29 - The 9/11 of Our Imaginations: Islam, the Figure of the Muslim, and the Failed Liberalism of the Racial Present

Summary

The template for the great American novel for many of the writers of the post-9/11 era is drawn from a number of sources. The narrative of deportations and disappearances, which became a central aspect of the Bush-era domestic War on Terror, frames how racism is constructed and understood in the violence of state terror and policing. Islam is at best described in terms of typologies, and practicing Muslims are caricatured as conservative automatons without agency or complexity. Naming an external enemy to the US nation as the bad Muslim constructed as foreign and marginal is also the central reasoning of the racialization of Muslims in US popular culture. To speak of self-defense and self-determination in the Muslim world from the perspective of the US security state is to utter a terrorist discourse instead of an anticolonial or decolonial critique. The ambiguity around critiquing racism stems from a subterfuge of ideological valuation that imagines the racialized Muslim as less than human.