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\"This study investigates power, belonging and exclusion in British societyby analysing represntations of the mosque, the University of Oxford, and the plantation in novels by Leila Aboulela, Robin Yassin-Kassab, Diran Adebayo, David Dabydeen, Andrea Levy, and Bernardine Evaristo. Lisa Ahrens combines Foucault's theory of heterotopia with elements of Wolfgang Iser's reader-response theory to work out Black British and British Muslim literature's potential for destabilising exclusionary boundaries. IN this way, new perspectives open up on the intersections between space, power and literature, intertwining and enriching the discourses of Cultural and Literary Studies.\"--Page 4 of cover.

Fiction by writers of Muslim background forms one of the most diverse, vibrant and high-profile corpora of work being produced today - from the trail-blazing writing of Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi, which challenged political and racial orthodoxies in the 1980s, to that of a new generation including Mohsin Hamid, Nadeem Aslam and Kamila Shamsie. This collection reflects the variety of those fictions. Experts in English, South Asian, and postcolonial literatures address the nature of Muslim identity: its response to political realignments since the 1980s, its tensions between religious and secular models of citizenship, and its manifestation of these tensions as conflict between generations. In considering the perceptions of Muslims, contributors also explore the roles of immigration, class, gender, and national identity, as well as the impact of 9/11. This volume includes essays on contemporary fiction by writers of Muslim origin and non-Muslims writing about Muslims. It aims to push beyond the habitual populist 'framing' of Muslims as strangers or interlopers whose ways and beliefs are at odds with those of modernity, exposing the hide-bound, conservative assumptions that underpin such perspectives. While returning to themes that are of particular significance to diasporic Muslim cultures, such as secularism, modernity, multiculturalism and citizenship, the essays reveal that 'Muslim writing' grapples with the same big questions as serve to exercise all writers and intellectuals at the present time: How does one reconcile the impulses of the individual with the requirements of community? How can one 'belong' in the modern world? What is the role of art in making sense of chaotic contemporary experience? Rehana Ahmed is Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Teesside, UK. Peter Morey is Reader in English Literature, School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies, University of East London, UK. Amina Yaqin is Lecturer in Urdu and Postcolonial Studies, Department of South Asia, SOAS, UK. Selected Contents: Introduction Rehana Ahmed, Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin 1. Writing Muslims and the Global State of Exception Stephen Morton Part 1: Writing the Self 2. Bad Faith: The Construction of Muslim Extremism in Ed Husain’s The Islamist Anshuman A. Mondal 3. Reason to Believe? Two ‘British Muslim’ Memoirs Rehana Ahmed 4. Voyages Out and In: Two (British) Arab Muslim Women’s Bildungsromane Lindsey Moore Part 2. Migrant Islam 5. Infinite Hijra: Migrant Islam, Muslim American Literature, and the Anti-Mimesis of The Taqwacores Salah D. Hassan 6. Muslims as Multicultural Misfits in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers Amina Yaqin 7. ‘Sexy Identity-Assertion’: Choosing between Sacred and Secular Identities in Robin Yassin-Kassab’s The Road from Damascus Claire Chambers Part 3: (Mis)reading Muslims 8. Writing Islam in Post-9/11 America: John Updike’s Terrorist Anna Hartnell 9. Invading Ideologies and the Politics of Terror: Framing Afghanistan in The Kite Runner Kristy Butler 10. Representation and Realism: Monica Ali’s Brick Lane Sara Upstone Part 4: Culture, Politics and Religion 11. From ‘the Politics of Recognition’ to ‘the Policing of Recognition’: Writing Islam in Hanif Kureishi and Mohsin Hamid Bart Moore-Gilbert 12. Resistance and Religion in the Work of Kamila Shamsie Ruvani Ranasinha 13. Mourning Becomes Kashmira: Islam, Melancholia, and the Evacuation of Politics in Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown Peter Morey

This study analyses four new genres of literature and film that have evolved to accommodate and negotiate the changing face of postcolonial Britain since 1990: British Muslim Bildungsromane, gothic tales of postcolonial England, the subcultural urban novel and multicultural British comedy.

During the years between 1954 and 1965, which witnessed the construction of a new Algerian national identity, Jean Sénac, the most important French-language poet associated with Algerian nationalism, was struggling to establish a sense of self, both at the collective level of the Nation and on the individual level of the Man. By the end this decade of self-determination Sénac would fashion the complex nature of his national and sexual identities into an authentic poetics of social protest. In Sénac's works, produced after Algerian independence, he openly proclaims himself to be a gaouri -the Algerian pejorative for a foreigner or infidel-as well as a homosexual. However, Sénac's stance on the margins came after more than a decade in which he struggled with the fear that his non-normative identity was an obstacle to be overcome if he wanted to be a poet in service to his people.

Fai'za Guene's Kiffe kiffe demain describes the coming-of-age experiences of Doria, a second-generation Franco-Maghrebi, or beur, adolescent of Moroccan origin, who lives in an economically and socially disfavored Parisian housing project. Doria's abandonment by her father, who abruptly leaves for Morocco to marry a younger woman capable of giving him a male heir, provides the novel's focus: a simultaneous critique of Maghrebi, or North African, patriarchy and a searing indictment of the socioeconomic and political disenfranchisement experienced by the residents of the \"other France,\" namely, Maghrebi Arab-Muslim working-class immigrants and their French-born beur children. This paper demonstrates how the protagonist's negotiation of biculturality exposes the hypocrisy of the French secularizing mission, in which all markers of difference are suspect until they are assimilated into a homogeneous ideal of sameness. At the same time, social oppression produces a vibrant \"vernacular\" culture in the projects as a contestation of second-class citizenship, racialization, and mediated representation.

This essay examines the adaptation and translation of Sembene Ousmane's novella The Money-Order (originally published in French in 1966 as Le mandat) into \"Hawala ya Fedha\" (1980), a Kiswahili play by the Tanzanian woman dramatist Amandina Lihamba. Drawing on the contemporary theories of translation and adaptation that demote fidelity to the original as the cornerstone of translation, I demonstrate that the changes that Lihamba introduces in her text do not result from the incommensurability among the languages involved (Wolof, French, English, and Kiswahili), the muchvaunted clash of civilizations, or the supposed incompatibility between the two genres (novel and play); rather, she is invested in amplifying gender issues in Sembene's novel through a popular public medium to signify the urgent need for women's literacy in Julius Nyerere's Tanzania.

This essay considers the recent production of texts in English that construct and rely on repeated and homogenized images of Muslim women, focusing on a translated text but arguing for its contextualization within the market of popular memoir. Taking the translation of Rajaa Alsanea's Banat al-Riyadh into English as a case study, I argue that revisions made by press and author to my translation assimilated it to chick-lit generic conventions in the anglophone marketplace, muting the gender politics and situatedness of multiple kinds of Arabic that acted, in the original novel, as a critique of the Saudi system. Paratextual framing of the marketed book and translational choices emphasized the fiction as a writing of \"experience,\" bringing it closer to the memoir genre and linking it to a tradition of what I call Orientalist ethnographicism. These effects produce a work and author-figure both exotic and familiar.

9 Geary also mentions the director of the school, S. Garat, a native of Baghdad, who was educated in Paris, and the English teacher, a young Baghdadi Jew, Mr. Michael, who had received his education at the Jesuit College in Bombay.10 Wealthy Jews also used to send their sons to be educated in European institutions, where they were influenced by the atmosphere of the Enlightenment, especially with regard to the benefit from the advantages which participation in the cultural and social activities of the wider society could offer them. Sasun Hiskil (Sassoon Yehezkel) (1860-1932), for example, did Oriental studies at Vienna, where many Jews spoke high German, adopted German names, and dressed and acted like Austrians and Germans.11 In an interview in 1909 with a correspondent of the Hebrew newspaper Ha-Olam (The World), published in Vilna, Sassoon Afandi, at the time one of the representatives of Baghdad in the Ottoman parliament, expressed views inspired by ideas prevalent among European Jews.

This article analyzes the Algerian writer Assia Djebar's uncertain and ambiguous relationship with feminism. While her work is clearly preoccupied with women's experiences, the notion of a collective feminine identity remains a subject of contention, and female characters are frequently presented as both singular and elusive. In \"Vaste est la prison\", the author sets out to trace a coherent genealogy of Algerian women, but the narrative at once hints at and disrupts any clear linking threads. For this reason, I argue that feminist resistance for Djebar revolves not around the uncomplicated celebration of female solidarity, but around a continual shifting between collective and singular critique. Women's resistance to patriarchal oppression in Algeria consists of a continual process of convergence and divergence. Djebar does not propose a single feminist argument but charts instead the very difficult process of creating a shared concrete cause.

Ahmadou Kourouma's Allah n'est pas obligé is set within the context of conflict with Islam. Magic, which derives from animistic thought, is being used unscrupulously by men who are nothing but businessmen willing to exploit the ancient beliefs of their people. These false magicians possess an active imagination that allows them to convince scientifically ignorant people that they can control and manipulate natural forces. Above all, these magicians are psychologically astute manipulators. Sociologically, these magician-businessmen are reassuring to a population in the throes of civil war, because they appear to offer the security of tradition. For this reason, those in political power surround themselves with these magicians so as to continue to execute their control over the uneducated masses. The magicians take full advantage of their position of power. They use fetishes as aids to impress the naive believers they are meant to treat. The fetish has commercial value as well, since it is regularly replaced and can enter the market as an object associated with magical powers. The fetish is associated with a list of sacrifices to make and restrictions to respect-all these rituals being part of the web created by the magician to protect himself against the eventual potential failure of his art to cure the person who has come to him for help.