Towards an ethics of reading Muslims

Encountering difference in Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire

Datos Bibliográficos

ID5725854
AutoresRehana Ahmed (Queen Mary University of London, London, UK, autor de correspondencia)
Año2021
Volumen35
Número7
Páginas1145-1161
Fecha de publicación2021-07-03
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaTextual Practice (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0950-236X • E-ISSN: 1470-1308
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/0950236x.2020.1731582
OpenAlexW3005405882
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas10

This article explores the ethics of reading across difference in a secular literary marketplace that is invested in representations of Muslims. Focusing on Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire (2017), it considers how this high-profile novel anticipates and negotiates the pressures of anthropological reading practices, including in its representation of the ‘veiled' Muslim woman, and highlights the novel's concern with the sensory everyday - especially the aural - as a means of bypassing the violence of surveillance and the visual more broadly in connecting with others. By examining the characters' encounters, the article considers how Home Fire negotiates its implied reader's encounter with the text. It argues that while the novel's success lies partly in its use of spectacular images of Muslims, its overt theatricality in fact opens up a space beyond the frame within which Muslims are normatively seen or read, and enables a reading encounter that resists an easy consumption of difference. Through its analysis of Shamsie's novel, the article explores the possibility of building through reading a ‘differentiated solidarity’ (Iris Marion Young) - connections forged across lines of difference that nevertheless respect and retain the distinction of that difference - and thereby intervenes in debates about the ethics of writing and reading others

Aesthetics · Art · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Solidarity · Gender Studies · Islamic Studies and History · Law · Media, Religion, Digital Communication · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies