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

Abstract EN

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