Vulnerable Bodies: Rethinking Global Violence in The Sirens of Baghdad

In choosing to teach Yasmina Khadra's novel The Sirens of Baghdad, I had two pedagogical objectives: the first was to question the meaning of the word “terrorism.” I had hoped that in a comparative examination of acts represented in the novel with acts of war, students' learned condemnation of terrorism might prompt reconsideration of the ethics of war. My second objective was to question the inevitability of military responses to global violence, or at least to question why war seems to be a permanent and, for many, an acceptable reality in twenty‐first‐century culture. Students in my 200‐level literature course were age nine or ten when the 9/11 attacks occurred and have come of age in a period of continuous global violence and U.S. military involvement. This paper outlines a pedagogy of re‐examining global violence and its consequences through literature and critical theory.