From Exclusionism to Extremism
Reading the American Taliban in Ryan Inzana’s Johnny Jihad
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11272745 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Caitlin Forbes (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 42 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 129-151 |
| Publication date | 2017-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/melus/mlx055 |
| OpenAlex | W2746161609 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 7 |
In 2002, John Walker Lindh, an American citizen, shocked the world by confessing to being a terrorist operative for al Qaeda. As a twenty-year-old man from California, “Walker Lindh gained instant notoriety as the ‘American Taliban’” (Slifkin 417). In Ryan Inzana’s graphic narrative, Johnny Jihad (2003), the visual and textual unite in a fictional exploration of the question prompted by Lindh’s incarceration: what causes a middle-class American citizen to identify with an Islamic extremist group? By engaging with this question from a historical perspective, Inzana draws attention to the ramifications of current foreign policy at the intersection between fact and fiction. As a graphic novel presented from the perspective of an extremist, Johnny Jihad fills a literary gap by providing a new avenue for examining the issues prevalent in post-9/11 discourse: Inzana not only scrutinizes American identity, terrorism, and Islam but reconsiders the connections between the three. In trying to demonstrate “how a person comes to join an organization that endorses or engages in acts of violence to bring about social or political change” (Inzana, Personal), Johnny Jihad frames Islamic extremism as a reaction to Orientalist attitudes. By tying the prevalence of historically Orientalist attitudes in US foreign policy to Islamic extremism, Inzana reconsiders the origins of that extremism, suggesting that the divisiveness inherent in American identity-making leaves destruction and violence as the only means for navigating those divides.
Aesthetics · Art · Identity (music) · Islam · Literature · Media studies · Muslim world · Narrative · Orientalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Terrorism · Comics and Graphic Narratives · Gender Studies · History · Islamic Studies and Radicalism · Law · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence
| Highly cited | No |
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