{"title":"Becoming \"Black\" and Muslim in Today's Russia","authors":"Tatiana Rabinovich","doi":"10.1215/15366936-9547943","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-9547943","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Global anti-Muslim racism takes new and specific forms in contemporary Russia by mobilizing the shifting meanings of \"Blackness\" to stigmatize vulnerable populations. Stemming from the tsarist and Soviet pasts, these meanings of \"Blackness\" (and \"whiteness\") have been refracted by the dramatic socioeconomic and political shifts since the collapse of the Soviet Union. This article draws on the accounts of working-class devout Muslim women, with whom the author conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Saint Petersburg between 2015 and 2017, to elucidate their experiences of how anti-Muslim racism operates as a tool of exclusion, deployed along racial, religious, ethnic, class, and gender lines. The women's daily responses to anti-Muslim racism suggest how solidarities might sustain communities targeted by racism, while laying the foundations for future intersectional anti-racist movements in the country.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47846669","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Shari’a Barbie’s Afterlives","authors":"Amira Jarmakani","doi":"10.1215/15366936-9547896","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-9547896","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article investigates a sprawling archive of memes (about “Shakira law,” “shari’a Barbie,” and the “jihad squad,”) and incorporates analysis of the original Serial podcast (about the case of Adnan Syed) to look at the role of metadata and dataveillance in criminalizing and apprehending Muslims. Given technological innovations, like autocorrect functions that “correct” conversations about the “racialization” of Muslims to the “radicalization” of Muslims (to give one example), algorithmic manipulations of data depend on sexualizing and racializing assemblages that tell a familiar story about the way Muslim lives are shaped by the discourses and representations through which they are figured and apprehended. The author explores the way that this archive of memes figures Muslims as a “measurable type”—whereby they are profiled into highly fraught categories, like “terrorist,” through algorithmic interpretations of their online activity—therefore enabling what John Cheney-Lippold calls “soft biopolitics.” Given the ability of this sort of data to materially shape a person’s life, the author looks at the roles of metadata and big data in apprehending Muslims, Arabs, and SWANA-identified people through a biopolitical framing of population, where apprehend is understood in both senses of the word—in terms of understanding Muslims as well as criminalizing them.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91204045","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Race, Gender, and Religion","authors":"M. Moallem","doi":"10.1215/15366936-9547874","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-9547874","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article focuses on anti-Muslim racism as a discourse that collapses race and religion and cannot be reduced to phobia. It is instead about a racial project of accumulation based on European superiority and how cultural racism upholds the European civilizational project. The author argues that Islamophobia should be traced back to colonial modernity, its regimes of othering, and its perception of Islam as Mohammedanism that conceals its nature as a fetishistic, primitive, barbaric, patriarchal, and irrational set of beliefs. To illustrate anti-Muslim racism, the author elaborates briefly on three interconnected ideas: the construction of Islam as a unified religious and cultural mindset, its fetishistic character, and its enigmatic image of the woman to reflect on how Islam is presented as the antonym of Western civilization.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87044281","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Searching for the Next Intifada","authors":"Z. Bhutto","doi":"10.1215/15366936-9547969","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-9547969","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article explores the possibilities of distinctly queer and Muslim futures rooted not only in Muslim diaspora communities but in the Muslim world itself. The Palestinian intifadas of 1987 and 2000 are the author’s primary inspiration, whereas the future becomes a blank canvas onto which one can imagine the next global intifada, a giant popular uprising fought on many fronts. The author examines the work of artists Jassem Hindi, Layla tul Qadr, Saba Taj, and Hushidar Mortezaie, who look at the future in terms of parallel imaginative possibilities rather than in temporal terms. In addition to these artists, the writings of scholars and artists Jose Estaban Muñoz, Ronak Kapadia, Etel Adnan, and Hamed Sinno further emphasize the future-facing nature of both queerness and Islam, as well as the radical possibilities of telling queer Muslim stories in the future.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81301767","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How Hate Crime Laws Perpetuate Anti-Muslim Racism","authors":"Evelyn Alsultany","doi":"10.1215/15366936-9547954","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-9547954","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay focuses on two cases in which Muslim youth were murdered yet law enforcement refused to classify the murders as hate crimes. It examines the 2015 murders of Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu-Salha, and Razan Abu-Salha in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and the 2017 murder of Nabra Hassanen in Reston, Virginia. This author argues that the denial of these cases as hate crimes contributes to the diminishment of anti-Muslim racism and should be understood as a form of racial gaslighting—a systematic denial of the persistence and severity of racism. In conversation with those advocating for rethinking the criminal justice system through prison abolition and restorative justice, it posits that seeking state recognition for hate crimes cannot provide justice given that the state is responsible for constructing Muslims as a national security threat. It explores how anti-Muslim racism is upheld through extremely narrow and problematic definitions of racism and hate crimes, through an approach to hate crimes that prioritizes punishment over civil rights, and through creating a dilemma for Muslim communities who must seek recognition of anti-Muslim racism from the same state that enacts surveillance and violence on them.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44133280","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"When the World Sleeps\"","authors":"Malak Mattar","doi":"10.1215/15366936-9548002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-9548002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43661704","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Transnational Feminist Approaches to Anti-Muslim Racism","authors":"Z. Korkman, Sherene H. Razack","doi":"10.1215/15366936-9547863","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-9547863","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue brings together feminist scholars to theorize antiMuslim racism. It specifically attends to an understanding of anti-Muslim racism as transnational, proliferating, and linked to other racisms and projects of rule. Three key questions are addressed: How do we understand global circuits of power as they travel and shape local contexts in which anti-Muslim racism operates, including contexts in whichMuslims are the majority? How is global anti-Muslim racism a gendered phenomenon? What is a revolutionary politics in which resistant forms of Muslimness imagine another world?With its emphasis on the transnational, the special issue assembles scholars whose work on the regional contexts of Turkey, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran, the Middle East, Europe, Canada, and the United States, among other nations, reveals the global circuits along which anti-Muslim racism travels. Their explorations of how the global and the local are intertwined pay special attention to howdiscourses of anti-Muslim racism install white, Western subjects as superior and the heteronormative white family as the basis of political life. This is a racism that morphs as it travels transnationally and attaches itself to supremacist, colonial, and imperial projects everywhere. The special issue offers an explicit feminist analysis, paying attention to how racial discourses are gendered and sexualized and how thosewho are the targets of anti-Muslim racism articulate their gendered dreams of an alternative lifeworld in the face of their marginalization.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49122468","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Four Editorials from Bint al-Nīl","authors":"Tom J. Abi Samra","doi":"10.1215/15366936-9547907","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-9547907","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article is in two parts. The first part provides an overview of the life of the Egyptian feminist Doria Shafik by drawing extensively on the work of her biographer Cynthia Nelson. This allows readers unfamiliar with Shafik to understand her social, political, and cultural milieu. The second part consists of translations from the Arabic of four editorials that Shafik wrote in her feminist magazine Bint al-Nīl.","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79341188","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Who's Terrorizing Who?","authors":"Ginetta E. B. Candelario","doi":"10.1215/15366936-9547841","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-9547841","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54178,"journal":{"name":"Meridians-Feminism Race Transnationalism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46091234","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}