Terrorists” Imaginaries: Social Exclusion, Queerness, Repressive Apparatus and the Emergence of Post-religious Terrorism in Contemporary Maghrebian Francophone Literature and Film

I examine the narratives imaginaries of Terrorism among some authors and filmmakers between 2007 and 2012. I argue that these oeuvres give rise to a new understanding of terrorism that is rooted in a series of traumatic experiences endured by the subject. These humiliations lead to the urgent need of a radical revenge: The terrorist act. The new terrorism is rooted in the radical multitude of oppressed singularities. Literary and cinematic fiction from the Maghreb can be considered as what Saldivar in Unsettling Race, Coloniality and Caste” (2007), calls a locus of enunciation on terrorism. This enables the emergence of a new discourse on terrorism that encompasses a dominant vision according to which terrorism is exclusively rooted in religion, that is to say the Islamic radical thought. In the fictions that constitute my corpus, the terrorist act is presented as a consequence to economic precarity, gender persecution, and a process of desocializing the subject. A political reading of the Qur\u27aan comes as a consequence to the causes mentioned above. Religion is presented as a tool by which the subject not only comprehends his situation but also justifies the act of revenge, that is to say the terrorist act. Thus, they imitate the oppressor towards whom an admiration is felt. In my dissertation, I examine the different levels of this dynamic humiliation/ revenge. Through an interdisciplinary theoretical perspective informed by cultural and literary studies, my dissertation examines debates about poverty and violence, terrorism and gender, postcolonial studies on immigration and transnational terrorism