| Summary: | The rising tide of Islamophobia and the consequent acts of violence pertaining to it over the
past couple of years, is inflicting misery on Muslims living across the globe. This situation
calls for a clear understanding of the phenomenon of Islamophobia. Using the New Historicist
approach, this paper embarks on reading Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album (1995) in the
backdrop of the politics of Islamophobia in the pre-9/11 context. It thus attempts to highlight
the working of the West-driven anti-Muslim political and literary discourse prevalent during
the pre-9/11, or post-Cold-War era. The application of Stephen Greenblatt’s thesis of power,
subversion and containment enables us to examine the selected novel by situating it within the
actual political discourse prevalent during the time of its production to examine its treatment
of the Western political narrative of Islamophobia. The study finds that since the 1990s, the
West has been relying heavily on the political discourse that intensifies the narrative of
Islamophobia in order to contain the subversion it encountered in the form of rising Muslim
influence and immigration crises in the West. In the case of literary discourse however, we
suggest that while The Black Album (1995) may seem to comply to the Western narrative of
Islamophobia, it also offers sights of subversion to the anti-Muslim narrative by exposing
Western bias and racist tendencies; and, in return, it ultimately demands negotiation and
change.
|
|---|