The representation of the Arabic and Islamic Identity in the 9/11 novel Lorraine Adams’s Harbor as a case study

Abstract

The 9/11 attacks have affected the representation
of the Arabic and Islamic identity and a great
deal of research has been interested in the study
of this representation. Most of this research has
been directed to the study of the 9/11 political
discourse showing that this discourse embeds
misrepresentations of Arabs and Muslims through
powerful rhetorical features. The present paper
finds it interesting to study the representation of the
Arabic and Islamic identity in literature rather than
in politics, and in order to remain within the context
of the 9/11 attacks and the issue of terrorism, it
chooses to analyze one of the 9/11 novels, namely
Lorraine Adams’ (2004) Harbor. A critical discourse
analysis following Fairclough’s (2001) analytical
procedure is applied to understand the ideological
dominant discourse through the identification of the
rhetorical devices on which this literary discourse
is based.It is concluded that Harbor is based on a
shocking sequencing of its backstory in a way that
the reader is preoccupied with the horrifying story
that he experiences while a lot of misrepresentations are backgrounded within the
discourse. In fact, this critical
evaluative reading applied to
the novel brings to the fore what
is backgrounded in order to
denounce the misrepresentation
of the Arabic and Islamic identity.