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Against the Fear of Complexity: De-racialising the Muslim Migrant in Elif Shafak’s "Honour"
Dalarna University, School of Language, Literatures and Learning, English. (Litteratur, identitet och transkulturalitet)ORCID iD: 0000-0002-8434-1747
2021 (English)Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

In 2000, the Parekh report foresaw two possible futures for the country, namely, a narrow and inward-looking tendency that would only accentuate the rifts between the nations of the UK and its denizens and, on the other hand, a country that had the potential to develop as “a community of citizens and communities,” provided it underwent a series of transformations, including the “rethinking [of] the national story and national identity” (xiii). The increase in anti-Muslim racism after 9/11 (Poynting & Mason 2006), the perceived crisis of multiculturalism and the increasing dominance in the public sphere of populist, ultra-conservative discourses signal that this transformation of national identity has not occurred in the terms of the report but rather as a consequence of what Appadurai has termed the “fear of small numbers” (2006). Several studies have pointed to the criminalisation of Muslim communities in newspapers, and the way in which media reports on honour killings have “misrepresented ethnic minorities and engendered a sense of mainstream moral superiority” that envisions the Muslim migrant “other” as morally inferior (Gill 2006). In her 2012 novel Honour, British-Turkish writer Elif Shafak questions the “representational violence” (Shapiro 1998) exerted by media by imaginatively engaging with the complexities of the socio-cultural conditions in the home and host countries that lie behind the unreported realities of perpetrators and victims of gender violence against women in a family of Turkish Kurdish migrants to Britain in the 1970s. This paper will contend that Shafak’s Honour embodies a type of ethical engagement with this “representational violence” that fosters a way of imagining the nation differently through the perspective of its Muslim migrant “other.” 

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2021.
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URN: urn:nbn:se:du-39210OAI: oai:DiVA.org:du-39210DiVA, id: diva2:1622774
Conference
Nordic Migration Research conference
Available from: 2021-12-23 Created: 2021-12-23 Last updated: 2023-04-14Bibliographically approved

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Zamorano Llena, Carmen

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CiteExportLink to record
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  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
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Language
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