9/11 and the Muslim presentation as the "Other" in American and Canadian Fiction

Document from the year 2017 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, University of Marburg, language: English, abstract: 9/11 novels, post-9/11 novels and Ground Zero Fiction which have a literary closeness of this day suddenly picked up the former colonial concepts of 'Other' and 'Otherness' or 'Center and Periphery' and set them in a context of a shifting, multicultural American population with the task to suddenly re-imagine this 'Other', a task which has hardly been dealt with and if so only on the surface. To do so is a difficult task since this has to be done from a Western perspective and in the light that this 'Other' here is attached to Islam or Muslims. The literary presentation of the 'Other' as a Muslim remains a painful step since it also has to examine the ways in which knowledge is manipulated by dominant Western and Muslim discourses but it helps to bring in new energy into the postcolonial discourse being shaped by critics such as Said, Spivak or Foucault. Thus fiction related to 9/11 must not only stay on the level of shock or individual or collective trauma it can also be seen as a starting point for new cultural and critical debates how to deal and write about the terror attacks of that day and how to see the Muslim as the 'Other' in a more objective light. How this can be done will be one central part of this book which starts with a general remark of Muslim writing before and after 9/11 and a short reflection of different types of novels dealing with it. A next step lies in the task to critically reflect the presentation of Muslims in 9/11 fiction in the USA and Canada. This will be followed by an analysis of parameters typical for Muslim existence. A closer analysis will then be followed by three novels dealing with matters of 'Otherness', The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), Cockroach (2008) and Atta (2011). The final step then will be to give an outlook of the matter discussed here. The choice of the three novels analyzed here followed one basic principle namely that all selected authors are male and dispose of a different cultural and religious background with Islam as the common glue. [...]