Tolerance and Risk: How U.S. Liberalism Racializes Muslims
(Hardback)
Available Formats
Publishing Details
Tolerance and Risk: How U.S. Liberalism Racializes Muslims
By (Author) Mitra Rastegar
University of Minnesota Press
University of Minnesota Press
15th November 2021
United States
Classifications
General
Non Fiction
Ethnic groups and multicultural studies
Social groups: religious groups and communities
Religion and politics
305.6970973
Physical Properties
Hardback
304
Width 140mm, Height 216mm, Spine 38mm
Description
How apparently positive representations of Muslims in U.S. media cast Muslims as a racial population
Portrayals of Muslims as the beneficiaries of liberal values have contributed to the racialization of Muslims as a risky population since the September 11 attacks. These discourses, which hold up some Muslims as worthy of tolerance or sympathy, reinforce an unstable good Muslim/bad Muslim binary where any Muslim might be moved from one side to the other. In Tolerance and Risk, Mitra Rastegar explores these discourses as a component of the racialization of Muslimswhere Muslims are portrayed as a highly diverse population that nevertheless is seen to contain within it a threat that requires constant vigilance.
Tolerance and Risk brings together several case studies to examine the interrelation of representations of Muslims abroad and in the United States. These include human-interest stories and opinion polls of Muslim Americans, media representations of education activist Malala Yousafzai, LGBTQ activist discourses, local New York controversies surrounding Muslim-led public projects, and social media discourses of the Syrian refugee crisis. Tolerance and Risk demonstrates how representations of tolerable or sympathetic Muslims produce them as a population with distinct characteristics, capacities, and risks, and circulate standards by which the trustworthiness or threat of individual Muslims must be assessed.
Tolerance and Risk examines the ways that discourses of liberal rights, including feminist and LGBTQ rights discourses, are mobilized to racialize Muslims as uncivilized, even as they garner sympathy and identification with some Muslims.
Reviews
"Through a brilliant analysis, Mitra Rastegar illuminates how the same standards that deem some Muslims worthy of tolerance can then be used against them. This is an urgently necessary book that will change our understanding of how inclusion operates in liberal societies."Evelyn Alsultany, author of Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11
Author Bio
Mitra Rastegar is clinical associate professor of liberal studies at New York University. Her work has been published in GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, WSQ: Womens Studies Quarterly, and International Feminist Journal of Politics.
