Radical children, radical fictions: terror and extremism in Sam Mills’s Blackout and Malorie Blackman’s Noble Conflict

Abstract

This article discusses the binding together of the terrorist’s and the victim’s perspectives in Sam Mills’s Blackout and Malorie Blackman’s Noble Conflict. In staging this kind of encounter, the contemporary children’s novel can explore the origins and workings of terrorist organisations, as well as counter-terrorist institutions, encouraging young readers to enter into critical engagement with different forms of violence that are connected with resistance to oppression and injustice. The terror-saturated dystopian visions fashioned by this generation of children’s writers are read as allowing them to raise crucial questions about the rightness of waging war on an abstract concept of ‘terror’ that exists forever in potential and about the justification of the state’s recourse to counter-terrorism legislation that seeks to criminalise not just terroristic practices but also radical thought. The article is shaped by postcolonial and ethical approaches to narrative and readings drawn Michel Foucault and Judith Butler.