The War on Terror in Contemporary Black British Poetry: Hannah Lowe and Moniza Alvi

In the light of Cultural Studies’ focus on the signifying practices of forms of power, this article concentrates on some poems from Hannah Lowe’s The Kids (2021) and Moniza Alvi’s Fairoz (2022), in order to highlight the modalities through which they undermine the discriminatory profiling of minorities effected by the so-called war on terror. By means of a textual analysis of the poems in relation with contextual references, it is argued that both poets unveil the presence of power structures behind symbolic processes. Thus, they unmask the constructedness of apparently natural categories, offering a springboard for undermining them.