108; as framed as threatening 23, 107, 108, 109, 113; and politics of care 24; racism against 107, 108, 111, 116, 122; and recognition 23–4, 111–12, 114, 122–3; representations of 23–4, 53–4, 108, 109, 113–14, 122–3; and testimonial injustice 117; vulnerability of 23–4, 51, 108, 110, 114, 117, 119; see also suspect communities Reid, Julian 88 Reynolds, Kimberley 3 Robert, Na’ima B. 64; Black Sheep 7, 65–6, 72–7; Boy vs. Girl 7, 65–6, 72–7 Rollock, Nicola 73 Rosen, David M. 29

Index Roth, Philip 2 Rushdie, Salman 7, 108, 118; and fatwa 38; The Satanic Verses 108 Safran Foer, Jonathan 2 Said, Edward 109 Said, S. F. 55 Sainsbury, Lisa 6, 29, 30, 48, 124, 129 Schoene, Berthold 115, 117 self-discipline 88, 89, 92; see also counter-extremism, and freedom self-fashioning: ethnic 5; 65; strategic use of 5; 65; subcultural 5, 65; see also performance/performativity; self-identification, as Muslim self-identification: as Muslim 65, 72, 75–7 Shepler, Susan 29 Shiner, Michael 69 Shryock, Andrew 38 Shukla, Nikesh 64; Run, Riot 7, 65–6, 78–82, 134 Sim, Wai-chew 65 Singer, Nicky: The Innocent’s Story 7, 85, 97–103 solidarity: and compassion 124, 131–2; interethnic/multicultural 3, 5, 7, 65, 66, 71–2, 82, 107, 109, 113, 114, 116–17, 118, 120, 122, 125, 126, 129, 130, 134; intergenerational 107, 116, 122; lack of 67–8, 77, 116–17, 125; limitations of 66, 72, 82, 112, 125, 126; and precarity/precariousness 5, 120; and social space 111, 118, 123; see also dwelling place Spencer, Robert 108 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 107 Stevenson, Randall 15, 130 Stolic, Tijana 108 Stormzy: and protest art 1–2; see also terror, and art and creativity subcultural fiction: post-terror 64–5, 71–2, 78, 82; “state-of-the-nation” strand of 65–6 subcultures, youth: categories of 70–1; and gang affiliation 64, 73, 74, 76–7; importance to young ethnic subjects of 64–5; and inside/outside spaces 70–1; and moral panics 64; see also performance/performativity; self-fashioning Sukkar, Sumia: The Boy from Aleppo Who Painted the War 6, 12, 21–2, 24–7

141

Sundmark, Björn 6 superhero: trope of 17–18, 22; see also terror, and play suspect communities 5, 37, 42, 43–5, 46, 64, 114; and media 5, 36, 43–4, 53–4; vulnerability of 6–7, 45, 51, 52, 54, 103; see also fear of terrorism; paranoia, post-terror; refugee Swindells, Robert: Ruby Tanya 7, 106, 112–18, 120, 123 Syal, Meera: Anita and Me 4; see also children’s literature, and racial/ethnic other, pre-9/11 Tarlo, Emma 75 terror: and art and creativity 1–2, 12, 20, 27, 106; and collective memory 12; and cultural and ideological binaries 3, 38, 40, 42–5, 49, 59, 85, 103, 131; and dystopia 86, 87, 103; and fiction 2, 93, 130; impact on child’s imagination and understanding of 2, 12, 15, 16, 22, 106, 113–14; and play 12–13, 17–19, 20, 25–7, 28–9; see also superhero, trope of; trauma, and play; and sacrifice 100; slow 4, 21–2, 27, 28, 53–4; and spectacle 15–16, 22, 90; teaching about 2, 16; and trauma 13–14, 21–2; see also counter-extremism/counter-terrorism Tew, Phillip 65 Todres, Jonathan 6 trauma 3, 13–14, 21–2, 27, 28, 30–1; art and narrative as antidotes to 20, 27, 31–2, 131; fidelity to 19–20; learning lessons from past 120–1; and memorializing loss 31–2; and play 17– 19, 20, 25; as serving to perpetuate violence 51; see also terror, and play; and transitional object 19; as wound 15 Upstone, Sara 43, 45, 55, 70 Versluys, Kristiaan 98, 130 violence: as acting out against systemic racism 69, 74, 77; as associated with racial/ethnic other 5, 7, 43–5, 60; see also suspect communities; damage inflicted by past 121; and the power of discourse 91–2, 93, 96, 111–12; reciprocal 13, 18, 39, 42–3, 53, 85, 92, 93, 100, 102, 132; see also justice, retributive; state 1, 2, 3, 13, 31, 37, 50, 51–2, 54, 60, 78, 80–1, 85–8, 90,

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Index

92, 95–6, 97, 98, 99–100, 115, 131; terroristic 1, 2, 3, 12, 13, 15–16, 20, 21, 23, 37, 53, 85, 86, 92, 97, 98, 102, 110, 115, 131 Walker, Gregory W. 70 Walsh, John 29 Ware, Vron 23, 45, 46 Warmington, Paul 36 war on terror 3, 12, 37, 39–40, 42, 52, 54, 56–8, 59–60, 64, 85, 86, 87, 92, 93, 94–5, 103; justification for 31, 38, 86,

87, 88, 133; see also counter-extremism; terror, and ideological binaries Wheatle, Alex 64, 81; The Dirty South 65; Liccle Bit 70 Whitehead, Anne 3, 29, 30 Whitlock, Gillian 6 Winnicott, D. W. 19 Young, Jock 64 Zephaniah, Benjamin 64 Zulaika, Joseba 94, 130