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Muslimness in Contemporary Literary Imaginations

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Muslimness in Contemporary Literary Imaginations TRANSNATIONAL SPACES, TRANSITIONAL PLACES: MUSLIMNESS IN CONTEMPORARY LITERARY IMAGINATIONS _______________________________________ A Dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School at the University of Missouri-Columbia _____________________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy ____________________________________________________________ by NERIMAN KUYUCU Prof. Karen Piper, Dissertation Supervisor MAY 2020 © Copyright by Neriman Kuyucu 2020 All Rights Reserved The undersigned, appointed by the dean of the Graduate School, have examined the dissertation entitled TRANSNATIONAL SPACES, TRANSITIONAL PLACES: MUSLIMNESS IN CONTEMPORARY LITERARY IMAGINATIONS presented by Neriman Kuyucu a candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and hereby certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance. Professor Karen Piper Professor Nathan Hofer Professor Christopher Okonkwo Professor Lynn Itagaki To all the souls who have found home in spaces in between ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am deeply indebted to everyone who has contributed to this dissertation over the past few years. To my supervisor and mentor, Karen Piper, I am forever grateful. Thank you for the patience, care, and intelligence with which you have read and discussed several drafts and chapters. I would also like to extend my deepest gratitude to my committee, Christopher Okonkwo, Nathan Hofer, and Lynn Itagaki for their assistance and suggestions throughout my project. This dissertation would not have been completed without the support of my friends and family near and far. To Aylin, Burçin, and Radka, I am grateful for all the invaluable moments of laughter, reflection, and fun. Thank you for always being there for me, no matter how many miles separate us. Thank you to Kristin, Carley, Becky, and Burcu for your companionship, support, distraction, and commiseration. Special thanks to Tristan who has kept me grounded and adventurous. Thank you for believing in me even when I did not. To my parents and my brother Mehmet, I am exceedingly grateful for your unlimited support. To my father, thank you for always believing in me and supporting all the decisions I’ve made. To you, I owe everything. To my cat Venus, I am thankful for all the cuddles and the constant love. To my younger self, I am eternally grateful for working relentlessly to make all my dreams a reality. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………...ii Abstract………………………………………………………………………………….iv Introduction: The Intersections of Muslim Writing and Muslim Diaspora……………..1 Chapter 1. Towards a New Mode of Reading Muslim Diasporic Writing: Muslim Diaspora Space as a Literary Site……………………………………………...25 Chapter 2. Recovering Voices and Creating Muslim Spaces in Laila Lalami and Leila Aboulela……………………………………………………………………...55 Chapter 3. Muslimness and The Politics of a Homing Desire: Abu-Jaber, Shafak, and Jarrar………………………………...…………………………………………….142 Chapter 4. The Convergence of Islam, Feminism, and Queerness in Muslim Diasporic Writing: Aboulela, Janmohamed, and Tanaïs……………………..178 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………….216 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………221 Vita…………………………………………………………………………………….242 iii ABSTRACT This dissertation focuses on contemporary literature in English produced by writers of Muslim origin. My study analyzes Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account (2014), Leila Abuela’s The Kindness of Enemies (2015), Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent (2003), Elif Shafak’s The Saint of Incipient Sanities (2004) and Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home (2007), and Leila Aboulela’s Minaret (2005), Shelina Janmohamed’s Love in a Headscarf (2009), and Tanwi Nandini Islam’s Bright Lines (2015) to explore and illuminate the ways in which Muslim diasporic subjectivity is being reconfigured in contemporary literary imaginations. Guided by developments in Muslim literary studies, postcolonial and diaspora theories, this dissertation examines, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the particular conjunctures of literature, Muslimness, displacement, and belonging within the new analytic framework of Muslim diaspora space. This project seeks to move beyond the set of discourses—radicalization vs. secularization; Islamism vs. liberalism— that have defined Muslimness to highlight alternative positionalities in between. My analyses of the chosen texts through the lens of Muslim diaspora space, I argue, shift the focus from the preconceived notions about the authors’ positionality as Muslim to the ways in which they create complex characters that represent the variety of Muslim discourses and practices. Rather than focusing on such over-asked questions as “Is the text Islamic or secular?” and “Western or Muslim?,” Muslim diaspora space as a mode of analysis highlights how the writers negotiate the concepts of Islamic vs. secular and Muslim vs. citizen by redefining “Muslimness” as well as “western-ness.” iv Introduction: The Intersections of Muslim Writing and Muslim Diaspora Immediately after the current U.S. administration’s executive order on the travel ban that restricted immigration from seven Muslim countries in 2017, more than fifty literary agents from various agencies in North America issued a collective open call for submissions from Muslim writers. “Like so many of you,” their statement read, “we are gravely alarmed by the present administration’s recent broad ban on refugees and immigrants from Muslim countries [...] fear[ing] the message sent by these bans to people within our country and to those outside of our borders.” The literary agents openly acknowledged the impact of the market forces on cultural production, consumption, and circulation. “This is our open call for stories that will bring increased understanding, tolerance, empathy and compassion in the world,” they added, “We all agree that the current political climate demands a need for a greater presence of authors of Muslim heritage in the book marketplace” (Gore 2017). The concerns of the literary agents speak to the various ways in which Muslim populations have, since 9/11, have wrestled with the discursive constructions of Muslimness, what it means to be Muslim in the Global North: a key concept that underpins the entirety of this project that examines the intersections of contemporary Muslim writing and Muslim diaspora. “The Muslim ban” has gone into effect at a time when Muslims are becoming the fastest growing segment of the diasporic population in the Global North.1 The executive order has demonstrated once again that as the Muslim diaspora in the United States and Europe continues to grow, so do political and legislative efforts to resolve the “problem” 1 See Lipka (2017) and Mohamed (2018) for recent estimates. 1 of Islam. To this end, the complexity of the issues surrounding Muslim identities, including Islamist extremism, the flux of refugees, integration, flows of labor, resistance, and the incompatibility of Islam with Western democratic principles, has frequently been covered by mass media and investigated in academic circles. However, broader theoretical questions about the formation of Muslim subjectivity2 in the diaspora and about literary engagements with the notions of Muslimness in particular remain understudied. This project broadens the perspective of the various ways in which “Muslim diaspora” can be theorized and used as an analytic tool to read narratives produced by writers of Muslim origin from the Muslim Middle Eastern/South Asian/North African3 diasporas. While the bulk of the studies on the notions of Muslim diaspora have examined its usefulness as a conceptual tool through a social science perspective, this project conceptualizes Muslim diaspora space through a postcolonial cultural studies method. It acknowledges the limitations of data-based research on the Muslim diaspora and explores the ways in which literature can contribute to our understanding of Muslim diaspora and the positionality of Muslims within it. In doing so, it seeks to remedy the conceptual and 2 I use “subjectivity” in Brah’s terms as “the site of processes of making sense of our relation to the world” which can also be “the modality in which the precarious and contradictory nature of the subject-in-process is signified or experienced as identity” (Brah 1996, p. 123). 3 The term “the Muslim Middle Eastern/South Asian/North African diasporas” refers to the geography of Islam as explored in Alsultany and Shohat’s Between the Middle East and Americans (2013). Alsultany and Shohat use the term “the Middle East” to “echo this common usage of the term, however inaccurate, to include North Africa as well, since within the public sphere ‘the Middle East’ does tend to ‘cover’ the region of North Africa, including in academic organizations, for example, The Middle East Studies Association.” Alsultany and Shohat’s use of “the Middle East” thus “alludes to the idea of the Middle East as signifying a broad geographical spectrum, while acknowledging that it is a problematic rubric.” “In this sense,” they add, “while South Asia might appear to be outside the scope of a volume dealing with Middle Eastern / North African diasporas, the current cultural politics make it necessary to address the ways in which Islamic Asia (Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kashmir, Indonesia, etc.) and the Middle East become conflated” (21). I use “Muslim diaspora” in this context throughout this project. 2 methodological gaps in diaspora studies, as well as literary studies. This study thus analyzes the
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