CFP: South Asian Literature and 9/11
India
Organization: Panjab University and Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi
Call for abstracts: South Asian Literature and 9/11
The global order has been seldom reshaped by events as profoundly as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. More than being a tragic episode for US history, 9/11 was also a catalytic global event. This event readjusted the way international security paradigms were defined and enacted, creating and normalising emergency exceptionalisms (Agamben, Hodgson, Pease, Kaplan and Pease). 9/11 also exacerbated political polarisation reinforcing a rhetoric steeped in colonial binaries and set in motion a prolonged and far-reaching “War on Terror”, affecting spatiotemporal and linguistic sites as contentious as well (Kaplan “Where is” “Violent Belongings”, Jackson “Security”, Kellner, Shapiro). Language was sought to be redefined with terms like 9/11, terror, ground zero, homeland, among others creating new semiotic registers.
While the immediate focal point for this redefinition of the global order and security paradigms was meant to be the United States (Gray, Patman), the geopolitical reverberations of the events set in motion in the wake of 9/11 were acutely felt across the rest of the world as well (Walt). With globalisation and the global circulation of capital, the interconnectedness of the world ensured that other countries besides the US were also impacted: by terrorist events, but also by the repercussions of the global War on Terror (Hartig and Doherty).
Among the regions most significantly impacted was South Asia. Although the effects of terrorism in South Asia predate 9/11, the attacks served as a defining moment that reoriented global attention and power structures, making the region a crucial geopolitical site where power and politics of the war on terror played out in various ways. Globalisation had meant that the region became a key economic player in geopolitics (McCoy). Additionally, the post-9/11 narrative and the positioning of several SAARC countries as key players in the war on terror also impacted the everyday lives of various countries in that region. The discursive production of the post-9/11 security state too had a profound impact on the large South Asian diasporic community spread globally and its negotiation of hybrid identities.
South Asia’s geopolitical landscape with its historical complexities, of conflict and militancy but also its vibrant democratic traditions, rich cultural diversity and local non-aligned governmental policies, alongside the region’s literary heritage, which predates the West and still holds its own in the modern and contemporary world, makes it a uniquely influential site for examining the influences of global power shifts, literary and cultural discourse and politics. It was also clear that the emerging process of securitisation (of the communities, states, regions) was embedded in insecurity (Kaplan “Homeland Insecurities”, McClintock). This coupling of state governmentality and paranoiac aesthetics also defined the cultural as well as political texts.
Not only was 9/11’s aftermath and state policy narrativised as if out of a fictional world, fiction in the US was also used as ideological state apparatus. Literature after 9/11 became a definitive epoch in itself (Kenniston and Quin, Gray). Even in South Asia, the effect of this aspect of paranoid aesthetics and politics was strongly felt. Thus were produced (in)secure fictions, the poetics and politics of security and insecurity, all condensed and coalesced in multiple ways. The politics of the war on terror in the Euro-US realm has been rightly read as one of narrativising the WTC atrocity (Jackson “The 9/11 attacks”). The narratives and fictions deployed by discourses in South Asia remain under researched when discussing 9/11 (Langah).
While 9/11 led to a universal shift in the security paradigms, this universal impulse often also flattened the plurality of global histories, events, and cultural contexts, the specific contours of which terms like “terror” and “terrorism” had long been framed and translated within. When framed within such a securitized and ideologically charged political landscape, “terrorism” circulated as a politically saturated, ahistorical, fixed category whose meaning was overdetermined by dominant ideological narratives as it resisted contextualisation operating as an “untranslatable” (Apter). This discursive reframing reflects in the permeation of Islamophobic and xenophobic rhetoric across communities and policies not only in Europe and North America but also within South Asia, further deepening cycles of communal exclusion that reenact colonial legacies and binaries. South Asia, in this context, offers a unique insight into the geopolitical and linguistic narrativizing of “terror” post-9/11, which often relies on and redefines categories like “fundamentalism,” “jihad”, “radicalism” while also leading to a mediatization of violence into a spectacle devoid of its specific context and impact. South Asian fiction, poetry and other literary expressions also offer a crucial counter-narrative to such discourse by exploring and deconstructing the continuing repercussions of racial profiling, surveillance, and securitization also by reinventing, translating and adapting their language, forms and poetics to this new reality. The role of fiction, poetry and other literary expressions in South Asia in this context remains under-explored.
This call for papers for a special issue seeks to undertake an exploration of literary, cinematic, and cultural texts produced during 2000-2020—within South Asia as well as its far reaching diaspora—with the WTC atrocity and the coming of the COVID-19 pandemic as two bookends of a definitive era. The crisis marked by “the new normal” of 9/11, including the discourses of (in)security, xenophobia and exclusion, were further exacerbated by the normalisation of these practices of exclusion in the COVID-19 pandemic.
The geopolitics alongside the aesthetic politics of South Asia and its diaspora, especially in times of crisis and intensified global scrutiny and securitisation, demands a thorough engagement with a newly emergent field of the impact of 9/11 on South Asia. The cultural imperialism of the US as well as the colonial legacies of South Asia have already been established as linked in a globalised world (Kaplan and Pease, Appudarai, Said). Further, the logic of (in)security with the privatisation of war and the entanglement of global capital further highlight the need to examine American Studies and postcolonialism directly.
While language had already been instrumentalised for political objectives, literary language, literature, and cinema too played important roles. Literature and cinema are always seen as a field of reflection and interrogation of the sociopolitical events of its time. This project is to ask how literature shapes the social fabric after 9/11 and is also in turn shaped by it. Through this project, we aim to understand the following:
How does literature in South Asia, especially in its formal elements, shape and is shaped by the discourses of 9/11 and the discourses of (in)securitisation?
How does the shifting geopolitical terrain and the changes in everyday life of communities affect the SAARC and diasporic literary landscape?
How does the literature of the diaspora, particularly diasporic poetry, have political implications that go far beyond the South Asian or the Euro-American region?
How do South Asian literary forms and literary fictions represent, negotiate and challenge the narratives of the (in)secure ?
How does the experience of trauma and violence on and by (in)secure communities transform literary aesthetics? What form of ‘grievability’ (Butler) can be understood through literature that policy needs to take into account?
How do representations of terror, as a lived experience and as a literary metaphor, in South Asian literature change in response to 9/11 and its aftermath?
How are questions of identity, home, belonging reframed by 9/11 in South Asian diasporic writing, cinema and other forms of aesthetic expression?
How does South Asian literature address questions of surveillance, religious and ethnic profiling, migration and linguistic registers of “otherness” after 9/11?
How does South Asian literature navigate collective grief, ‘grievability’ (Butler), history and memory alongside hope, reconciliation and futurity in the years between 9/11 and the COVID-19 pandemic?
How do gender, caste, class and religion inform the portrayal of dominant discourses of (in)security?
350-500-word abstracts for proposed 7000-9000-word chapters (including notes and bibliography) addressing one or more of the above themes, are solicited for a special issue by Dr Swatie (Panjab University, Chandigarh, India) and Dr Wafa Hamid (Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India). Please send abstracts in a .docx file by email to the editors at southasia.research2@gmail.com latest by 1st November 2025. (The issue is under consideration to be published in a reputed SCOPUS Q1 journal).
Work Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell, University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton University Press, 2006.
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? Verso, 2009.
Gray, Richard. After the Fall: American Literature since 9/11. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011
Hartig, H., and C. Doherty. "Two Decades Later, the Enduring Legacy of 9/11." Pew Research Center, 2 Sept. 2021, www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/09/02/two-decades-later-the-enduring-legacy-of-9-11/.
Hodgson, Godfrey. The Myth of American Exceptionalism. Yale University Press, 2010.
Jackson, Richard. “Security, Democracy, and the Rhetoric of Counter-Terrorism.” Democracy and Security, vol. 1, no. 2, 2005, pp. 147–71.
—. "The 9/11 Attacks and the Social Construction of a National Narrative." The Impact of 9/11 on the Media, Arts, and Entertainment: The Day that Changed Everything?, edited by M.J. Morgan, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009,
Kaplan, Amy. “Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, October 17, 2003.” American Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 1, 2004, pp. 1–18.
—.. "Homeland Insecurities: Some Reflections on Language and Space." Radical History Review, vol. 2003, 2003, p. 82-93.
Kaplan, Amy, and Donald E. Pease, editors. Cultures of United States Imperialism. Duke University Press, 1994
Kellner, Douglas. “Bushspeak and the Politics of Lying: Presidential Rhetoric in the ‘War on Terror.’” Presidential Studies Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 4, 2007, pp. 622–45. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27552281.
Kenniston, Ann and Joanne F. Quinn. Literature after 9/11. Routledge, 2013.
Langah, N. Taj, editor. Literary and Non-Literary Responses Towards 9/11: South Asia and Beyond. Routledge, 2019.
McClintock, Anne. "Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib."Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, vol. 13, no. 1, 2009, pp. 50-74
Patman, Robert G. “Globalisation, the New US Exceptionalism and the War on Terror.” Third World Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 6, 2006, pp. 963–86.
Pease, Donald E. The New American Exceptionalism. University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Shapiro, Michael J. “The New Violent Cartography.” Security Dialogue, vol. 38, no. 3, 2007, pp. 291–313.
Walt, Stephen M. “Beyond Bin Laden: Reshaping U.S. Foreign Policy.” International Security, vol. 26, no. 3, 2001, pp. 56–78. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3092089.
Swatie