Overview

Part reportage and part protest, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb is an inquiry into the cultural logic and global repercussions of the war on terror. At its center are two men convicted in U.S. courts on terrorism-related charges: Hemant Lakhani, a seventy-year-old tried for attempting to sell a fake missile to an FBI informant, and Shahawar Matin Siraj, baited by the New York Police Department into a conspiracy to bomb a subway. Lakhani and Siraj were caught through questionable sting operations involving paid informants; both men received lengthy jail sentences. Their convictions were celebrated as major victories in the war on terror. In Amitava Kumar’s riveting account of their cases, Lakhani and Siraj emerge as epic bunglers, and the U.S. government as the creator of terror suspects to prosecute. Kumar analyzed the trial transcripts and media coverage, and he interviewed Lakhani, Siraj, their families, and their lawyers. Juxtaposing such stories of entrapment in the United States with narratives from India, another site of multiple terror attacks and state crackdowns, Kumar explores the harrowing experiences of ordinary people entangled in the war on terror. He also considers the fierce critiques of post-9/11 surveillance and security regimes by soldiers and torture victims, as well as artists and writers, including Coco Fusco, Paul Shambroom, and Arundhati Roy.

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9780822345626

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Reviews

A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb imaginatively portrays the forces shaping contemporary India, and it is a remarkable reader of mass culture and popular narrative forms, of the worlds of Hindi cinema, pulp fiction, sensational journalism, and globalized media. Amitava Kumar's rendering of the Starr Report through the experience of the protagonist, Binod, shows us how a seemingly quintessential American narrativeoshaped by domestic politics, the culture wars, and a market-driven mediaocan travel all the way to Delhi in a 'cheap, pirated version,' and be remade by alternative forms of entrepreneurship. oSiddhartha Deb, author of An Outline of the Republic and The Point of Return Kumar's searching and humane account of the global consequences of the U.S. war on terror gets behind the rhetoric and state public relations campaigns in a brisk but thoughtful narrative. Kumar covers intellectual and artistic responses to American domestic and foreign security policies, including the work of conceptual artist Hasan Elahi, who after being randomly interrogated by the FBI after 9/11, has taken to documenting and uploading to his Web site every move he makes. In his own reportage, Kumar (Husband of a Fanatic) focuses on two legal cases, in whose details, including his own interviews with the defendants, he astutely deconstructs the logic of what he sees as a burgeoning police state and the global order (or disorder) it encourages. The first is that of Hemant Lakhani, a boastful 70-year-old smalltime London clothier arrested in a sting operation delivering a sample shoulder-fired missile to an FBI informant. The other concerns Shahawar Matin Siraj, drawn into a bomb plot by undercover New York police. An arresting and heartrending work of public protest and valuable social analysis, this work contributes forcefully to a subtle, human-scaled accounting of 21st-century geopolitics. - Publishers Weekly, Starred Review Amitava Kumar has written a unique book. It is ultimately a book about neoliberalism, about the public interest defined as militarism rather than as well-being. It is a book about the imagination reduced to suspicion and fear rather than hope and liberty. It is a book that swells from India to Indiana, depicting the global ecology of antiterrorism. oVijay Prashad, author of The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World Kumar's book succeeds in lifting some of the fog that engulfs the war on terror. It's a must-read. oShobhan Saxena, The Times of India * An important book... Kumar is able to combine painstaking research, taut pacing, and thought-provoking analysis to produce an outstanding work of nonfiction. oAayush Soni, Business Standard Kumar builds, with considerable finesse, a case against the brutality and incompetence of the state, both Indian and American. oSadanand Dhume, Outlook India * I can't think of a more urgent, important, and necessary book. oPradeep Sebastian, The Hindu This is a very important book since it speaks of crimes committed by the State under the garb of tackling terror. Be it the paranoia in the U.S. after 9/11 or in India [after] the 2001 attack on Parliament, liberal democracies, while accusing individuals of moral turpitude, have violated all norms of justice and fair play themselves. oRahul Pandita, OPEN Magazine Mr. Kumar's book isn't especially long, but it is a many-tentacled beast. In part it's a deft survey of post-9/11 art, from its fiction and nonfiction to its foreign films and obscure works of performance art. At its heart, however, [the book] is about the ordinary men and women, brown-skinned in general and Muslim in particular, who have had their lives upended by America's enraged security apparatus. Mr. Kumar calls them the small people, and to them he extends his own impressive and trembling moral imagination... A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb carries in the crook of its own arm Mr. Kumar's plaintive appeal. If we're to bridge the perilous divide that separates us from those poor and unnamed people who resent us, we first need to see them, to look into their eyes. We need, Mr. Kumar writes, to acknowledge that they exist. This angry and artful book is a first step. - Dwight Garner, The New York Times Foreigner is part contemporary history, part investigative journalism, part political treatise, part memoir - and an absolute must-read. My greatest fear is that the readers who most need to read this book will not. Kumar is an excellent storyteller. He's also immensely convincing. Drawing on his vast, voracious knowledge of literature, film, television, and breaking headlines, Kumar makes a case that post-9/11 fear has created a not-so-brave new world of bullies and fools. Moving fluidly between his adopted US home and his birthplace of India - another country altered by concerns over terrorism - Kumar carefully exposes what he sees as the senseless abuse of power justified by the 'war on terror'... Again and again, Kumar makes a case that the 'red zone of a terrorist threat' has blinded post-9/11 courts to blatant injustice, condemnation without evidence, and even torture: '[T]his new definition of public interest, where the argument is made in terms of national security,' writes Kumar, 'will trump all other claims every time.' That national security threat at home, Kumar argues, keeps citizens distracted from the 'greater horror of the other war [in Iraq] from our eyes.' - Terry Hong, Christian Science Monitor, August 2010

"""A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb imaginatively portrays the forces shaping contemporary India, and it is a remarkable reader of mass culture and popular narrative forms, of the worlds of Hindi cinema, pulp fiction, sensational journalism, and globalized media. Amitava Kumar's rendering of the Starr Report through the experience of the protagonist, Binod, shows us how a seemingly quintessential American narrative--shaped by domestic politics, the culture wars, and a market-driven media--can travel all the way to Delhi in a 'cheap, pirated version,' and be remade by alternative forms of entrepreneurship."" --Siddhartha Deb, author of An Outline of the Republic and The Point of Return ""Kumar's searching and humane account of the global consequences of the U.S. ""war on terror"" gets behind the rhetoric and state public relations campaigns in a brisk but thoughtful narrative. Kumar covers intellectual and artistic responses to American domestic and foreign security policies, including the work of conceptual artist Hasan Elahi, who after being randomly interrogated by the FBI after 9/11, has taken to documenting and uploading to his Web site every move he makes. In his own reportage, Kumar (Husband of a Fanatic) focuses on two legal cases, in whose details, including his own interviews with the defendants, he astutely deconstructs the logic of what he sees as a burgeoning police state and the global order (or disorder) it encourages. The first is that of Hemant Lakhani, a boastful 70-year-old smalltime London clothier arrested in a sting operation delivering a sample shoulder-fired missile to an FBI informant. The other concerns Shahawar Matin Siraj, drawn into a bomb plot by undercover New York police. An arresting and heartrending work of public protest and valuable social analysis, this work contributes forcefully to a subtle, human-scaled accounting of 21st-century geopolitics. "" - Publishers Weekly, Starred Review ""It is among the accomplishments of Amitava Kumar's new book, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb that it refuses to separate the cultural and the political means by which the War on Terror has been waged. Kumar endeavours to connect not only the tortuous practices common to states fighting terrorists, but also the ways this ""war"" has been imagined... Alongside his personal encounters with these terrorists, Kumar shows the haphazardly constructed legal cases, the government witnesses, and the clash of half-digested cultural understandings. He peels back the stories that we only know by headlines ... with a novelist's eye and a reporter's doggedness... Kumar makes both a political and legal argument, but also a cultural one. It is to his credit that, while writing a non-fiction book, he acknowledges the power of the imagination - of art - to wrestle into view that which politics works to hide from us. Kumar's work demonstrates that the Terrorist is not a ""known unknown"": he is both ordinary and comprehensible."" - Manan Ahmed, The National"

Author Information

Amitava Kumar is a novelist, poet, journalist, and Professor of English at Vassar College. He is the author of Husband of a Fanatic, a New York Times “Editors’ Choice”; Bombay-London-New York, a New Statesman (UK) “Book of the Year”; and Passport Photos. He is the editor of several books, including Away: The Indian Writer as an Expatriate, The Humour and the Pity: Essays on V.S. Naipaul, and World Bank Literature. He is also an editor of the online journal Politics and Culture and the screenwriter and narrator of the prize-winning documentary film Pure Chutney. Kumar’s writing has appeared in the Nation, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, American Prospect, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Hindu, and other publications in North America and India.

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