Frawley, Oona
(2013)
Global civil war and post-9/11 discourse in The
Wasted Vigil.
Textual Practice, 27 (3).
pp. 439-457.
ISSN 0950-236X
Abstract
Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil offers the opportunity to consider the
ways in which notions of civil war in the twenty-first century are complicated
both by legacies of colonialisms and by contemporary discourse on
extremism. Though the Afghanistan represented in the text is shown to
be in a state of civil war stemming from tribal conflict, it is, simultaneously,
an occupied space with an inheritance of multiple occupations. This
palimpsestic arena serves as a meeting ground for key characters, each of
which hails from and so represents a distinct part of Afghanistan’s
legacy. The novel also offers a meditation on the nature of extremism
and its representations in the post-9/11 era. If, as Baudrillard suggests, terrorism
like that enacted on 11 September 2001 succeeds because of its symbolic
value, Aslam’s novel pursues the notion of the symbolic through
language as a way of moving beyond the standoff created by current-day
(and largely American) rhetoric about extremism. The ‘global civil war’
enacted in the pages of The Wasted Vigil thus offers a critique not only
of definitions of civil war, but also, and perhaps more significantly, a far
more damning critique of the American-centric perspective on globality
and media’s normalization of the unimaginable image.
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