Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels - Hardcover

Chambers, Claire

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1137520884 ISBN 13: 9781137520883

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

Synopsis

This book is the sequel to Britain Through Muslim Eyes and examines contemporary novelistic representations of and by Muslims in Britain. It builds on studies of the five senses and ‘sensuous geographies’ of postcolonial Britain, and charts the development since 1988 of a fascinating and important body of fiction by Muslim-identified authors. It is a selective literary history, exploring case-study novelistic representations of and by Muslims in Britain to allow in-depth critical analysis through the lens of sensory criticism. It argues that, for authors of Muslim heritage in Britain, writing the senses is often a double-edged act of protest. Some of the key authors excoriate a suppression or cover-up of non-heteronormativity and women’s rights that sometimes occurs in Muslim communities. Yet their protest is especially directed at secular culture’s ocularcentrism and at successive British governments’ efforts to surveil, control, and suppress Muslim bodies.

About this title

About the Author

Claire Chambers is Senior Lecturer in Global Literature at the University of York, UK, where she teaches modern Anglophone writing from South Asia, the Arab world, and their diasporas. Her previous books are British Muslim Fictions, Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora, Britain Through Muslim Eyes, and Rivers of Ink.

From the Back Cover

This book is the sequel to Britain Through Muslim Eyes and examines contemporary novelistic representations of and by Muslims in Britain. It builds on studies of the five senses and ‘sensuous geographies’ of postcolonial Britain, and charts the development since 1988 of a fascinating and important body of fiction by Muslim-identified authors. It is a selective literary history, exploring case-study novelistic representations of and by Muslims in Britain to allow in-depth critical analysis through the lens of sensory criticism. It argues that, for authors of Muslim heritage in Britain, writing the senses is often a double-edged act of protest. Some of the key authors excoriate a suppression or cover-up of non-heteronormativity and women’s rights that sometimes occurs in Muslim communities. Yet their protest is especially directed at secular culture’s ocularcentrism and at successive British governments’ efforts to surveil, control, and suppress Muslim bodies.

Edition details

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1137520884
• ISBN 13: 9781137520883
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 340