The Figure of the Terrorist in Literature and Visual Culture

The contemporary preoccupation with terrorism is marked by a curious paradox: whereas the topic has been ubiquitous in public discourse since the late twentieth century, the voices of terrorists themselves are usually silenced. Is the terrorist “the quintessential proscribed or tabooed figure of our times”, as cultural anthropologists Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass have suggested? The present volume is the first to approach the tabooing of terrorists from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective. Covering a broad geographical scope, it explores how different media forms (such as novels, fiction and non-fiction films, or comic books) frame and make sense of the figure of the terrorist: do they reinforce the terrorism taboo, or do they find ways of circumventing it? Each contribution asks how factors such as ideological agenda, religious identity, ethnicity, and gender impact the way the perpetrators of political violence are conceived in different historical moments and cultural contexts.