Conference outline

In their pioneering 1996 study Terror and Taboo, cultural anthropologists Joseba Zulaika and William Douglass point out a curious paradox in the contemporary preoccupation – or, rather, obsession – with terrorism: whereas the topic of terrorism has been ubiquitous in Western public discourse since the late twentieth century, the voices of terrorists themselves are usually silenced. Zulaika and Douglass explain this by suggesting that the terrorist is “the paradigm of inhuman bestiality, the quintessential proscribed or tabooed figure of our times” (1996: 6).

To say that there is such a thing as a “terrorism taboo” (Jackson 2015: 320) is not to say that terrorism is not talked about. Quite the opposite is true: quoting Michel Foucault’s well-known phrase, we may, in fact, speak of a “veritable discursive explosion” (1978: 17) surrounding the subject of terror, which the events of 11 September 2001 have propelled to the forefront of political action and media attention. What is taboo, then, is not the topic of terrorism as such; it is the political subjectivity of the perpetrator of terrorism, for “the very attempt to ‘know’ how the terrorist thinks or lives can be deemed an abomination” (Zulaika and Douglass 1996: 149).

According to political scientist Richard Jackson, the tabooing of terrorists not only affects debates about actual perpetrators of politically motivated violence, but also fictional representations in literature and film, where terrorists tend to be “dehumanized, demonized, and most importantly, depoliticized” (2018: 382). Indeed, Hollywood action films characteristically deploy the figure of the terrorist as a disposable villain, whose motives remain obscure and whose elimination at the hands of the white male hero serves to affirm the respective period’s political, social and cultural status quo (Vanhala 2011, 296–98). Unsurprisingly, the cinematic engagement with terrorism turns out to be rather more complex and multifaceted if we move beyond the narrow genre of the Hollywood action blockbuster. Yet, Tony Shaw’s Global History of Terrorism on Film still comes to the conclusion that the issue is depoliticized in the majority of films (2015: 205).

Does this mean that the “‘condemnation imperative’” (Hage 2003: 68) to which terrorism is subjected ultimately precludes an empathetic identification with the perpetrator and his or her agenda? As Tim Gauthier notes in a recent discussion of fictional approaches to the 9/11 hijackers, such identification would require an acknowledgment of the terrorists’ own sense of victimization and a framing of their violence as “serving altruistic purposes” (2015: 164) – a perspective invariably denied to the reader, as novelists shy away from any appearance of condoning terrorism.

Taken together, the (surprisingly few) existing studies on the portrayal of terrorists thus seem to confirm the tenets of Jackson’s pessimistic diagnosis that:

“In all the thousands of popular and literary novels, all the newspaper columns and news reports, all the movies and television shows and even in many academic books and articles, terrorists are virtually always depicted in stereotypical terms and as caricatures of what we imagine terrorists to be – fanatical, extremist, aggressive, hateful, dysfunctional, damaged” (2015: 319).

Using this sweeping – and deliberately provocative – statement as a starting point, the international conference The Figure of the Terrorist will be the first to approach the “tabooing” of the terrorist from an interdisciplinary and historically comparative perspective.

Works Cited

Foucault, Michel. 1978 [1976]. The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books.

Gauthier, Tim. 2015. 9/ 11 Fiction, Empathy, and Othemess. Lanham, Boulder, New York, and London: Lexington Books.

Hage, Ghassan. 2003. “‘Comes a Time We Are All Enthusiasm’: Understanding Palestinian Suicide Bombers in times of Exigophobia.” Public Culture 15:1, 65–89.

Jackson, Richard. 2015 [2014]. Afterword to Confessions of a Terrorist, 317–22. London: Zed Books.

———. 2018. “Sympathy for the Devil: Evil, Taboo, and the Terrorist Figure in Literature.” In Terrorism and Literature, edited by Peter C. Herman, 377–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Shaw, Tony. 2015. Cinematic Terror: A Global History of Terrorism on Film. New York: Bloomsbury.

Vanhala, Helena. 2011. The Depiction of Terrorists in Blockbuster Hollywood Films, 1980–2001: An Analytical Study. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company.

Zulaika, Joseba, and William A. Douglass. 1996. Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables, and Faces of Terrorism. New York: Routledge.