Despite its emblematic place within contemporary racism and its increasingly important position in defining relations between states and ethnicised minorities, Islamophobia remains a contested, ...frequently unrecognised and largely under-theorised form of racism. The Politics of Islamophobia provides a definitive contribution to these debates, offering a theoretically sophisticated account which draws upon a series of substantive case studies to position Islamophobia as an expression of racialised governmentality. By taking into account connections across different national contexts, and by moving beyond the limiting framing of the war on terror which has dominated recent debates, this book offers a new perspective on the study of Islamophobia.
In this article we are not concerned with the management of extremists, but with the regulation of wider populations stereotyped as extreme based on the conflation of difference with politicality. ...Attempts to regulate racialized populations by excising the political surplus seen as constituting excessive Muslim difference are viewed in the context of a Muslim identity politics that places the ontology of the social into crisis by challenging the terms on which modernity’s racial projects subjectify actors. As seemingly non-racial, Muslims are represented as haunting, incorporeal and incomplete subjects. Islamophobia emerges as a corrective, racializing apparently incompletely racial subjects. Its success is underwritten by the attempts to deny the racist nature of Islamophobia. The shift from managing lawbreakers to stereotyping entire populations as extremists is central to this.
Framing Islamophobia Tyrer, David
The Politics of Islamophobia,
11/2015
Book Chapter
So, where to begin? Perhaps we should start at the beginning by pointing out that Islamophobia is a form of religious discrimination that emerged most forcefully as a backlash against Muslims in the ...wake of the terrorist atrocities that occurred on 11 September 2001. Only it didn’t. The term was originally coined in the late 1980s (Quraishi 2005: 60). Then again, it had first been used some decades earlier at the start of the twentieth century (Vakil 2011). But wait, for Islamophobia is not a form of religious discrimination at all, but an emblematic expression of contemporary biopolitical racism (Tyrer
Now you see me Tyrer, David
The Politics of Islamophobia,
11/2015
Book Chapter
Questions about visibility loom large in discussions about Muslims (cf. Jonker and Amiraux 2006; Peter 2011) and there is a mode of Islamophobia that appears to oscillate between suspending Muslims ...in invisibility and inflating their difference as a hypervisibility. For example, the populist and far right campaigns about Islamisation frequently deploy the burka as a shorthand for the Muslim presence, so that all but the most contested and problematised forms of Muslim difference are rendered invisible. The question of Muslim visibility is therefore not unproblematic, and it has given way to a manifestation of Islamophobia that appears to entail cases
Islamophobia, then, can be understood as a postcolonial problem insofar as it emerges in the wake of the presence of postcolonial populations that provoke a symbolic crisis to the logics of ...modernity’s racial grammar, and in so doing present a series of questions for the governance of populations under racial logics. It can also be understood as a post-political problem. This dimension of Islamophobia is revealed in the emergence of far-right Islamophobia, although it is also manifested in the logics of Islamophobia in a more fundamental way. Post-politics can be understood as a series of attempts to displace or suppress
Certain conjurings seem to burst through into our world in moments of shocking hyperreality as though from another dimension. One way of putting it is to suggest that they leave us lost for words, ...struggling to integrate them into the symbolic. But to consider them simply as a fantasy seems lacking, for at the same time they manifest as terrifying. If fantasy is the handmaid of Islamophobia then its power to mobilise seems contingent on its visceral nature. It is therefore helpful to turn to the question of affect and emotion since it seems that to disentangle Islamophobia from this
If the rise of Islamophobia has been thoroughly resistible, as Poynting and Mason (2007) note, it has at the same time seemed somehow inevitable. Racial politics are often marked by periods of ...simmering tension with sporadic outbursts following trigger events which act as catalysts for eruptions of hate, so even in spite of the difficulties attendant upon reducing Islamophobia simply to a post-9/11 backlash, we still have to acknowledge that the subsequent growth of Islamophobia has been impacted by the major events of recent years, including both terrorist attacks and the them/us language of the war on terror. But the
Islamophobia emerges as a provisional solution to the problem of how to name a people that interrupt racial namings. The problem with self-ascription is that it is a fundamental challenge to symbolic ...authority; it does not only challenge the terms on which society has come historically to be organised (formally and informally), but it also forges new allegiances between groups previously divided by institutionalised racial and ethnic lines, and fractures other prior allegiances. It institutes new subject positions that transform the relationships of groups to each other, to civil society, and to the state. In the case of Muslims, it
As a piece of political artwork, Yoko Ono’sWhite Chess Set(1966) engaged with troubled questions concerning agency, power, subjectivity and antagonism, and involved dissolving the difference between ...antagonists, thus causing the game itself to collapse (Danto 2007: 75). This metaphor helps illustrate the epistemic conditions that underwrite the emergence of Islamophobia. Within the terms of a game – and for the sake of argument, let us call it biopolitics – that institutes a binary inside/outside the nation fracture within human populations and gives way to modes of governance that institute ascribed subject positions elaborating this division, a contemporary condition in which
Culture is a constant reference in debates surrounding Islam in Europe. Yet the notion of culture is commonly restricted to conceptual frames of multiculturalism where it relates to group identities, ...collective ways of life and recognition. This volume extends such analysis of culture by approaching it as semiotic practice which conjoins the making of subjects with the configuration of the social.Examining fields such as memory, literature, film, and Islamic art, the studies in this volume explore culture as another element in the assemblage of rationalities governing European Islam.From this perspective, the transformations of European identities can be understood as a matter of cultural practice and politics, which extend the analytical frames of political philosophy, historical legacies, normative orders and social dynamics.
