Editorial

The years following the terror attacks of 11 September 2001 saw the production of a number of creative works which sought to respond to the events or their aftermath in the face of what many Western commentators understood as a “breakdown of all meaning-making systems” (Versluys, 2009: 2). Most high-profile among these were literary works by critically acclaimed and commercially successful white Anglo-American male writers — including Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), John Updike’s Terrorist (2006), and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) in the US, and Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005) and Martin Amis’s The Second Plane (2008) in the UK — which have formed the focus of much recent scholarly work (see Gray, 2011; Keniston and Follansbee Quinn, 2008; Randall, 2011; Versluys, 2009). While “post-9/11” fiction by writers of Muslim heritage from a range of countries — including Britain and North America — entered the literary marketplace, diversifying and complicating the narratives that shape our understanding of the contemporary world (for example, Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 novella The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Kamila Shamsie’s 2009 novel Burnt Shadows), the genre remains dominated by white Western narrative perspectives and a focus on North America, as well as by the novel. Our aim in this special issue is to critically interrogate the evolution of the genre of post-9/11 cultural production which has typically corroborated the exceptional status of these events, privileged white Western responses while marginalizing the perspectives of Muslims, or contributed to narratives of the “Muslim” as cultural “other”, as susceptible to radicalization, or as terrorist. Each of the essays contributes to this interrogation in a different way.

Ana María Sánchez-Arce’s essay, “Performing innocence: Violence and the nation in Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Sunjeev Sahota’s Ours are the Streets”, explores a canonic post-9/11 novel — one that has helped define the genre — alongside the debut novel of a relative newcomer to British fiction. While McEwan’s novel is focalized predominantly through a privileged white middle-aged Londoner, Sahota’s is narrated by a young working-class Muslim from Sheffield. Sánchez-Arce argues that through its satirical treatment of privileged and blinkered protagonist Henry Perowne, McEwan’s novel in fact exposes the narrowness and prejudice of Western responses to 9/11 which construct Britain, like North America, as “exceptional” in its “innocence”. Sahota’s protagonist Imtiaz Raina, on the other hand, becomes aware of the sham status of the “ceremony of innocence” conducted by those in power. According to Sánchez-Arce’s reading, this leads him to seek to redefine the British nation, which normatively places its racial and religious “others” on its borders, through an act of terror. Both novels, therefore, are invested in exploring and interrogating “Britishness” in the wake of 9/11.

The focus on British culture in this special issue necessitates scrutiny of the impact of the 2001 race riots and 2005 London bombings. These national events were instrumental in shaping public perceptions of British Muslims and multiculturalism in the first years of the new millennium. Following the riots in Oldham, Burnley, and Bradford, multiculturalism came under attack as political and media commentators from across the political spectrum declared its “failure”. The spotlight was shone on working-class Muslim communities, particularly in the north of England, which were accused of “self-segregation” and constructed as breeding grounds for extremism. Multiculturalist practices and policies, it was claimed, had facilitated separatism rather than integration, while separatism was represented as a first step in the direction of extremism (see Kundnani, 2007). In this discourse, both negative and positive factors that have led to the formation of tight-knit Muslim communities in Britain were obscured: the poverty, disenfranchisement, and racism that mark the lives of a substantial number of British Muslims, on the one hand, and the preservation of Muslim cultures as well as the solidarity that binds community members, on the other. It is this context that Sarah Ilott engages with in her reading of three post-9/11 examples of British comedy films that address aspects of multicultural Britain: Mark Mylod’s Ali G Indahouse, Chris Morris’s Four Lions, and Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block. In “‘How is these kids meant to make it out the ghetto now?’: Community cohesion and communities of laughter in British multicultural comedy”, Ilott argues that these films contest popular discourse that blames minority communities for the tensions and challenges of British multiculturalism, foregrounding instead economic and social factors that push minority Britons to the margins of the nation. By focusing on two films that are not directly concerned with 9/11 or Muslims (Ali G Indahouse and Attack the Block) alongside one that is (Four Lions), the essay reframes the debate in terms of class and race thereby disturbing the notion that British Muslims are the problem and effectively reversing the neoliberal substitution of “community” and “culture” for structural forms of exclusion (Lentin and Titley, 2011). Indeed, the very notion of culturally homogeneous communities is destabilized in this article, which shows how the films use comedy to disrupt and redraw such boundaries of identity.

With its focus on the 2001 race riots and their impact on perceptions of working-class northern multicultural communities, Rehana Ahmed’s interview with performance poet and playwright Avaes Mohammad, “I’ll explain what I can”, complements Ilott’s essay. In the interview, Mohammad, a rare example of a working-class British Muslim artistic voice, discusses the way his own roots in Blackburn, a racially divided Lancashire town, have shaped his art. His emphasis on the poverty and “poverty of opportunity” that scar the lives of both white and Asian community members — and can help drive some to extremist political positions — also works to break down the divisions between them and refocus attention on the nation’s class divisions. Mohammad’s emphasis on place — whether his divided hometown of Blackburn, or the streets of Manchester claimed by young British Muslims during Eid celebrations, or the prison cells of Guantánamo Bay — finds an echo in Madeline Clements’ article on artistic responses to 7/7. In “Countervailing aesthetics? Depictions of British Muslims and the multicultural working class in post-7/7 art”, Clements’ focus is on Beeston, Leeds, home to one of the London transport bombers, Mohammad Sidique Khan, and whose ethnically diverse inhabitants form the subject of British artist Philip Gurrey’s 2008 sequence of portraits, The Beeston Series. Like Ilott, Clements addresses the scrutiny of working-class multicultural communities, particularly their Muslim members, but this time in the wake of the terror attacks when Britain’s Muslim population were subjected to increased levels of stereotyping and profiling. Reading Gurrey’s work in this social and political context — and productively contrasting it with responses to 7/7 by two London-based artists, Mark Sinckler and Faiza Butt — the essay shows how it offers a “countervailing aesthetic”, one that disturbs sensationalist media portrayals of the Leeds suburb, thereby delinking it from extremism and terrorism and emphasizing the ordinary, lived multicultural realities of its inhabitants who, it is suggested, are connected by class more than by ethnicity or religion.

Recent years have seen increasingly urgent debates — in both activist and academic contexts — about the political appropriation of discourses of women’s and LGBT rights by neoliberal regimes in the decades following 9/11. More specifically, scholars and activists alike have contested the implicit equation of the secular West with gender equality and sexual freedom in opposition to a construction of Islamic cultures as inherently intolerant and oppressive. Working with innovative new scholarship in gender and sexuality studies, including feminism and queer theory (see for example, Ahmed, 2006; Gopinath, 2005; Puar, 2007), the authors contributing to this special issue significantly extend debates attending to questions of cultural representation after 9/11 by taking an intersectional approach to issues of gendered and sexual identity; Alberto Fernández Carbajal, Peter Cherry, and Lucinda Newns explore the representation of people of Muslim heritage or faith in multicultural or diasporic contexts, with a focus on constructions of gendered and sexual identity. Newns’ “Renegotiating romantic genres: Textual resistance and Muslim chick lit” and Carbajal’s “Countermemories of desire: Female homosexuality, ‘coming out’ narratives, and British multiculturalism in Shamim Sarif’s I Can’t Think Straight” examine how stereotypes of Muslim women as passive victims of Islamic patriarchal oppression are challenged in popular fiction and films which focus on narratives of female agency, whether spiritual or sexual. Where Newns considers the depiction of women in the context of critical negotiations between cultural tradition and postfeminist politics in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator (1999) and Shelina Zahra Janmohamed’s memoir Love in a Headscarf (2009), Carbajal and Cherry situate their discussion of same-sex desire in the context of competing — and contested — discourses of Muslim homophobia and Western Islamophobia in films directed by Shamim Sarif and Sally El Hosaini. The erasure of female homosexuality in cultural representations of Muslim and Arab culture and identity is a key concern for Carbajal, whose essay explores the limitations of Western models of sexual identity for queer Muslim and Arab subjects. By contrast, in “‘I’d rather my brother was a bomber than a homo’: British Muslim masculinities and homonationalism in Sally El Hosaini’s My Brother the Devil ”, Cherry examines the problematic visibility of young British Muslim men subject to racial profiling as potential criminals and terrorists. Carbajal and Cherry’s analysis of selected literary and film narratives evaluate the extent to which writers and film-makers of Muslim heritage successfully challenge the assumed incompatibility between Islamic culture and non-heterosexual identity.

While the years following the events of 11 September 2001 have seen the emergence of what has come to be known as “post-9/11 fiction and film” as an expanding field of study and object of analysis, the questions of genre which necessarily follow have been less examined. The essays collected in this special issue explore genres often overlooked in the focus on literary narratives of white Western reaction, including those whose perceived status has historically been compromised by the gendered and class politics of cultural value (not only comedy but also romance) and those that challenge literary taxonomies (such as memoir, both literary and mass market). Contextualizing, historicizing, and politicizing the “horizons of expectation” (Todorov, 1990) within which these texts are understood, these articles examine the relationship between authors, readers, audiences, and markets, reflecting on critical contexts of reception and on the “paratextual” apparatus of consumption (Genette, 1997). Considering post-9/11 literary production in literary historical frames which exceed the contemporary period, these essays offer new insights and articulate new questions for the dominant histories of the novel and of literary criticism that prevail in the West. Peter Morey’s “‘Halal fiction’ and the limits of postsecularism: Criticism, critique, and the Muslim in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret” and Newns’ “Renegotiating romantic genres” challenge perceptions that literary expressions of personal faith by Muslim writers are incompatible with the secular and individualist tradition of classic realism recounted in many histories of the novel in the West. Morey notes the persistence of religion in the novel — a literary innovation with origins in Puritan autobiographies — arguing for continuities between Judeo-Christian, Islamic, and secular narratives. Morey and Newns reflect in different ways on the nineteenth-century origins of twenty-first-century romance genres, in relation to the Bildungsroman and the domestic novel respectively. Where Morey revisits literary critical histories of the novel, Newns examines the contemporary literary marketplace, exploring the ways in which Muslim chick lit repurposes the consumer-driven neoliberal politics of postfeminist popular fiction.

The interest in the role of secular liberalism in literary culture — and in particular in its unacknowledged legacies and problematic binaries — which is evident in these essays, is given further attention in Stephen Morton’s “Secularism and the death and return of the author: Re-reading the Rushdie affair after Joseph Anton”, which examines the author’s retrospective reflections in his much-anticipated memoir on his reworking of Islamic history in his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. Through a close and contextualized reading of Rushdie’s texts, and with reference to Roland Barthes’ essay “The death of the author”, Morton subverts conventional accounts of Rushdie’s protestors as misreading the novel by asking whether Rushdie’s own representation of The Satanic Verses and its reception in Joseph Anton might in fact be understood as a type of secular misreading. Hence, the article challenges the binary between secularism and fundamentalism that framed understandings of the Rushdie affair and which continues to underpin the political and literary discourses of Western reaction that have prevailed since before 9/11. Moreover, by returning to the Rushdie affair of 1988–89, which proved pivotal in the shaping of public perceptions about the role of British Muslims in the public sphere, Morton, like several of the other authors in this collection, also implicitly challenges the construction of 9/11 as a defining rupture in the history of British multiculturalism.

The articles collected in this special issue seek to productively reframe ongoing debates by offering new perspectives on the meaning, significance, and impact of the September 11 attacks in British contexts, whether historical, cultural, or literary. They do so in four key interlinked ways: first, by addressing post-9/11 Britain and British cultural production, second, by expanding our focus beyond the novel and other written forms to encompass visual art, film, performance poetry, and theatre; third, by prioritizing work produced by Muslims or that explores the position of Muslims or the state of multiculturalism in Britain; and fourth, by questioning normative conceptions of 9/11 as the definitive rupture in contemporary Western culture, both through an acknowledgement of the longer history of Islamist violence internationally and Islamophobic racism in the West, and through a focus on other significant events both pre- and post-dating the US terror attacks including the 2001 race riots and the 7/7 terror attacks. At the time of writing, the national narratives and public histories with which many of these essays are concerned are being subjected to renewed scrutiny. The publication of the Chilcot Report of the Iraq Inquiry in July 2016 has given new impetus to critiques of UK political and military responses to 9/11, demonstrating that the contested legacy of events of over 15 years ago continues to extend well beyond its historical moment. In this context, the critical role of artists and writers as voices of diversity and dissent is all the more vital.