Family, Violence and Gender in African Anglophone Novels and Contemporary Terrorist Threats

This book investigates how the breakdown of the family and the conventional gendering of roles gives rise to terrorist violence as portrayed in various African Anglophone narratives written by internationally renowned authors including Chinua Achebe, Doris Lessing, J.M. Coetzee and the award-winning contemporary Moroccan author Laila Lalami. It proves that the indispensable relationship between an eroding family structure and terror is not only an observation found in African Anglophone narratives, but, rather, that this relationship can help us to better comprehend terror as a globalized phenomenon in the twenty-first century.

Both the novels and the real-life cases of various terrorist figures such as Osama bin Laden and Mohamed Morsi seemingly suggest a linkage between an alternative family institution in the form of fundamentalist religious sects and terror. Referencing paratexts in fiction and biography, the book adopts a ground-breaking approach to juxtapose the portrayal of fictional characters to the life story of Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani student who has resisted Taliban rule in Afghanistan at great personal risk. When viewed together, these paratexts capably represent a viable afterlife of ideology and narrative to the colonial legacy of terror, and the reinvention of that legacy as a tradition of contemporary fundamentalism in response to the failure of states to protect the family.