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When Person Becomes Problem

Terrorist fiction or political fiction? Why is Ian Fleming’s James Bond an international spy and Mohsin Hamid’s Riz Ahmed a possible terrorist? How novels are placed in genres and named by critics and educators affects the perception of the texts and in some cases may force the reader’s perspective concerning heroism and villains in the works. This essay explores how cross-disciplinary violence theories such as those of Hannah Arendt, Arjun Appadurai, Martha Nussbaum, and Cathy Caruth may be applied to contemporary South Asian fiction to bring out the ambiguities between innocence and guilt, hero and villain, and terrorist and political protestor. Karan Mahajan’s 2016 novel The Association of Small Bombs is used as the touchpoint to ground these discussions of genre, theory, and the storytelling that coincides with acts of terrorist violence. Postcolonialism is stretched beyond discussions of former colonizers and colonized to the greater degrees of complication in acts of political violence where the nation and global trajectories of power become the targets of critique and human lives the force and fodder for disruption as a creative force. This essay reads in the fiction and theory individual lives as symbols for communities, political collectives, and the monolithic forces of militaries and markets. Both victims and perpetrators are made abstract, the bodily becoming poetic and political. Ultimately, the problem referenced in this essay’s title is found to be not the perpetrators of violence, but the assumption of an Us–Them philosophy which is applied to characters, authors, and individual works in the construction of “terrorist fiction” as a genre and the recent international state of violence to which these fictional works speak.