The Legends of Rita, part of the ICA's Baader's Angels season
In today's Guardian, Hari Kunzru thinks he might be in trouble. Following the conviction of the self-styled "lyrical terrorist", he's expecting the police to come knocking on his door in a raid that will uncover his shelf full of books glorifying terrorism, his hard drive's history of sites maintained by "unsavoury people", and his notebooks covered in chilling phrases and a "list of possible targets". It's all research for his last novel, but would the police find anything more than "a certain transgressive glamour" in such material?
It's something I wondered myself last weekend, after taking out a collection of books on female suicide bombers from my university library. If the police, I wondered, had a look at my library account, as well as the history of my internet searches, they'd find I have an (un?)healthy interest in women's subversive acts, violent rebellion and involvement in terrorism. I know I emailed more than a few people yesterday expressing my great excitement at news of the ICA's forthcoming Baader's Angels: Women's Roles in German Terrorism Films season.
It's all research for a thesis. Honest. But as Kunzru writes, in our current terrorist panic we seem to have accepted that it should be illegal to think, read and write certain things. "Incitement to violence is rightly criminalised but what about imagining violence? ... How long before it's suggested we should shut up altogether?"
Do you own any subversive books that have caused you to ponder whether the police might come knocking at your door?
