I have argued elsewhere that this novel answers Richard Gray’s call for a “deterritorialization” of post-9/11 American literature: an idea that can be applied more broadly to all English-language fiction attempting to deal with the fallout from the atrocity. Faced with what he sees as the parochialism and timidity of war-on-terror novels, Gray suggests that writers need to expand and defamiliarize their imaginative territory, to find a space between or at least from which to try to do justice to conflicting political interests and positions. Instead of simple empathy, the novel form needs to explore the contradictions that animate debates in the world today, making the text a site of struggle for these different versions. This might mean trying to come at things aslant—from an oblique angle, so to speak. And it may well mean a need for new or more experimental types of narrative structure.

DEFINE: Defines Gray's concept of 'deterritorialization' — expanding and defamiliarizing imaginative territory to address conflicting political positions in post-9/11 fiction.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 445