ایرج سلیمان جهان

This study seeks to delineate the representation of post-9/11 in Iraq through employing a range of ideas and conceptions from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s formulation of Empire to Agamben’s theorization of the state of exception so as to reveal the real cause of the US invasion of Iraq, the real significance of fundamentalism which arose in the wake of the violence resulting from the invasion, and the resistance role that fundamentalism played in Iraq. The study seeks to demonstrate how Islamophobia, terrorism, fundamentalism, and Empire are inextricably intertwined and the way they are represented in Inaam Kachachi’s The American Granddaughter. The findings of the study reveal the fact that the main intentions of the invasion arise out of the Empire’s attempts to spread its supranational sovereignty to the entire world, along the way giving rise to fundamentalism, which stands as the antithesis of the Empire and which does not have anything to do with going back to the roots of Islam but rather serves the losers of the process of globalization as the means through which they can contest its winners. The novel, thus, is an attempt at giving a narrative mode to the events that led to the fundamentalist renaissance in Iraq as a form of postcolonial confrontation and indicating how fundamentalism has been a form of resistance.

This study attempts to examine Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in the light of the ideas of Michel Foucault, specifically the notions of normalization, institutions, and surveillance that tackle the relationships among power, institutions, and literature. The analysis posits that, in the context of the 1960s, the American government took advantage of all the institutions which were supposed to guarantee the freedom of individuals to curtail their freedom. Seeking to create a normal, ordinary, and homogeneous society, these administrations have employed the police, law, prison, and other overlapping institutions that work in tandem to create circuits of institutions which guarantee to reduce  human beings to simpletons who are docile, meek, and ready to fit in place properly. The normality and ordinariness favored by the authorities are also implemented since the novel starts by depicting free individuals whose identities hinge on their being abnormal while it ends when their movement is shattered, and the protagonist is seen as a simpleton serving the forced labor sentence of the judges of both the government and normality. Freedom emerges as a mirage than truth as there seems to be no outside through which individuals can live outside the domination of controlling apparatuses.