‘Terror and the Postcolonial’: 1 An Ethico-Politics of Relationality in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows 2

The Taliban’s resurgence to power after two decades of war on terror alongside an increase in global rates of terrorism since 9/11 not only impugns our counter-terrorism measures but also solicits a return to the question that has recurrently engaged scholars in postcolonial studies: How do we respond to the global situation of ‘terror’?. Elleke Boehmer identifies two responsive modalities in postcolonial literature: a ‘hybridizing’ and a ‘resistance’ inflection embodied respectively in the magic realist and national narratives. While both engage with neocolonialism, the former often comes to collude with globalization’s imperio-capitalist processes which are subverted by the latter through ‘nation narration’ (2010, 143). Analyzing Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows via Judith Butler’s theorization of a nonviolent ethics, this paper identifies Shamsie’s response to terror as a departure from Boehmer’s model. Debunking ‘capitalist-driven colonialism’ and ‘neo-imperial globalization’, Burnt Shadows also contests ‘the nation’ to endorse an ethico-politics of relationality anchored in shared human loss. This article argues that Burnt Shadows narrativizes a relational historical consciousness indispensable to apprehending our mutual constitution in vulnerability; in doing so, it advances a new paradigm of postcolonial resistance that demands a re-evaluation of ‘terror’ through our interdependent global history, informed by the continuities of empire, in order to reconceive politics within a relational social ontology that can forfend cycles of violence.