The impact of post-‘9/11’ terrorism on how the city of London has been reimagined is significant. In this paper, we will explore two post-‘9/11’ novels, Chris Cleave’s 2005 Incendiary and Mohsin Hamid’s 2017 Exit West, which complicate the tradition of British literature featuring terrorists (Taylor, London's Burning: Pulp Fiction, the Politics of Terrorism and the Destruction of the Capital in British Popular Culture, 1840–2005 (London: Continuum, 2012), 1–2) by reenvisaging London as a nexus of state terrorism. Incendiary, published on the day of the ‘7/7’ bombings, highlights the complexity of political violence through the story of a traumatised woman who loses her son and husband during a terrorist attack in London. Cleave critiques the post ‘9/11’ city by constructing a narrative centred on the Londoners’ response to the terror perpetrated by the government, the police, and media (e.g.: violence against civilians, suspension of civil rights, martial law, and surveillance). Similarly, Hamid’s Exit West depicts London as a place where refugees live in terror, exploited in work camps and subjected to surveillance (through drones and by citizens turned vigilantes) by the British state. This paper aims to interrogate how these texts problematise mainstream representations of sovereign power in London. If state sovereignty is understood as ‘an aspiration that seeks to create itself in the face of internally fragmented, unevenly distributed and unpredictable configurations of political authority that exercise more or less legitimate violence in a territory’ (T. B. Hansen and F. Stepputat (eds.), Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the Postcolonial World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2005), 10), literary fiction creates a space suitable for questioning the legitimacy of this aspiration. The state actively produces ‘fear, terror, and violence’, embedding in the construction of cities (D. Gregory, The Colonial Present (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004), 4). The London of Cleave’s and Hamid’s novels becomes a site for both projecting terrorism and resisting terror in all its forms. Our interdisciplinary theoretical framework combines postcolonial theory and elements of urban and cultural sociology (S. Graham (ed.), Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004); S. Graham, Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (London: Verso, 2011); J. C. Alexander, Performance and Power (Cambridge: Polity, 2011)) with inquiries into the cultural imaginary of terrorism (Frank, The Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism in Public Discourse, Literature, and Film: Narrating Terror (New York, NY: Routledge, 2017), 75.) in post-‘9/11’ literature. We subscribe to the proposition that the ‘only real solution to our current geopolitical crisis’ is asserting the global values that connect the Self with the Other (Gauthier, 9/11 Fiction, Empathy, and Otherness (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 1.) and we argue that Incendiary and Exit West provide a counternarrative to the dominant discourse of terrorism post ‘9/11’, which champions the state’s supreme authority through stereotyping and polarisation. The proposed reading of Cleave’s and Hamid’s novels will show how the city of London, as imagined in literary responses to ‘9/11’, can crystallise a counternarrative of protest by revealing the systemic violence through which sovereign power is performed at the expense of civil populations, particularly minoritised populations through discourses of hate such as Islamophobia and antiimmigrant/refugee rhetoric.

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“伦敦是一座建在自身残骸上的城市”：克里斯·克利夫 (Chris Cleave) 的《燃烧弹》和莫辛·哈米德 (Mohsin Hamid) 的《西出口》中的国家恐怖主义和抵抗

“9/11”后的恐怖主义对伦敦市如何重新构想的影响是巨大的。在本文中，我们将探讨两部“9/11”后的小说，克里斯·克利夫 (Chris Cleave) 的 2005 年《燃烧弹》和莫辛·哈米德 (Mohsin Hamid) 的 2017 年《西部出口》(Exit West)，它们使以恐怖分子为特色的英国文学传统复杂化（泰勒，伦敦的燃烧：低俗小说，恐怖主义的政治以及英国流行文化中首都的毁灭，1840-2005（伦敦：Continuum，2012），1-2）通过重新设想伦敦作为国家恐怖主义的纽带。在“7/7”爆炸案当天出版的《燃烧》，通过一个受创伤的妇女在伦敦恐怖袭击中失去儿子和丈夫的故事，突出了政治暴力的复杂性。克利夫通过构建一个以伦敦人对政府、警察和媒体所犯下的恐怖行为（例如：针对平民的暴力、中止民权、戒严和监视）的反应为中心的叙事来批评后“9/11”城市）。同样，哈米德的《西出口》将伦敦描绘成一个难民生活在恐怖中的地方，在工作营中受到剥削，并受到英国政府的监视（通过无人机和公民变成的义务警员）。本文旨在探究这些文本如何对伦敦主权权力的主流表述提出问题。如果国家主权被理解为“在面对内部支离破碎、分布不均和不可预测的政治权威配置，这些政治权威在一个领土上行使或多或少合法的暴力时，寻求自我创造的愿望”（TB Hansen 和 F. Stepputat (eds.), Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the Postcolonial World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2005), 10)，文学小说创造了一个空间，适合质疑这种愿望的合法性. 国家在城市建设中积极制造“恐惧、恐怖和暴力”（D. Gregory, The Colonial Present (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004), 4）。克利夫和哈米德小说的伦敦成为宣传恐怖主义和抵制各种形式的恐怖主义的场所。我们的跨学科理论框架结合了后殖民理论和城市和文化社会学的元素（S. Graham (ed.), Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004); S. Graham, Cities兵临城下：新军事城市主义（伦敦：Verso，2011 年）；JC Alexander，Performance and Power（剑桥：Polity，2011 年））与对恐怖主义文化想象的调查（弗兰克，公共话语、文学和电影中恐怖主义的文化想象：讲述恐怖事件（纽约，纽约：Routledge，2017 年） ), 75.) 在“9/11”后的文献中。我们赞同这样一种命题，即“我们当前地缘政治危机的唯一真正解决方案”是维护将自我与他人联系起来的全球价值观（Gauthier，9/11 Fiction、Empathy 和 Otherness（Lanham，MD：Lexington Books，2015 年） ), 1.) 并且我们认为，《燃烧》和《西部出口》为“9/11”后恐怖主义的主流话语提供了一种反驳，后者通过刻板印象和两极分化来捍卫国家的最高权威。