Governing ghosts: Race, incorporeality and difference in post-political times

Abstract

In this article we are not concerned with the management of extremists, but with the regulation of wider populations stereotyped as extreme based on the conflation of difference with politicality. Attempts to regulate racialized populations by excising the political surplus seen as constituting excessive Muslim difference are viewed in the context of a Muslim identity politics that places the ontology of the social into crisis by challenging the terms on which modernity’s racial projects subjectify actors. As seemingly non-racial, Muslims are represented as haunting, incorporeal and incomplete subjects. Islamophobia emerges as a corrective, racializing apparently incompletely racial subjects. Its success is underwritten by the attempts to deny the racist nature of Islamophobia. The shift from managing lawbreakers to stereotyping entire populations as extremists is central to this.

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

“…As other critical race scholars note, the naturalization of racial hierarchies can take hold irrespective of whether this order is thought of biologically or culturally, marked phenotypically or performatively (Omi & Winant, 1994). Continuing with this understanding of "race thinking" and the racialization process as that which seeks to order and manage, Tyrer and Sayyid (2012) argue that the Muslim is racialized as a haunting phantom-like figure, "a ghostly presence" simultaneously "unreal" and "jarringly hyperreal" to the logic and gaze of hegemony (p. 355). In other words, Tyrer and Sayyid (2012) hold that the racialization of Muslim identities and bodies is built according to a logic that simultaneously holds "Muslimhood" as a frozen artefactual subjectivity that is out-of-place and time, shifting and in excess, forever unknowable, and thus an "incompletely realizable" figure that slips all attempts at management (p. 354).…”

“…The discourses that followed the tragedy of 9/11 not only rejuvenated longstanding orientalist and Eurocentric prejudices directed towards Muslim subjects, but also renewed some of these "old" prejudices through contemporary racial grammars and structures (Bayoumi 2006;Meer & Modood, 2010;Razack 2007;Tyrer & Sayyid, 2012). Razack (2007), speaking about the racialization of Muslims, explains that the Muslim question has fundamentally become a question of management through eviction, writing: "I wish to underline that the eviction of Muslims from political community is a racial process that begins with Muslims being marked as a different level of humanity" (p. 176).…”

“…Continuing with this understanding of "race thinking" and the racialization process as that which seeks to order and manage, Tyrer and Sayyid (2012) argue that the Muslim is racialized as a haunting phantom-like figure, "a ghostly presence" simultaneously "unreal" and "jarringly hyperreal" to the logic and gaze of hegemony (p. 355). In other words, Tyrer and Sayyid (2012) hold that the racialization of Muslim identities and bodies is built according to a logic that simultaneously holds "Muslimhood" as a frozen artefactual subjectivity that is out-of-place and time, shifting and in excess, forever unknowable, and thus an "incompletely realizable" figure that slips all attempts at management (p. 354). Likewise, Bayoumi (2006) argues that in the wake of 9/11, a reformulation of crude early 20th century race logics came to develop "a typology of Muslim[hoods]" (p. 288) that, according to Mamdani (2005), reduces the Muslim subject to the "not-yet-modern" good Muslim versus "the anti-modern" bad Muslim (p. 28).…”

“…As such, the link between the body and Muslimhood is tenuous at best, which leads Tyrer and Sayyid (2010) to argue that the Muslim figure comes to be marked as a "haunting presence" that cannot simply be fixed on the brown body. Thus, this interruption in the management of Muslimhood calls into play a range of exceptions in the "work" of spotting, identifying, and marking the Muslim (Tyrer & Sayyid, 2012; see also Bayoumi, 2006).…”

Countering violent extremism, governmentality and Australian Muslim youth as ‘becoming terrorist’

“…As Nadya Ali (2014: 148) writes in her analysis of a similar governmentality of British Muslims, the absence of a ‘homogeneous Muslim community as imagined by policy makers’ meant that ‘one had to be created’. In the context of the war on terror, and a Muslim population in Australia which was increasingly mobilising around a Muslim identity politics while still maintaining a huge diversity of Muslim subjectivities, ‘fixing the content of the label “Muslim”’ (Tyrer and Sayyid, 2012: 356) in order to produce a self-contained governmental population became necessary. The conduct of conduct of ‘Muslims’ needed a discrete community of governmental subjects over which CVE could govern at a distance.…”