Thinking Past 'Post-9/11'

This book offers new ways of constellating the literary and cinematic delineations of Indian and Pakistani Muslim diasporic and migrant trajectories narrated in the two decades after the 9/11 attacks. Focusing on four Pakistani English novels and four Indian Hindi films, it examines the aesthetic complexities of staging the historical nexus of global conflicts and unravels the multiple layers of discourses underlying the notions of diaspora, citizenship, nation and home. It scrutinises the "flirtatious" nature of transnational desires and their role in building glocal safety valves for inclusion and archiving a planetary vision of trauma. It also provides a fresh perspective on the role of Pakistani English novels and mainstream Hindi films in tracing the multiple origins and shifts in national xenophobic practices, and negotiating multiple modalities of political and cultural belonging. It discusses various books and films including The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Burnt Shadows, My Name is Khan, New York, Exit West, Home Fire, AirLift and Tiger Zinda Hai. In light of the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 attacks, current debates on terror, war, paranoid national imaginaries and the suspicion towards migratory movements of refugees, this book makes a significant contribution to the interdisciplinary debates on border controls and human precarity. A crucial work in transnational and diaspora criticism, it will be of great interest to researchers of literature and culture studies, media studies, politics, film studies, and South Asian studies.

Jayana Jain is a postdoctoral researcher in the ONLINERPOL project at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. Her research and teaching interests include diaspora and migration studies, South Asian literary and visual cultures, gender and disability studies, digital politics and media studies. She has been awarded the European Union's Marie Curie Fellowship and DAAD scholarship to conduct research on South Asian diasporas and migrants. She has also served as a lecturer of English and postcolonial studies at the University of Münster, Germany.

Introduction Part I - Framing the Nexus: The Prism of 9/11 1. Thinking Diaspora, (De) Constructing Nation, Home and Identity 2. Surveying South Asian Diasporic Texts and Contexts through the Prism of '9/11' Part II - Exploring the Nexus: The First Decade after 9/11 3. How did it come to this? Reconfiguring Borders in The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Burnt Shadows 4. Post-9/11 Diasporic Anxieties in New York and My Name is Khan Part III - Expanding the Nexus: The Second Decade after 9/11 5. Thinking Past 'Post-9/11', The Discourse of Insecurity in Exit West and Home Fire 6. Long-Distance Nationalisms and Populist Politics in in AirLift and Tiger Zinda Hai Conclusion