Superpower Symbolic Osama Bin Laden and Millennial Discontent

This chapter charts the uses of Osama bin Laden's image in the first decade of the twenty-first century, a period marked by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, US military interventions, and growing resistance to global inequalities. More than any other iconic figure to emerge in the new millennium, Osama bin Laden provided a symbol for popular frustrations with the neoliberal world order in the global South. In the early 2000s people in multiple world regions used bin Laden iconography to articulate a sense of marginalization and demands for systemic change. However, few of those who wore bin Laden T-shirts subscribed to his beliefs or endorsed his tactics. Many simply perceived bin Laden as a figurative "superpower" that symbolically approximated the United States. To account for this interpretation, this chapter concentrates on the urban environments of coastal Kenya, where some young people represented various grievances through bin Laden iconography. In an effort to explain why they did so, this chapter highlights acute feelings of alienation within religious and ethnic minority communities along Kenya's Indian Ocean coast. It shows how some Kenyans perceived their experiences of marginality as part of a larger system of repression that bin Laden's actions appeared to address..