Anti-Muslim racism operates through contradictions and unstable imperial terrain, not a well-oiled machine.
Evidence
To point to changes, complications, and contradictions within anti- Muslim racism is not to erase its potency but to show that it is neither straightforward nor simple. It is a complex phenomenon that needs to be understood at many levels. It therefore requires us as scholars and activists to eschew a tendentious approach, one that seeks out the cases and examples that strengthen a particular argument while ignoring those that don’t and to instead study the entire phenomenon with all its complications. Such intellectual and activist work involves an embrace of contradiction and a dialectical materialist mode of analysis. If I had put aside all the evidence that reveals countervailing tendencies, I could have produced an analysis free of contradiction, which might perhaps have been more straightforward and even emotionally satisfying. However, as I show in the conclusion, the imperial matrix of anti-Muslim racism is not a well-oiled machine where an input at one end, such as articulations by primary definers, produces an expected outcome at the other end. Even while those with power exercise hegemony, because the imperial terrain on which races are made and unmade is unstable, not least due to resistance, it creates the conditions for unexpected outcomes. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 95
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- DEFINE: Explains the dialectical materialist mode of analysis as a methodological commitment to embracing contradiction rather than cherry-picking confirming evidence.
Related
- Contradiction within anti-Muslim racism is the basis for its end. (similarity 0.88)
- Anti-Muslim racism contains internal contradictions and countervailing tendencies that resist neat causal models (similarity 0.86)
- Anti-Muslim racialization is unstable, contested, and co-produced with anti-racism (similarity 0.86)
- Anti-Muslim racism is a persistent product of empire, not event-driven. (similarity 0.85)
- Anti-Muslim racism operates as steady imperial practice, not only crisis response (similarity 0.84)
- Anti-Muslim racism is produced across intersecting institutional spheres, not by any single source (similarity 0.83)
- Anti-Muslim racism is structural to empire rather than a fringe phenomenon. (similarity 0.83)
- Anti-Muslim racism arises from empire as a normal modality, not only crisis. (similarity 0.83)
- Anti-Muslim racism is structurally rooted in empire, not individual prejudice (similarity 0.83)
- Modern anti-Muslim racism needs both colonial domination and liberal freedom. (similarity 0.83)
- Anti-Muslim racism emerged from Old World-New World contact (similarity 0.82)
- Kumar characterizes anti-Muslim racism as an ‘ideology and practice rooted in the political economy of the empire’ (p. 7), distancing it from religious intolerance. (similarity 0.82)
- Islamophobia is increasingly theorized as a form of racism rather than mere religious prejudice (similarity 0.82)
- Empire is a contingent process that reproduces itself through shifting racism. (similarity 0.82)
- Kumar contends that empire creates the conditions for anti-Muslim racism, which in turn sustains empire. (similarity 0.82)