Rewriting terror

the 9/11 terrorists in american fiction

Bermúdez de Castro, Juanjo

There is a discursive way of coming to terms with the terrorists responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001, which has prevailed as the predominant course of action in the US. It is supported by governmental institutions, the mainstream media, and by most novelists, film directors, TV scriptwriters, and cartoonists who have re-visited and re-created the event through fiction. This ideological maneuver can appear in different guises: demonizing discourses, in which the 9/11 terrorists are represented as quintessentially “evil” or the vivid image of irrationality and hatred; generalizing discourses, in which a new identity label that emerged after 9/11 – a religious, racial, and ethnical mix merely based on physical appearance and conformed by Muslims, Arabs, Middle Easterners, and whoever “looks like” them – is turned into the constructed “evil” object of both suspicion and retaliation; and finally, “hystoerical” contextualizations of the event, which, obsessed with memorializing the 9/11 date, have reformulated contemporary history in Dickensian terms such as “everything has changed, nothing has changed” while neglecting to specify “for whom” it has changed, and more importantly, “for whom it has not.” This book analyzes how some US works of fiction – novels, films, TV series, short stories, and comics – have rewritten the historical event of 9/11 under the limitations imposed by ideological dictates.