Emancipation in an Islamophobic age: Finding agency in "nonrecognition," "refusal," and "self-recognition"

Abstract

The existing Islamophobia literature has aptly illustrated how the tragedy of 9/11 and the discourses that followed have situated ‘Muslims’ in a multifaceted system of reductive caricatures and security structures such that the Muslim subject “can at a moment’s notice be erected as [an] object of supervision and discipline” (Morey and Yaqin 2011: 5-6). The current paper builds off this structural analysis, however orients attention to the agents that sit at the receiving end of this architecture. Examining an annual multi-medium exhibit featuring the artistic works of Muslim women in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), I ask what (re)imaginings and possibilities of place, voice and emancipation are available in our Islamophobic age? What possibilities can we detangle from closely engaging with the negotiation patterns of the agents living the everyday of Islamophobia. (Mus)interpreted - an amalgamation of misinterpreted and Muslim interpreted - is an exhibit oriented towards uncovering-dismantling-and-rectifying the politics of living and finding ‘home’ amidst the backdrop of the problematic subject frame. The paper will engage with the ‘artistic statements’ of nearly two dozen multi-medium curated pieces, and ask what possibilities of place, voice and emancipation remain for the post 9/11 Muslim subject in our increasingly securitized and racialized age. There will also be a sustained attention given to issues of recognition/misrecognition /nonrecognition, broadly asking if the politics of recognition is framed as the site for emancipatory re-imaginings, or as the curators put it, as the grounds for “inclusive-future[s]”?

Becoming Muslim: Converting old and new practices through ‘turning away’

“…Referring to Fanon, he argues, ‘rather than remaining dependent on their oppressors for their freedom and self-worth, the colonized must instead struggle to work through their alienation/subjection against the objectifying gaze and assimilate lure of colonial recognition’ (Coulthard, 2014: 43). Coulthard uses the term self-recognition to refer to a self-directed ‘strategic fixing’ that aims to re-position, re-arrange, and re-cast available practices, discourses, and artefacts rooted in a given sociohistorical field in a manner that would serve the most ‘enabling’ potential for the subjects in question (Coulthard quoted in: Ali, 2018). This comes quite close to the argument of many converts that their conversion gave them the opportunity to become the person they want to be(come).…”

“…Ali uses the work of both Coulthard and Simpson to theorize the concepts of ‘turning away’ and ‘refusal’ (Ali, 2018: 22). Turning away in Ali’s work becomes an active refusal to engage in the hegemonic recognition game of being situated and managed and to be politically consumed by the overarching system (Ali, 2018).…”

“…Ali uses the work of both Coulthard and Simpson to theorize the concepts of ‘turning away’ and ‘refusal’ (Ali, 2018: 22). Turning away in Ali’s work becomes an active refusal to engage in the hegemonic recognition game of being situated and managed and to be politically consumed by the overarching system (Ali, 2018). This so-called ‘politics of refusal’ is highly influenced by Fanon, who indeed argued that rather than remaining dependent on their oppressors for their freedom and self-worth, the colonized must struggle against the objectifying gaze of the colonizer (Coulthard, 2014; Fanon, 1961: 43; Simpson, 2014).…”

Monstrous awakenings: Queer Necropolitics in Vivek Shraya and Ness Lee's Death Threat

“…Lastly, Orientalism positions those widely and ill-defined by the white imaginary as Brown, Asian, foreign and Muslim, as transfixed in halted proximity to whiteness, whereby we are considered, not stuck in or outside of time per se, but as behind in time (Puar, 2007; Chen, 2012; Ali, 2018). Here, people of colour are invited to pursue a whiteness that we will never catch up to but must always aspire towards.…”

“…I frame my analysis around one main theme: the graphic novel's tendency to rhetorically conflate the literal death of the body with the ‘social death’ of being misgendered. Using this theme as my point of entry, I critically interrogate how Death Threat occupies the realm of artistic expression that ‘highlights impulses of subversion, slippage, and “turning away” as the height of agentic action and emancipatory (re)imagining’ (Ali, 2018: 3). I begin by outlining the sociohistorical landscape from which the death-making practices challenged by Death Threat are located and draw strength, revealing the impact such practices have on dominant (read white and western) modes of gender-sex signification/materialisation and, by extension, the positionality of trans women of colour within this milieu.…”