Peter Benchley’s novel
Jaws was published in 1974. In 1975 it was turned into a film. For years various cultural critics, most famously the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, have deconstructed
Jaws to mean more than just a story about a fictional tourist spot, Amity Island, being tormented by a shark.
Peter Biskind in his 1999 book
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls writes that, since the novel and its film adaptation arrived during a particularly severe economic and political crisis in the US,
Jaws immediately struck a chord with an audience disoriented by the apparently indefinable nature of the crisis.
In 2012, Žižek saw the shark as a combination of prejudices and fears that are encapsulated into a single definable entity, so that a bemused polity is able to clearly perceive it as the cause of society’s dread. To Žižek, the shark of Amity Island can thus be understood as a metaphor of any community seen to be existing outside the homogeneity of the majority community and is thus suspect. These can be immigrants such as Muslims in Western countries (and now in Modi’s India), non-Muslims in Muslim countries, non-whites in white-majority societies, etc.