Ahmad Sulaiman

The Dialectics of Cruelty and Solidarity: Representations of Cruelty and Solidarity in Chris Cleave's Incendiary and Little Bee Ahmad Sulaiman

The Book dramatizes two distinct but interrelated representations of human ideologies in two contemporary British novels, Incendiary and Little Bee, both written by Chris Cleave. The book examines, in part one, Michel Foucault's concept of power and how cruelty is carried out through the analysis of a series of cruel exercises of power by Al-Qaeda group, the British government, and the British people. In part two, the book unveils two modalities of solidarity, among the Nigerian-Nigerian party and among the British-Nigerian party, through which the antithetical nature of solidarity deconstructs cruelty and related power exercises. The analysis in this part is heralded in by the expedition of Jurgen Habermas's communicative action of rationality and Richard Rorty's ironism. The Conclusion uncovers, though in different contexts, the dialectical nature of cruelty and solidarity, for they are conceived as two faces of the same coin.