Homegrown Terror: Projective Identification and Wafaa Bilal’s Domestic Tension

Abstract

At the intersection of Asian American studies, performance studies, and psychoanalytic theory, this article issues a study of the work of performance artist Wafaa Bilal. Drawing on the work of psychoanalytic theorist Melanie Klein and, in particular, Klein’s theory of projective identification, Homegrown Terror issues a theory of projective identification’s role in the process of racialization, and, in particular, the production of the racialized figure of the so-called homegrown terrorist. Bilal’s work allows us to see the process through which members of the dominant culture disaggregate their own fear and terror of the Middle Eastern, South and Central Asian American body (apprehended as Muslim or Arab), externalizing these negative affects by projecting them onto and in some cases into the body of the racialized subject.