The terrorist figure in 9/11 fiction misrepresenting muslims, arabs and middle easterners

Resumen

There is a discursive way of coming to terms with the terrorists responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001, which has emerged as the predominant course of action in the US. This mode of discourse is supported by governmental institutions, the mainstream media, and especially by those who have re-visited and re-created the event through fiction, that is, novelists, film directors, TV scriptwriters, cartoonists, etc. It can appear in different guises, the most common one being those demonizing discourses in which the 9/11 terrorists are presented as the quintessentially ¿evil¿ personification of irrationality and hatred. These representations of the terrorists give space to another much more dangerous rhetoric: those generalizing discourses in which a new identity label that emerged after 9/11 ¿ a religious, racial, and ethnic mix merely based on physical appearance and conformed by Muslims, Arabs, Middle Easterners, and whoever looks like Muslim, Arab, or from the Middle East ¿ becomes the constructed object of both suspicion and retaliation. Moreover, certain ¿hystoerical¿ contextualizations of the event have taken place, which, obsessed with memorializing the 9/11 date, reformulated contemporary history in Dickensonian terms like ¿everything has changed, nothing has changed¿ while neglecting to specify ¿for whom¿ it has changed, and more importantly, ¿for whom it has not.¿ This project analyzes how some US 9/11 fictional works ¿ novels, films, TV series, short stories, and comics ¿ have rewritten the historic event of 9/11 under these ideological limitations.