Refusing Internment, Reclaiming Vitality, and Moving Past the Bargain Of Recognition: The Case of a Muslim Creative Counterpublic

The overarching goal of my project is to investigate the tactics of resistance and self-making available and picked up by those living on the receiving end of overbearing racializing structures. Actively listening to the formation and operation of a Muslim creative counterpublic called the Muslim Writers Collective (MWC) demonstrates that the analytics of self/social transformation available to racialized actors cannot simply be limited to ‘resistance’, understood as antagonist-oppositionality, and ‘transformation’, understood through the frame of recognition politics. The study of MWC draws on an ethnographic full-participant observation of two chapters - located in Toronto and New York City - in addition to 30 conversational interviews of performers, organizers, and attendees. For MWC regulars, comprised of racialized actors fielded to perpetually remain in quarantine and internment, expansion, revelation and mundanification emerge as powerful acts of refusal. Through communal storytelling, improvisation, and congregational experimentation, the altar of whiteness comes to be decentered, and a refusal of abjecthood and subalternity is collectively embodied. MWC fosters a space in which generative acts of refusal operate to engender an analytics of resistance and transformation prioritizing vitality and subjectivity. In consequence, actively rejecting the static, unidimensional, and reductive constructs of Muslimhood circulated in dominant racializing public(s). Hence, in contrast to the re-inscribing role of the corrective curations antagonist-recognition politics demands, MWC locates self/social transformation in the hazardous horizontal work of bearing witness to internal difference, in all its contradictions, incoherencies, and divergences, in order to ignite vitality as a congregation, as a Jama’ah.