Muslim Otherness in Post-9/11 Novels A postcolonial outlook on the fictional representation of Muslim otherness in post 9/11 novels.

2020

Master´s thesis in English (EN501) The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001,led many Americans to vilify Muslims and Islam. Indeed, 9/11 bequeathed to the U.S. a new category of evil other, a decade and more after the “evil empire” of the USSR had been vanquished, and the cold war concluded. This thesis will investigate how this new other is represented in three post-9/11 novels, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2011),and H. M. Naqvi’s Home Boy (2010). These novels will be examined partly through the lens of postcolonial theory, as represented by Edward Said, Mohammad Samiei,and Robert Young. This thesis will demonstrate how the selected n…