Rewriting Terror: the 9/11 Terrorists in American Fiction

There is a way of discursively conceiving the terrorists responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001, which has been imposed in the US as the normal procedure because it is backed by government institutions, the mainstream media and by most novelists, film directors, television series writers and cartoonists who have re-visited and re-created the historical event of 9/11 through fiction. This ideological collusion can take on different appearances: demonizing speeches, in which 9/11 terrorists are represented as the quintessential "evil" or the living image of irrationality and hatred; generalizing speeches, in which a new identity label emerged after 9/11 -a mixture of race, ethnicity and religion based purely on the physical aspect and formed by Arabs, Muslims, people from the Middle East and everyone who is "Look like"- she is turned into a cursed object of suspicion and retaliation; and lastly, “historical” contextualizations of the event, which obsessed with commemorating the date of 9/11 reformulate contemporary history in the Dickensian terms of “everything has changed, nothing has changed”, without specifying “for whom” has changed, and what is more important, "for whom not". This book looks at how some American works of fiction -novels, movies, television series, short stories, and comics- have rewritten the 9/11 historical event under the constraints of ideological dictates.