Protecting Whiteness: Counter-Terrorism, and British Identity in the BBC’s Bodyguard

This article uses Bodyguard to trace the ways that whiteness is represented in counter-terrorism TV and so draw the links between whiteness, counter-terrorism and culture. It argues that Bodyguard offers a redemptive narrative for British whiteness that recuperates and rearticulates a British white identity after/through the War on Terror. As such it belongs to a later genre of counter-terrorism TV shows that move on from, but nonetheless still propagate, the discursive foundations of the ongoing War on Terror. This reading of Bodyguard is itself important, as popular culture is a site where much of the British population made and continues to make sense of their relationship to the UK during the War on Terror, forging often unspoken ideas about whiteness. It affords the opportunity to draw out the connections between whiteness and counter-terrorism, connections that need further scholarly attention to fully understand the complex relationships between security and race.

Mediations of Security, Race, and Violence in the Pulse Nightclub Shooting

This article examines news and political mediations of security, race, and violence in the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting in an attempt to isolate how dominant institutions reaffirm and preserve the North American state's monopoly on violence and cultural preservation through the calculated balance of security in relation to tolerance of diversity. The event was predominantly mediated through security discourses of the “war on terror,” and this martial framing enabled the production of homonationalist rhetoric (drawing on Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages) that aimed to include previously excluded queer Latino/a populations within the American body politic. Focusing on news media reporting and political as well as activist responses to the shooting during the months of June–August 2016, the article shows how this process of homonationalist inclusion was not smooth. Memorialization and advocacy for the Pulse victims by dominant institutions is striated by colliding phobias (Islamo-, xeno-, and homo-) that interrupt a clear mode of nationalist address or point of identification in mediations of the shooting. Drawing on a knowledge base attentive to queer-of-color and Indigenous concerns, the article demonstrates how biopolitical and necropolitical value is extracted from communities exposed to intersecting violences with differential dividends distributed to queer Latino/a and Afro-Latino/a communities.

Joyce Carol Oates’s Carthage as a Modern Troilus and Cressida Story

Both Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Joyce Carol Oates’s Carthage are set in times of war, the Trojan War and the Iraq War, respectively, and both are associated with love on the one hand, and loss on the other. In fact, Carthage contains many echoes of the past, with the main characters of the novel, Juliet and Cressida Mayfield, bringing connotations with Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s works, their father compared to an old Roman general, and Corporal Brett Kincaid likened to the hero of chivalric romances. The aim of this article is to argue that Oates’s Carthage may be seen as a modern Troilus and Cressida story in that it presents aspects of medieval reality in a modern guise, with the most poignant and recurrent association being that between the “war on terror” and medieval crusades and the emotion dominating the characters’ reactions being rage, an emotion which occurs in relation to the fires of passion and war in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, and Joyce Carol Oates’s Carthage.

Studying Islam and Its Adherents in Australian Universities

Islamic Studies is a relatively new, yet growing phenomenon in Australian universities. With an increased focus on Islam and Muslim in the age of War on Terror and with Australian Muslim population fast increasing, Islamic Studies is an important intellectual tool to better understand, Islam and Muslims and many challenges facing them. This paper is an investigation of the recent trends and developments in Islamic Studies as an academic discipline in Australian universities. This is an important intellectual task because Islamic Studies continues to play a significant role in Australian academia. The data were collected from literature review and are analysed descriptively. The findings of the study show that the intellectual tools developed in Islamic Studies can be deployed to build relationship between fragmented Muslim communities and between Muslims and non-Muslims particularly in multicultural Australia. Islamic Studies draws on a variety of fields making it a crossdiscipline. As such, it offer a rich and analytic investigation of world’s second largest religion and its multiple expressions. Australian universities offer Islamic studies ranging from undergraduate to postgraduate program. The topic studied include Islamic philosophy, jurisprudence, education, history, and Arabic.