This study - the first of its kind - situates Rohinton Mistry's writing in its cultural and historical context. It explores key features, such as the legacy of Zoroastrianism, Parsi anglophilia, recent Indian history, and the Persian and European narrative traditions on which Mistry draws to produce his distinctive postcolonial fictions.

Islamophobia is one of the most prevalent forms of prejudice in the world today. This timely book reveals the way in which Islamophobia's pervasive power is being met with responses that challenge it and the worldview on which it rests.The volume breaks new ground by outlining the characteristics of contemporary Islamophobia across a range of political, historic, and cultural public debates in Europe and the United States. Chapters examine issues such as: how anti-Muslim prejudice f...

This book critically engages with the contemporary breakdown of trust between Muslim and non-Muslim communities in the West. It argues that a crisis of trust currently hampers intercultural relations and obstructs full participation in citizenship and civil society for those who fall prey to the suspicions of the state and their fellow citizens. This crisis of trust presents a challenge to the plurality of modern societies where religious identities have come to demand an equal recognition...

In an era of rampant Islamophobia, what do literary representations of Muslims and anti-Muslim bigotry tell us about changing concepts of cultural difference? In Islamophobia and the Novel, Peter Morey analyzes how recent works of fiction have framed and responded to the rise of anti-Muslim prejudice, showing how their portrayals of Muslims both reflect and refute the ideological preoccupations of media and politicians in the post-9/11 West.Islamophobia and the Novel

In an era of rampant Islamophobia, what do literary representations of Muslims and anti-Muslim bigotry tell us about changing concepts of cultural difference? In Islamophobia and the Novel, Peter Morey analyzes how recent works of fiction have framed and responded to the rise of anti-Muslim prejudice, showing how their portrayals of Muslims both reflect and refute the ideological preoccupations of media and politicians in the post-9/11 West.Islamophobia and the Novel

Fiction by writers of Muslim background forms one of the most diverse, vibrant and high-profile corpora of work being produced today - from the trail-blazing writing of Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi, which challenged political and racial orthodoxies in the 1980s, to that of a new generation including Mohsin Hamid, Nadeem Aslam and Kamila Shamsie. This collection reflects the variety of those fictions. Experts in English, South Asian, and postcolonial literatures address the nature of M...

Explores the role of women’s status, bodies, and sexuality in global conflicts.Women's bodies have become a battleground. Around the world, people argue about veiling, schooling for Afghan girls, and "SlutWalk" protests, all of which involve issues of women's sexuality and freedom. Globalization, with its emphasis on human rights and individuality, heats up these arguments. In Of Virgins and Martyrs, David Jacobson takes the reader on a fascinating tour of...

Muslim Diaspora identifies those aspects of migratory experience that shatter or reinforce a group’s attachment to its homeland and affect its readiness to adapt to a new country.The contributors to this collection examine many dimensions of life in the Diaspora and demonstrate that identity is always constructed in relation to others. They show how religious identity in diaspora is mediated by many other factors such as:GenderClassEthnic origin

While globalization unifies the world, divisions re-emerge within it in the form of a spectacular separation between Islam and the West. How can it be that Huntington’s contested idea of a clash of civilizations became such a powerful political myth through which so many people look at the world?Bottici and Challand disentangle such a process of myth-making both in the West and in Muslim majority countries, and call for a renewed critical attitude towards it. By analysing a process...

"Illustrates the complex and contradictory impact of Muslim revivalism on the expectations and hopes of Egyptian youth . . . Recommended." — ChoiceAgainst the backdrop of the revolutionary uprisings of 2011–2013, Samuli Schielke asks how ordinary Egyptians confront the great promises and grand schemes of religious commitment, middle class respectability, romantic love, and political ideologies in their daily lives, and how they make sense of the existential...

Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective is the first sustained study of gender-consciousness in the Palestinian creative imagination. Drawing on concepts from postcolonial feminist theory, Ball analyses a range of literary and filmic works by major creative practitioners including Michel Khleifi , Liana Badr, Annemarie Jacir, Elia Suleiman, Mona Hatoum and Suheir Hammad, and reveals a hitherto unrecognized trajectory in gender-consciousness under development in...

Conflicts involving religion have returned to the forefront of international relations. And yet political scientists and policymakers have continued to assume that religion has long been privatized in the West. This secularist assumption ignores the contestation surrounding the category of the "secular" in international politics. The Politics of Secularism in International Relations shows why this thinking is flawed, and provides a powerful alternative.Elizabeth Shakman Hu...