Afterword

Summary

It was a genuine honour to be invited to give a keynote lecture at ‘The Figure of the Terrorist in Literature, Film and Media’, the November 2019 conference in Zurich out of which this wonderful volume has arisen. It is an even greater privilege to be asked to write the afterword to this exceptionally interesting and insightful collection of papers, especially as I feel that I am the least qualified in the subject of all the contributors and there are many other more eminent scholars who could have been given the task instead. Unlike all the contributors to this superb collection, I have no legitimate expertise in literary studies or media studies. I trained in political science and international relations, and only came to the subject of terrorism in literature by happenstance.

In the following pages, I want to reflect briefly on some of the insights I have gained from this truly interesting, thoughtful and engaging collection of papers, in part through the prism of how and why I came to be interested in the figure of the terrorist, and how my concerns have changed since the terrorist attack on my home city of Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019. I commend this volume as a highly stimulating, rigorous and genuinely insightful addition to the growing literature on representations of terrorism in literature and visual media, and a major contribution to our understanding of the subject.

The Figure of the Terrorist

One day, somewhere around 2008, I was searching for a novel or film about terrorism which I could recommend to my students as a way of supplementing the academic books and articles I was making them read as part of a course. As a teacher, I had discovered that a good novel or movie could sometimes engage students and bring topics to life in ways that generally turgid, scientific academic writing could not. In this instance, however, when I thought about the many terrorism-related novels I had read, I realised that I could not think of a single example which I felt represented terrorism or terrorists in a realistic or credible way. That is, I could not recall any novel that told a story in which the terrorist protagonist had a believable psychology, motivation, history or characteristics, or any genuinely understandable reasons for what they did (Jackson 2015a; Jackson 2018).