Conclusion

Abstract

The purpose of this book has been to show how literature might help to challenge the reductive ‘us and them’ binaries often present in the framing of identity and difference after 9/11. Such binaries are perpetuated through the global media, but are also patently apparent in the lexicons of the Bush administration, al-Qaeda and — as I suggested in the Introduction — a number of prominent Western novelists, including Ian McEwan. As I have attempted to make clear from the opening pages, this is by no means to equivocate (morally or otherwise) between the three groups. Rather it is to underscore, through the very extent of their non-equivalence, just how ingrained such binaries have become in the language with which people from even the most vastly differing ideological backgrounds make sense of the contemporary world.