Race, Risk, and Fiction in the War on Terror: Laila Halaby, Gayle Brandeis, and Michael Cunningham

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes For an impassioned discussion of race and the genealogy of hate violence against Arab and Muslim communities after 9/11 see Ahmad. What further reinforces the salience of visible ethnicity in an examination of Arab American identity after September 11 is that prior to the attacks, the Arab American community was largely, in Nadine Naber's words, “the ‘invisible’ racial/ethnic group” (“Ambiguous Insiders” 37) of the United States. Palestinian American scholar Lisa Suhair Majaj aptly summarized this ambiguous categorization shortly before the 9/11 terrorist attacks: “Arab Americans occupy a contested and unclear space within American racial and cultural discourse. Although classified as ‘white’ by current government definitions, they are conspicuously absent from discussions of white ethnicity, and are popularly perceived as non-white” (329). This status was fundamentally changed by the 9/11 events and the panic they generated. As Steven Salaita has noted, with the beginning of the war on terror “Arab Americans evolved from invisible to glaringly conspicuous (whether or not the conspicuousness was welcomed)” (74) and often became the victims of racial violence. This sexualized xenophobia is also in line with the discursive practices of European colonialism where, according to Anne McClintock, “the rhetoric of gender was used to make increasingly refined distinctions among the different races” (55, emphasis in original). Brandeis's novel assumes that sympathy is an indisputably positive concept. However, as Amit Rai has argued, although sympathy was central to the rehabilitation of disfavored classes throughout the nineteenth century, by marking off the populations in need of benevolence, it only deepened the rifts it had set out to bridge (xix). Consequently, “sympathy has become something of a ‘bad’ word in political and cultural discourse, bearing connotations of a patronizing, even colonizing benevolence” (xii). Apparently, husband and wife are subjected to different forms of repression, he to institutional detention, she to public opprobrium based on her appearance. This chimes with Nadine Naber's observation that “federal government policies disproportionately targeted men while hate crimes and incidents of harassment in the public sphere disproportionately targeted women” (“Look, Mohammed” 293). On the “personality defect” model of terrorism, which holds that terrorists suffer from pathological personalities emerging from a damaged sense of self, see Post and Ruby. Additional informationNotes on contributorsGeorgiana BanitaGeorgiana Banita is Assistant Professor of Literature and Media Studies at the University of Bamberg, Germany, currently on leave as Postdoctoral Fellow at the United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney.