This paper draws from my radical qualitative research on the link between Islamophobia/Islamophilia and (counter)terrorism in the US. For my book, Decolonial Psychoanalysis, I interviewed 19 US Muslims asking them about not only their experiences with Islamophobia but also, and more significantly, how they resist it. My conclusion, based on the analysis, is that US Muslims resist Islamophobia in at least two distinct ways: epistemically and ontically. These forms of resistance constitute what I call “actual liberation”.
In this article, I dissect an excerpt from George W. Bush’s address to a joint session of Congress and the American people wherein the former President of the United States (POTUS) uttered the (catch)phrase the ‘war on terror’ (WOT). To accomplish this dissection, I apply Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) together with Lacanian psychoanalysis among other critical tools. My aim here is to deconstruct/recode the WOT discourse in the hope of opening up possibilities for alternative, and more constructive, counter-discourses on the social problem of ‘terrorism’ that afford multiple subject positions beyond the (counter)terrorism binary. As an Orientalist ideology, the WOT indexes the larger archive of American exceptionalism and can be traced back to the rise of the neo-conservative movement in the 1980s. This analysis is particularly relevant in the context of the current political climate in the United States, where the WOT rhetoric continues to normalise the logic of Islamophobia.
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