Sleepers, Moles, And Martyrs: Secret Identifications, Societal Integration, And The Differing Meanings Of Freedom

by Regina F. Bendix (Editor), John Bendix

The symposium Sleepers, Moles, and Martyrs: Secret Identifications, Societal Integration, and the Differing Meanings of Freedom held in Reinhausen, 2002, formed the basis of this publication. Occasioned by the social, political and mass media discourses after the bombings of New Yorks World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, an interdisciplinary group of scholars came together to explore the connotations and implications of the term sleeper. The biographies of terrorist perpetrators are but one of many permutations of sleeper-like phenomena in late modern polities. Clandestine operatives of the state are sleepers, and both willing and unwilling victims of terrorism are discursively transformed from sleepers into martyrs. Starting with analyses of the discourses about sleepers in Part I their historical antecedents, narrative emplotment, and semantic differentiation Part II turns to the hidden or unspoken aspects of the state, the challenge of fundamentalist terrorism to the m

131 pages, Paperback

First published August 27, 2004