Racing Muslim Interiority: Racialization, Recognition, and Internment

In this paper I argue that the politics of redress/recognition holds a particular insidious role in (re)producing the contours of racial discipline. In the context of Muslim subjecthoods the labor of curation recognition politics demands not only curtails and reproduces Muslim voices according to the racist dichotomy of savable-good/bad Muslim (Mamdani 2005), but also works to further a type of “psychic internment” (Naber 2006) that operates to reduce Muslim interiority/life into a "mechanism without vitality" (Davidson & Lewis 2010). The material context of Muslim racialization and exclusion in the Global North is such that the Muslim subject is racialized as an always “conquering-contaminating” (Morsi 2016; Sayyid 2012; Rai 2014) “anti-modern artifactual figure” (Mamdani 2005) who remains perpetually “haunting”, “unknowable” and “in excess” (Tyrer 2013; Morsi 2016). And thus, it is Muslim interiority that comes to be produced as a pollutant requiring racial administration. The calculus of claim-making the politics of recognition demands of the misrecognized furthers the racial investment in the eviction of the pollutant that is the “bad Muslim”, and the production of the “savable-good Muslim”. This is the macro-backdrop in which a Muslim creative counterpublic called the Muslim Writers Collective emerges. A collective turning from the conscriptive claim-making labor of redress politics, and instead cultivating a praxis of self/social transformation driven by “radical mutuality” and “self-recognition” (Lorde 1984; hook 2000; Nash 2011, 2019; Simpson 2014; Coulthard 2014; Alexander 2006).