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AUTHOR Peter Morey
Amina Yaqin
TITLE Framing Muslims Stereotyping and Representation After 9/11
CATEGORY current affairs academic trade
NUMBER OF PAGES 15 halftones PUBLICATION MONTH May
AUTHOR BIO Peter Morey is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature in the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of East London
Amina Yaqin is Lecturer in Urdu, Department of the Languages and Cultures of South Asia, School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Combining contemporary culture, literature, media, and Islam, this book is a comparative study of how the U.K. and U.S. have come to represent Muslims after 9/11 and 7/7 and how Muslims understand and respond to these stereotypes.
The subject of this book is those images of Muslims which are repeatedly circulated in the cultures of Western countries at the present time. It seeks to trace the restricted, limited ways in which Muslims are stereotyped and ‘framed’ within the political, cultural and media discourses of the West.
Far from being accurate or neutral, contemporary images of Muslims presented by politicians and in mainstream media and cultural forms, are almost always tied to an agenda which simultaneously announces its desire to engage with them while at the same time forcing debate into such contorted and tenuous channels as to make a meaningful flow of cross-cultural discussion almost impossible. ‘National security’, ‘strategic interests’, ‘multiculturalism’, ‘integration’, ‘preventing terrorism’ – in fact, all the buzzwords of contemporary political life, do little more than obscure a chronically one-sided dialogue which Muslims are invited to join but not change, or forever remain outside the boundaries of civil debate, doomed to be spoken for and represented, but never to speak themselves. Such a situation does a gross disservice to the variety and vitality of Muslim life, beliefs and cultural forms of expression as well as being a bad idea for those genuine about addressing pressing social problems.
In the book the authors lay out one way of understanding the relationship between the representations of Muslims in a political sense and those representations that take place in the mainstream media. In the end, while they argue that the framing of Muslims is still endemic in political and media representations, they acknowledge that the space for other articulations is being carved out, quietly and for the most part beyond the gaze of Western power elites, in the ruminations of Muslim bloggers and web users and in everyday practices. Such outlaw spaces are not the subject of this book and the authors leave it to others to explore them and bring them to the attention of a public generally force-fed a particular line about Islam and its adherents. Instead, they hope to highlight, in more detail than has hitherto been the case, the constituent parts of the mainstream stereotyping of Muslims, being convinced that it is only through honest self-scrutiny and a consideration of our practices at every level, that the debate – and thus the world – can move forward.
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AUTHOR Neeti Nair
TITLE Changing Homelands Hindu Politics and the Partition of India
CATEGORY history monograph
NUMBER OF PAGES 352 3 halftones, 4 maps PUBLICATION MONTH April
AUTHOR BIO Neeti Nair was born in Madurai, India in 1978. Educated at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University and Tufts University, she is now Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia. This is her first book.
BOOK DESCRIPTION
In a nuanced, revisionist account of Punjabi Hindus and the partition of India, Nair shows that rather than being foreordained by cultural differences and colonial policy, partition was a stunning, and very late, surprise. In South Asia, the word “Partition” still conjures up powerful images. This book revists the Partition through a study of political developments in the key province of Punjab, foregrounding the most forgotten of that province’s three main religious communities: the Hindus.
Using conventional archival material as well as uncommon oral histories, Neeti Nair probes both the causes and consequences of this historic event through the actions of a community that, although a religiously defined minority in the Punjab was a majority in the rest of India. Thus Punjabi Hindus’ varied political trajectories in the first half of the twentieth century are not only central to understanding the why and how of Partition, they are also important for the light they throw on the fears behind, and perils of, embracing a politics of minoritarianism. RIGHTS HELD
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English language reprint rights for India and South Asia licensed to Permanent Black
AUTHOR Christopher Nealon
TITLE The Matter of Capital Poetry and Crisis in the American Century
CATEGORY literature monograph
NUMBER OF PAGES 172 PUBLICATION MONTH April
AUTHOR BIO Chritopher Nealon was born in Valley Stream, New York in 1967. Educated at Williams College, Warren Wilson College and Cornell University he is now Associate Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of two volumes of poetry and Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall published by Duke University Press in 2001.
BOOK DESCRIPTION
An assessment of the relationship between English language poetry and the history of capitalism in the 20th century. In The Matter of Capital, Christopher Nealon argues that the workings of capitalism have been a central concern for poetry in English from the interwar years to today, and that this concern is worked out in a kind of content that formalist readings of this poetry have consistently overlooked. The book focuses on how, confronted with the capitalist capture of aesthetic experience, 20th century poetry makes recourse to its own history as a textual form, and to its long intimacy with rhetoric, to generate models for protecting poetry from the punctual catastrophes and incremental crises capital creates. For Nealon, to historicize poetry is to track what kind of textuality, and what kind of rhetoric, poetry thinks it is - and what forces it thinks can array against the dominations of the economy. This reading practice allows Nealon to re-think Marxist accounts of what it means to historicize literature - a project that, since the work of Fredric Jameson, has largely relied on readings of the novel, and on a notion of texts as inert objects to be reactivated by critics. The Matter of Capital gives poetry its place in the central drama of the century, drawing its studies from Ezra Pound, W.H. Auden, John Ashbery, Jack Spicer and the language movement, and the contemporary poets Kevin Davies and Claudia Rankine.
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