Culture, Diaspora and Modernity in Muslim Writing

Dr Rehana Ahmed (Queen Mary), Professor Stephen Morton (Southampton) and Professor Peter Morey (East London)

Note: Internal event not open to external attendees.

This panel discussion will reflect on some of the main arguments presented in Culture, Diaspora, and Modernity in Muslim Writing (Routledge, 2012). Specifically, it will address the relationship between Islamophobia and cultural forms such as the novel, and consider the ways in which recent literary and cultural representations of Muslims have challenged stereotypes of the Muslim as Islamic fundamentalist. In so doing, it will also consider how Muslim writing has contributed to the invention of an Islamic public sphere.

Dr Rehana Ahmed (Queen Mary), Professor Stephen Morton (Southampton) and Professor Peter Morey (East London) Culture, Diaspora and Modernity in Muslim Writing

About the Speakers

Rehana Ahmed is Lecturer in English at Queen Mary University of London where she teaches postcolonial and contemporary literature. Her AHRC-funded monograph, Writing British Muslims: Religion, Class and Multiculturalism , will be published by Manchester University Press this summer. She is also co-editor of Culture, Diaspora, and Modernity in Muslim Writing (Routledge, 2012) and South Asian Resistances in Britain, 1858-1947 (Continuum, 2011).

Stephen Morton is Professor in English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Southampton. He has taught and published articles on postcolonial literature, film and critical theory. His publications include States of Emergency: Colonialism, Literature, and Law (Liverpool University Press, 2013); Terror and the Postcolonial , co-edited with Elleke Boehmer (Blackwell 2009); Foucault in an Age of Terror (Palgrave 2008) co-edited with Stephen Bygrave; Salman Rushdie: Fictions of Postcolonial Modernity (Palgrave 2007); Gayatri Spivak: Ethics, Subalternity and the Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Polity 2006); and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Routledge 2003); as well as articles in Textual Practice, Public Culture, New Formations, Parallax, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Canadian Literature, The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory and Interventions: An International Journal of Postcolonial Studies .

Peter Morey is Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies in the School of Arts and Digital Industries at the University of East London. He specialises in colonial and postcolonial literature, culture and theory, and has a special interest in issues of race, nation and diaspora with particular reference to South Asian writing. He is co-author (with Amina Yaqin) of Framing Muslims: Stereotype and Representation after 9/11 (Harvard University Press, 2011): co-editor of a special issue of the journal, Interventions on ‘Muslims in the Frame’ (12:2, 2010); and joint editor of a collection of essays entitled Culture, Identity and Diaspora in Muslim Writing (Routledge, forthcoming in 2012). His previous books include Fictions of India: Narrative and Power (Edinburgh UP, 2000), Rohinton Mistry (Manchester UP, 2004) and Alternative Indias: Writing, Nation and Communalism (Rodopi, 2006), and he is also the author of a number of articles and book chapters in various publications. He is currently RCUK Global Uncertainties Leadership Fellow heading the Muslims, Trust and Cultural Dialogue project. Between 2007 and 2010 he was Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded Framing Muslims international research network. He is currently working on a monograph on Islamophobia and the Novel and a co-authored book on Muslims, the West and the Question of Trust .

Organiser: Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies

Contact email: cb92@soas.ac.uk