Includes bibliographical references (pages 257-288) and index.
Contents:
Part I. The 1990s: 'It was only through touch that we really new things' -- 'Touch me, baby': Ahdaf Soueif's In the eye of the sun -- 'I wanted a human touch': Hanif Kureishi's The black album -- Part II. Smelling and tasting the 2000s -- Fiction of olfaction: Nadeem Aslam's Maps for lost lovers and Monica Ali's Brick lane -- Taste the difference: Leila Aboulela, Yasmin Crowther, and Robin Yassin-Kassab -- Part III. Taking soundings in the technologized 2010s -- Sound and fury: Tabish Khair's Just another jihadi Jane and Kamila Shamsie's Home fire -- The doors of posthuman sensory perception in Mohsin Hamid's Exit west -- Conclusion.
Summary:
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. It argues 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.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.