While postcolonial theory has always condemned violence concomitant to colonisation, it has largely refrained from querying the legitimacy of those acts of violence performed by colonised peoples to free themselves from imperialist oppression. Arguably, its tolerance of violent insurgence has locked postcolonial thinking into a moral dilemma not wholly dissimilar from the impasse in which intellectuals of the Romantic period found themselves shortly after the French Revolution. Arguably too, it is more than a coincidence that just as the incorruptible Robespierre’s infamous Reign of Terror challenged the Romantics’ idealistic approval of the French people’s seizure of liberty, a new reign of terror is currently destabilizing the neo-romantic ideas of insurgence advanced by postcolonial theorists and critics ever since Fanon’s proclamation that “decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.”
The novel Due Preparations for the Plague (2004) by Janette Turner Hospital and the film Paradise Now (2005) by Hany Abu-Assad may be read as responses to this particular destabilization. Though addressing contemporary terrorism from radically different angles, they both can be shown to convey an acute sense of the postcolonial world’s entrapment in its own moral achievements, above all when confronted by such cataclysmic dramas of liberation as enacted by the fiercest of today’s self-appointed warriors against the neo-imperialistic forces determining modern world politics. This paper examines the reappraisals advanced by Hospital and Abu-Assad of the complex dialectic of oppression and freedom and its apparently indispensable propelling force, violence.