Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels

Claire Chambers

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781137520890
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This book is the sequel to Britain Through Muslim Eyes and examines contemporary novelistic representations of and by Muslims in Britain. It builds on studies of the five senses and 'sensuous geographies' of postcolonial Britain, and charts the development since 1988 of a fascinating and important body of fiction by Muslim-identified authors. It is a selective literary history, exploring case-study novelistic representations of and by Muslims in Britain to allow in-depth critical analysis through the lens of sensory criticism. Itargues that, for authors of Muslim heritage in Britain, writing the senses is often a double-edged act of protest. Some of the key authors excoriate a suppression or cover-up of non-heteronormativity and women's rights that sometimes occurs in Muslim communities. Yet their protest is especially directed at secular culture's ocularcentrism and at successive British governments' efforts to surveil, control, and suppress Muslim bodies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. The 1990s: ‘It Was Only Through Touch That We Really Knew Things’
• Part II. Smelling and Tasting the 2000s
• Part III. Taking Soundings in the Technologized 2010s
• Back Matter