Cloning Terror in David Blacker’s A Cause Untrue

Résumé

Seismologists have scientific tools at their disposal to indicate the magnitude of earthquakes as well as calculate their epicentres. 9/11 ranks high on the Richter scale with its shockwaves felt around the world, particularly in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq which have never fully recovered from their after-effect. While some conspiracy theorists or ‘truthers’ dispute the mainstream account of the 9/11 attacks of 2001 or suggest that the collapse of the Twin Towers was a CIA cover-up, most analysts recognise that 9/11 had a momentous impact on the American psyche and geopolitics. The convulsions and aftershocks of the WTC attack have generated a proliferation of 9/11 literature, films, artworks, and theoretical texts.
My article explores the ramifications between local and global terror in David Blacker’s novel, A Cause Untrue, which is set in the Sri Lankan civil war between the Sinhalese Buddhist majority and the predominantly Hindu Tamil separatists. Using Foucault and Agamben’s concept of biopower and Mbembe’s necropolitics, I argue that State agencies and terrorist networks deploy similar demonisation discourse and use similar strategies to sustain the war and legitimise further acts of terror.