New release: Making the British Muslim. By Nicole Falkenhayner
7. July 2014
Representations of the Rushdie Affair and Figures of the War-On-Terror Decade
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2014
(Europe in a Global Context, 3)
Reference
Tracing representations of the Rushdie affair from 1989 to 2009, this study establishes a genealogy of how British Muslims appeared on the public scene and how this subject position developed. The book combines innovative approaches in the theory of representation with close readings and rhetorical analysis of newspaper debates, novels, films, a memoir and political publications. It establishes that the figure of the British Muslim encapsulated the identity politics of a minority group just as much as the identity politics of Great Britain, and ‘the West’ in general, in the last 20 years.
Falkenhayner argues that the imaginary that made the British Muslim was one of constant deferral of the acceptance of Islam in Europe as an intrinsic part of its self-image, and that dreams of purity on both the Islamic and the mainstream British sides of the divide denied an already hybridized cultural reality. (publisher)
Dr. Nicole Falkenhayner is a postdoctoral fellow at the Graduate School
“Factual and Fictional Narration”, University of Freiburg. Between 2008 and 2012 she was a research associate in the Research Group “Idioms of Social Analysis”, Center of Excellence, University of Konstanz where she completed her dissertation.