Table Of ContentTerror and Counter-Terror in
’
Contemporary British Children s
Literature
The widespread threat of terrorist and counter-terrorist violence in the
twenty-first century has created a globalized context for social interactions,
transforming the ways in which young people relate to the world around
them and to one another. This is the first study that reads post-9/11 and 7/7
British writing for the young as a response to this contemporary predica-
ment, exploring how children’s writers find the means to express the local
conditions and different facets of the global wars around terror. The texts
examined in this book reveal a preoccupation with overcoming various
forms of violence and prejudice faced by certain groups within post-terror
Britain, as well as a concern with mapping out their social relations with
other groups, and those concerns are set against the recurring themes of
racist paranoia, anti-immigrant hostility, politicized identities, and growing
up in countries transformed by the effects of terror and counter-terror. The
book concentrates on the relationship between postcolonial and critical race
studies, Britain’s colonial legacy, and literary representations of terrorism,
tracingthematicandformalsimilaritiesinthenovelsofbothestablishedand
emerging children’s writers such as Elizabeth Laird, Sumia Sukkar, Alan
Gibbons, Muhammad Khan, Bali Rai, Nikesh Shukla, Malorie Blackman,
Claire McFall, Miriam Halahmy, and Sita Brahmachari. In doing so, this
study maps new connections for scholars, students, and readers of con-
temporary children’s fiction who are interested in how such writing addres-
ses some of the most pressing issues affecting us today, including survival
after terror, migration, and community building.
Blanka Grzegorczyk teaches at the University of Cambridge and Manchester
Metropolitan University. She is the author of Discourses of Postcolonialism
in Contemporary British Children’s Literature (2015).
Children’s Literature and Culture
Founding Series Editor: Jack Zipes
Current Series Editors: Kenneth Kidd and Elizabeth Marshall
Postcolonial Approaches to Latin American Children’s Literature
Ann González
‘The Right Thing to Read’
A History of Australian Girl-Readers, 1910-1960
Bronwyn Lowe
Battling Girlhood
Sympathy, Social Justice and the Tomboy Figure in American Literature
Kristen B. Proehl
Cyborg Saints
Religion and Posthumanism in Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction
Carissa Turner Smith
Out of Reach
The Ideal Girl in American Girls’ Serial Literature
Kate G. Harper
The Arctic in Literature for Children and Young Adults
Edited by Heidi Hansson, Maria Lindgren Leavenworth and
Anka Ryall
Terror and Counter-Terror in Contemporary British Children’s Literature
Blanka Grzegorczyk
ChicaNerds in Chicana Young Adult Literature
Brown and Nerdy
Cristina Herrera
Terror and Counter-Terror in
Contemporary British
’
Children s Literature
Blanka Grzegorczyk
Firstpublished2020
byRoutledge
52VanderbiltAvenue,NewYork,NY10017
andbyRoutledge
2ParkSquare,MiltonPark,Abingdon,OxonOX144RN
RoutledgeisanimprintoftheTaylor&FrancisGroup,aninforma
business
©2020Taylor&Francis
TherightofBlankaGrzegorczyktobeidentifiedasauthorofthiswork
hasbeenassertedbyherinaccordancewithsections77and78ofthe
Copyright,DesignsandPatentsAct1988.
Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthisbookmaybereprintedorreproduced
orutilisedinanyformorbyanyelectronic,mechanical,orothermeans,
nowknownorhereafterinvented,includingphotocopyingandrecording,
orinanyinformationstorageorretrievalsystem,withoutpermissionin
writingfromthepublishers.
Trademarknotice:Productorcorporatenamesmaybetrademarksor
registeredtrademarks,andareusedonlyforidentificationand
explanationwithoutintenttoinfringe.
LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData
Acatalogrecordforthistitlehasbeenrequested
ISBN:978-1-138-50174-4(hbk)
ISBN:978-1-315-14454-2(ebk)
TypesetinSabon
byTaylor&FrancisBooks
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction: Literature, Children, and the Wars around Terror 1
1 Unhealed Wounds 12
2 Precarious Lives 36
3 Subcultural Spaces 64
4 The Reluctant Terrorist 85
5 At Home in Wonderland 106
Conclusion: A Score for Stories of Compassion and Solidarity 129
Index 137
Acknowledgements
MysincerethankstoKennethKiddandElizabethMarshallfortheirsupport
and direction throughout, and to the editorial and publishing teams at
Routledge, with whom it is always a real pleasure to work.
To those who made possible, productive, and joyful my years as a chil-
dren’s literature scholar in Cambridge, and who welcomed me into their
faculties, departments, colleges, and homes: Farah Mendlesohn, Edward
James, Zoe Jaques, Maria Nikolajeva, David Whitley, Georgie Horrell,
Eugene Giddens, Tory Young, Jeannette Baxter, and Alex Houen.
I should also like to acknowledge the support and interest in my research
shown by Manchester Metropolitan University’s Department of English,
Centre for Creative Writing, English Literature and Linguistics, and Centre
for Youth Studies, in particular Berthold Schoene, Jess Edwards, Antony
Rowland, Paul Wake, Hannah Smithson, Paul Giladi, Kaye Tew, Chloé
Germaine Buckley, Alex Wheatle, and Livi Michael.
Manythankstoallmywonderfulandinquisitivestudents,pastorpresent,
whosequestionscastnewlightonsomeoftheideasinformingthisstudy.
Warmthanksforvariouskindsofhelp,guidance,andinspirationoverthe
past many years to Bernd-Peter Lange, the much missed Justyna Kociatkie-
wicz, Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Elaine Horyza, and Maciej Masłowski.
Asever,hugethankstomyfamily,andespeciallytomyhusband,mother,
and cats, for their understanding, moral support, and encouragement, and
forkeepingmegrounded, strong,andfedwhenthechaptersherewerebeing
written and edited.
Finally,Iamgratefultohavereceivedpermissionstoincluderevisedversions
of articles previouslypublishedelsewhere.Chapter 2 is derived inpart from an
article published as “A Trojan Horse of a Different Color: Counter-Terrorism
and Islamophobia in Alan Gibbons’s An Act of Love and Anna Perera’s
Guantanamo Boy” in Critical Studies on Terrorism 11:1 (2018), and Chapter 4
includes sections published as “Radical Children, Radical Fictions: Terror and
Extremism in Sam Mills’s Blackout and Malorie Blackman’s Noble Con-
flict” in Neohelicon 45:2 (2018). My thanks and due acknowledgments go
to the editors and publishers of these journals for permitting the repro-
duction of this material.
Introduction
Literature, Children, and the Wars
around Terror
What affects the young people of the time in which we find ourselves living
is largely framed by the specific moment in which we ask such a question.
Since the beginning ofthe newmillennium, someof the most prevalent fears
among the young generation have included a concern that, having already
erupted on numerous occasions both at the heart of the West and on its
peripheries, terror will rise again (see, for instance, Rumbelow 2015;
Khanna 2016; Fishwick 2017; Morris 2018; Coughlan 2018). The risk is not
just that terror will strike from “without,” but also that fear of terrorism
will bring personal and structural violence into Western democratic society
in the name of “defense.” These concerns have developed rather specifically
in the British context, where the revelations that most of the attackers
responsible for the London bombingsof 7/7/2005, or “London’s 9/11”(when
four suicide bombers detonated their explosive devices on the city’s trans-
port network), as well as the Manchester Arena suicide bomber (acting in
2017 at the conclusion of a concert clearly aimed at young people), were
British-born have led to the introduction and later ramping up of anti-ter-
rorism laws that have had a normatizing and constraining impact on public
debate, and that, among their other widely criticized measures, have obli-
gated schools, universities,and local authoritiesto playthe gameof spotthe
terrorist while interacting with the youth (see, for example, Cobain 2016).
Thus, at a moment when one in three British children are said to be pri-
marily anxious about global forms of terror (see Morris 2018), nursery and
school-aged children are threatened with being referred to counter-extre-
mism programs for owning a toy gun or drawing a picture of their father
chopping a cucumber, mistaken by staff for a “cooker bomb” (see “Family”
2017; Fox 2016). Much like in the US, where a post-9/11 recognition of the
precariousness of bodies and borders, together with the fear of continued
terroristic violence, has led many to a “belief that [America] need[s] more
guns, morebordercontrol, amore authoritarian governmenttokeepastrict
eyeonthings”(Harveyn.pag.),theextremeparanoiainducedbytheattacks
themselves and by the counter-terror rhetoric of successive governments has
constricted Britons’ freedoms and behaviors in a way that is symbolized by
an “artwork” stab-proof vest decorated with a union jack flag that was
2 Introduction
worn by the world-famous British rapper Stormzy at his recent Glastonbury
festivalconcert(anddesignedbytheequallywell-knownBritishprotestartist
Banksy), and which cultural commentators have dubbed an “artefact of
[British]paranoia[that]isaperfectimageofourmoment”(Jonesn.pag.).
The vocabulary of such terror and counter-terror resonates in the world
of children, who have themselves sought to engage intellectually and crea-
tivelywithterrorismanditseffects.Agoodexampleofsuchengagementisa
prize-winning speech written by the British Muslim primary school pupil
Sara Hussain in the form of an imagined conversation with the Manchester
Arenabomberinreaction tohispossiblejustifications ofthe attack,whicha
close friend of hers survived (see Pidd 2019). In a development running
concurrently with the rise of young people’s responses to the socio-political
and psychological impact of terroristic events, terror has become a major
concern for children’s writers, who have variously commented on the new
world orders following 9/11 and 7/7. The potentially transformative force of
children’s literature as a form of discourse that can shape social experi-
ence—a particularly important function within global situations marked by
periods of crisis and conflict—offers special value to issues of post-terror
healing and world-building in a context when most of the teaching about
the contemporary threat of terror is state-led or regulated (see, for instance,
Jerome, Elwick, and Kazim 2019; Ford 2019). And yet, children’s fiction has
been neglected as a form of writing that can, like the novels of Miriam
HalahmyandSitaBrahmacharithatIdiscusshere,atoncehelpmakevisible
the differential exposure of various populations to terror-related violence as
well as modeling alternative social interactions in the face of terror, even
though it could broaden and refresh a general critical debate surrounding
the relationship between fiction and terror (see, for example, Boxall 2013,
esp.123–164;Herman2018),whichalltoooftenfindsitsmaterialonashort
list of canonical writers such as Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Philip Roth,
Jonathan Safran Foer, and Don DeLillo. Therefore, it seems particularly
timely to undertake a full scholarly investigation of representations of ter-
rorism and its effects within post-9/11 children’s literature, as written for
young readers growing up in a Britain transformed by the global wars
around terror.
This book considers how post-9/11 British fiction for the young has plot-
ted ways of digesting and moving beyond the politics of terror and counter-
terror—here, after Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton (2010), understood
to bear colonial, neo-colonial, and postcolonial characteristics (see also
Boehmer 2018)—while recognizing that some groups have been affected more
than others by the repercussions of acts of terrorism and violence. It sees the
contemporarychildren’snovelas involvedintheimaginingofnewcommunal
modes of being that are required in a post-terror climate plagued by fear and
suspicion. Throughout, the focus is on children’s writing of the new century
that confronts and exposes the violence that escalates in situations of terror
and counter-terror, having a deep impact upon young people’s social and
Introduction 3
political attitudes. The identification of violence in these novels as the foun-
dation of a “common parlance” between the state and the terrorists allows
their writers to complicate, while encouraging readers to interrogate, the
simplistic ideological binaries of “with us or against us” that have arisen
around contemporary discourses on extremism and counter-extremism
(Houen 215). An investigation of the potential of these texts to invite the
audience to which they appeal to think their way into alternative socio-poli-
tical realities, this study views such novels as participating in a broader
traditionofprogressivechildren’sliterature,welldocumented byscholars like
KimberleyReynolds(2007)orJuliaL.MickenbergandPhilipNel(2008).The
textsinquestioncouldalsobeseenasanotherformofpostcolonialliterature,
a literature that in one current interpretation, as I have argued elsewhere
(Grzegorczyk 2015), aims to “engage politically with the anxieties that result
from a marginalized racial and cultural identity” (1; see also McGillis 2000;
Bradford 2007). The book offers a comparative analysis of the wide-ranging
responses to changing configurations of Britishness, due mainly to the effects
of terrorism and the war on terror, as portrayed by British children’s writers
who make visible and challenge the different forms of neo-colonialism and
strategies of exclusion coded as counter-terrorism. The critical principles that
underpin its readings are drawn from postcolonial and critical race theory,
terrorism studies, discourses of trauma, vulnerability, subcultural resistance,
and cosmopolitan ethics. Its five chapters are organized around the traumatic
effects of terrorism and counter-terroristic responses—with “trauma” defined
as a “crisis of truth” (Caruth 6), or a disruption of historical experience that
“caus[es] conventional epistemologies to falter” and “acts as a haunting or
possessive influence,” while resisting articulation and representation (White-
head 5)—followed by the greater vulnerability of certain groups of people in
an age of terror, the importance of subcultural affiliation as a means of
coming toterms withthereality ofBritain’s post-9/11 world,the processes of
and resistances to radicalization, and the possibility of realizing a progressive
form of multiculturalism rooted in communal values and solidarity against
oppression. By exploring the unfolding relationship between children’s fiction
and terror in the new century, the study demonstrates that contemporary
British children’s novels use the present conflict of ideologies to confront
specific social and ethical questions concerning vulnerability, survivability,
and responsibility, and open post-9/11 British social relations to postcolonial
and cosmopolitan critique.
Children’s books about terror—which can refer both to the violent
operation of and conflict between state systems and to attempts to resist
them—are certainly not new in the British tradition. This category might be
said to encompass works such as Joan Lingard’s “Kevin and Sadie” novels
(1970–1976), Gillian Cross’s Wolf (1990), Theresa Breslin’s Death or Glory
Boys (1997), Kate MacLachlan’s Love My Enemy (2004), Alan Gibbons’s
The Defender (2004), or Siobhan Dowd’s Bog Child (2008), to name only a
few. These works explore the difficult relationship between Britain and its
