John Updike, one of America’s avant-garde novelists, is one of those who have fictionalized the post-9/11 atmosphere and consequences in his 22nd novel, Terrorist. By means of employing a Muslim American teenager as the main character, the Muslim other in Terrorist has been characterized within the post-9/11 geopolitical context of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. This paper sets out to address Terrorist’s exemplifications of geography of these Muslim countries and situate them within post-9/11 geopolitical and colonial contexts. Colonial shadows are the inferences and insinuations where colonial acts and conditions are justified, vindicated and normalized either through the narrative’s representation of Muslims or via demonstrating pertaining geographies. By illustrating the narrative’s colonial shadows, this paper aims at fathoming and expounding the overt and covert colonial implications and associations between the narrative and colonized topographies. In Terrorist, Palestinians are represented in connection with violence and terrorism in comparison with the non-violent Israelis in order to vindicate the Israeli colonial standing in Palestine. Also, American colonial wars on Iraq and Afghanistan are shown as benign and justified self-defense acts.
Alosman, M. I. M., Mydin. M. R., & Hashim, R. S. (2018). Differentiation and imperfectionality in John Updike’s Terrorist. 3L: Language, Linguistics, Literature, 24(2), 58-70.
Arif, M. S., & Ahmad, M. (2016). Exploring John Updike’s Terrorist as a neo-Orientalist narrative of the Arabo-’Islamic’ world. Journal of Advances in Humanities, 4(5), 554-561.
Asher, L. (2006). John Updike at the New York Public Library. Literary Kicks. Retrieved from http://www.litkicks.com/UpdikeNYPL
Begley, A. (2014). Updike. Harper: New York.
Duvall, N. (2008). Introduction. In N. Duvall (Ed.), Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo (pp. 1-10). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Feldman, A. (2004). Ground Zero Point One: On the cinematics of history. In B. Kapferer (Ed.), The World Trade Center and Global Crisis: Some Critical Perspectives (pp. 26-36). New York: Berghahn Books.
Gafaïti, H. (2008). “Hyperculturization” after September 11: The Arab-Muslim world and the West. SubStance, 37(1), 98-117.
Gamal, A. (2011). “Encounters with strangeness” in the post-9/11 novel. Teaching American Literature, 4(4), 50-76.
Gregory, D. )2004(. The Colonial Present. Oxford: Blackwell.
Herman, P. (2015). Terrorism and the critique of American culture: John Updike’s Terrorist. Modern Philology, 112(4), 691-712.
Kalin, I. (2004). Roots of misconception: Euro-American perceptions of Islam before and after September 11. In J. E. B. Lumbard (Ed.), Islam, Fundamentalism, and the Betrayal of Tradition, Revised and Expanded: Essays by Western Muslim Scholars (pp. 143-187). Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom Inc.
Kumar. D. (2007). Islam and Islamophobia. International Socialist Review. Retrieved from http://www.isreview.org/issues/52/islamophobia.shtml
Kumar, M. P. (2012). Orientalism(s) after 9/11. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 48(3), 233-240.
Maira, S. (2009). “Good” and “bad” Muslim citizens: feminists, terrorists, and U.S. Orientalisms. Feminist Studies, 35(3), 631-656.
Manqoush, R., Yusof N., & Hashim, R. S. (2011). The use of historical allusion in recent American and Arab fiction. GEMA Online Journal of Language Studies, 11(1), 57-68.
Manqoush, R. A., Hashim, R. S., & Yusof, N. M. (2014). Metatextuality of transnational marriages in Updike’s Terrorist. International Journal of Literature and Arts, 2(1), 10-15.
Mansutti, P. (2012). Trauma and beyond: Ethical and cultural constructions of 9/11 in American fiction. Ph.D. diss., University of Waterloo, Canada.
Mirzayee, M., Royanian, S., & Shabanirad, E. (2017). September 11 and the outbreak of neo-Orientalism in John Updike’s Terrorist. World Scientific News, 86(3), 226-241.
Said, E. W. (1979). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
Said, E. W. (1985). Orientalism reconsidered. Cultural Critique, 1(Autumn), 89-107.
Said, E. W. (1994). Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books.
Said, E. W. (2001). Islam and the West are inadequate banners. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/16/september11.terrorism3
Salehnia, M. (2012). Political Zionism and fiction: A study of John Updike's Terrorist. Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 3(3), 484-488.
Schiff, J. (2013). John Updike. In T. Parrish (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to American Novelists (pp. 250-259). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Semati, M. (2010). Islamophobia, culture and race in the age of empire. Cultural Studies, 24(2), 256- 275.
Smith, A. (2006). Heteropatriarchy and the three pillars of white supremacy: Rethinking women of color organizing. In INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (Eds.), Color of Violence (pp. 66- 73). Cambridge, Massachusetts: South End Press.
Spivak, G. C. (2004). Terror: A speech after 9-11. Boundary 2, 31(2), 81-111.
Updike, J. (2006). Terrorist. New York: Penguin.
Zaidan, M. N. (2009). The image of Islam in John Updike’s Terrorist and The Coup. M.A. thesis. University of Jordan, Jordan.
Žižek, S. (2002). Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London:
In-Text Citation: (Alosman, Raihanah, & Hashim, 2019)
To Cite this Article: Alosman, M. I. M., Raihanah, M. M., & Hashim, R. S. (2019). Colonial Shadows in John Updike’s Terrorist. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 9(1), 1–17.
Copyright: © 2018 The Author(s)
Published by Human Resource Management Academic Research Society (www.hrmars.com)
This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this license may be seen at: http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
