ABSTRACT

This article considers Nikesh Shukla’s The Good Immigrant (2016) alongside two anthologies of essays by British Muslim women: Mariam Khan’s It’s Not About the Burqa (2019) and Sabeena Akhtar’s Cut from the Same Cloth? (2021). Situating them within the publishing industry’s racializing practices, which valorize writing by authors of colour as authentically representative of their cultures while devaluing it as less “literary” than white British writing, the article asks how the foregrounding of religiosity rather than race in Akhtar’s and Khan’s anthologies works to confirm or challenge these dominant terms of reception. The article is interested in how these anthologies might trouble the boundary between “culture” as the values and practices subscribed to by a racially minoritized community, and “culture” as the self-reflexive expression of individual creativity. Ultimately, it suggests the essay anthology might point to a form of literary solidarity that reaches beyond the confines of the neo-liberal marketplace even while remaining partly constrained by them.

摘要

本文考虑了尼凯什·舒克拉 (Nikesh Shukla) 的《好移民》 (2016 年) 以及英国穆斯林女性的两本散文选集：玛丽雅姆·汗 (Mariam Khan) 的《与罩袍无关》(It's Not About the Burqa ) (2019 年) 和萨比纳·阿赫塔尔 (Sabeena Akhtar) 的《裁剪自同一块布》(Cut from the Same Cloth)？（2021）。文章将他们置于出版业的种族化实践中，即重视有色人种作家的写作，认为其真正代表了他们的文化，同时贬低其文学性，不如英国白人写作，本文提出了如何在阿赫塔尔和可汗的作品中将宗教信仰而不是种族置于前台。选集致力于确认或挑战这些主流的接受术语。文章感兴趣的是这些选集如何打破“文化”（作为少数种族群体所认同的价值观和实践）与“文化”（作为个人创造力的自我反思性表达）之间的界限。最终，