The Alterity of Terror: Reading Kipling’s ‘Uncanny’ India

Abstract

How do we imagine terror today? What does it mean to ‘imagine terror’ in the midst of a global ‘war on terror’? Terror, as Botting and Ray argue, is an imaginative act, a threatening of pre-existing narratives (of self or nation), an encounter with alterity which resists being grasped. Terror calls into question what is ‘real’, what seems ‘absolute’ or fundamental. Yet terror is itself ‘real’, and today, seemingly inescapable. Beneath this assertion, however, there lurks a larger question: what is the nature of this pervasive presence of terror? With the destruction of the World Trade Center, which killed three thousand people (Roy, 2004: 19) and symbolically demolished the security of Western economic power and technological rationality, terror has become a central discourse in contemporary society. By 2005 in excess of 8,000 books had been published since 9/11 on the subject of terror and terrorism (Furedi, 2007: xix). This emerging field of knowledge needs to be examined for its ideological assumptions. How exactly is the otherness of the terrorist imagined in this discourse? What does such terror tell us about the way we imagine Western ‘civilisation? Strathern and Stewart suggest that, while deaths resulting from terrorist incidents are ‘exceptional’, they ‘create a spectacle of horror which inscribes itself into the cultural imaginary of the international community’ (2005: 21).