‘London is a City Built on the Wreckage of Itself’: State Terrorism and Resistance in Chris Cleave’s Incendiary and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

Abstract

The impact of post-‘9/11’ terrorism on how the city of London has been reimagined is significant. In this paper, we will explore two post-‘9/11’ novels, Chris Cleave’s 2005 Incendiary and Mohsin Hamid’s 2017 Exit West, which complicate the tradition of British literature featuring terrorists (Taylor, London's Burning: Pulp Fiction, the Politics of Terrorism and the Destruction of the Capital in British Popular Culture, 1840–2005 (London: Continuum, 2012), 1–2) by reenvisaging London as a nexus of state terrorism. Incendiary, published on the day of the ‘7/7’ bombings, highlights the complexity of political violence through the story of a traumatised woman who loses her son and husband during a terrorist attack in London. Cleave critiques the post ‘9/11’ city by constructing a narrative centred on the Londoners’ response to the terror perpetrated by the government, the police, and media (e.g.: violence against civilians, suspension of civil rights, martial law, and surveillance). Similarly, Hamid’s Exit West depicts London as a place where refugees live in terror, exploited in work camps and subjected to surveillance (through drones and by citizens turned vigilantes) by the British state. This paper aims to interrogate how these texts problematise mainstream representations of sovereign power in London. If state sovereignty is understood as ‘an aspiration that seeks to create itself in the face of internally fragmented, unevenly distributed and unpredictable configurations of political authority that exercise more or less legitimate violence in a territory’ (T. B. Hansen and F. Stepputat (eds.), Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the Postcolonial World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2005), 10), literary fiction creates a space suitable for questioning the legitimacy of this aspiration. The state actively produces ‘fear, terror, and violence’, embedding in the construction of cities (D. Gregory, The Colonial Present (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004), 4). The London of Cleave’s and Hamid’s novels becomes a site for both projecting terrorism and resisting terror in all its forms. Our interdisciplinary theoretical framework combines postcolonial theory and elements of urban and cultural sociology (S. Graham (ed.), Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004); S. Graham, Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (London: Verso, 2011); J. C. Alexander, Performance and Power (Cambridge: Polity, 2011)) with inquiries into the cultural imaginary of terrorism (Frank, The Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism in Public Discourse, Literature, and Film: Narrating Terror (New York, NY: Routledge, 2017), 75.) in post-‘9/11’ literature. We subscribe to the proposition that the ‘only real solution to our current geopolitical crisis’ is asserting the global values that connect the Self with the Other (Gauthier, 9/11 Fiction, Empathy, and Otherness (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 1.) and we argue that Incendiary and Exit West provide a counternarrative to the dominant discourse of terrorism post ‘9/11’, which champions the state’s supreme authority through stereotyping and polarisation. The proposed reading of Cleave’s and Hamid’s novels will show how the city of London, as imagined in literary responses to ‘9/11’, can crystallise a counternarrative of protest by revealing the systemic violence through which sovereign power is performed at the expense of civil populations, particularly minoritised populations through discourses of hate such as Islamophobia and antiimmigrant/refugee rhetoric.