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British muslim identities and spectres of terror in nadeem aslam’s maps for lost lovers
Moore, Lindsey
Moore, Lindsey
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Moore, Lindsey
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n1017-4824-1-PB.pdf
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"In an early attempt at measuring the challenge of 11 September 2001 and its aftermath for creative writers and artists, Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Mark Williams suggest the need for “not only repoliticised modes of understanding but also a new grammar of response” (10). Their rationale is not that history recommenced with the destruction of the Twin Towers. Rather, they call for considered alternatives to “war-onterror” rhetoric that, as Judith Butler puts it, “in its sloshy metonymy, returns us to the invidious distinction between civilization (our own) and barbarism (now coded as ‘Islam’ itself)” (Precarious Life 2).1 That such rhetoric has become less bellicose in the post-Bush and Blair phase of intervention in the Middle East does not render its discursive strategies obsolete. Repeated tropes are, among other things, relentlessly gendered, as is illustrated by the entanglement of imperialist and feminist discourses in media coverage of Afghan women’s rights.2 This article explores ways in which Nadeem Aslam’s second novel Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) participates in the construction of British Muslim identities in the aftermath of 9/11. I am interested in how a writer implicated by virtue of his cultural affiliations in national and transnational constructions of Islam might engage the “apparently ‘new’ and all consuming ‘grammar’” of the war on terror and “keep making art in the face of terror itself” (Nasta with Boehmer 1). Two preliminary questions about the function of literature arise, one pertaining to an oft-cited “burden of representation” (discussed below) and the other to the status of art and its ambiguous relation to truth."(pg 1)
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2009
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With permission of the license/copyright holder