Two Counter-Narratives of Global Terrorism: Sunjeev Sahota's Ours Are the Streets and Tabish Khair's Just Another Jihadi Jane

Abstract

By focusing on Ours are the Streets (2011) by Sunjeev Sahota and Just Another Jihadi Jane (2016) by Tabish Khair, this paper aims at tackling the issue of Islamic fundamentalism beyond constructed binarisms, while reassessing the role of literature as a means of elucidating the complexity of global phenomena (such as terrorism) behind simplified propaganda and political manipulation. Written in the wake of 9/11 and 7/7, both novels set out to reveal that the alleged hatred for the West on the part of the jihadists, as well as the religious indoctrination they willingly receive, often lie on the surface of precarious lives, severely affected by marginalization and neoliberal policies and practices. Hence, far from exhibiting the symptoms of fanaticism, the UK-born protagonists of both narratives (Jamilla, the reluctant fundamentalist in Khair’s novel and Imtiaz, the hesitant would-be suicide bomber in Sahota’s volume) mistakenly view their belonging to a terrorist cell as finally being part of a closely-knit and mutually protective group, the imaginary community they have always longed for. As both texts demonstrate, therefore, the boundary between the righteous and the wicked is blurred, while people’s vulnerability is constantly exploited to serve political and economic agendas. Judith Butler’s notion of precarity (2009) and Byung-Chul Han’s view of “the proliferation of the same” (2018) as the pathological alteration the social body suffers from, will provide the necessary theoretical framework to better understand and analyze the two novels and their characters.