Introduction: Secularism and the literary marketplace

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See: https://www.penguin.co.uk/series/bbwb/black-britain-writing-back, https://www.penguin.co.uk/company/social-impact/writenow, and https://www.jhalakprize.com.

2. The publishers interviewed did so on the understanding that their contributions would remain anonymous. Hence their names are not included here.

3. The help of those who made time to speak to us is gratefully acknowledged. The contextualized interpretation of their reflections is entirely our own.

4. See: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/connect/work-with-us/diversity-equity-and-inclusion/.

5. See: https://oneworld-publications.com/fiction-world-map/.

6. In her conversation with Peter Morey, Yasmin noted that she had never encountered the category of “Muslim writing” outside academic circles: an important reminder of the performative nature of categorization, bringing into being that which it frames.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rehana Ahmed

Rehana Ahmed is senior lecturer in postcolonial and contemporary literature at Queen Mary University of London, co-editor of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, an associate editor of Wasafiri, and co-investigator on the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded project “Remaking Britain: South Asian Networks and Connections, 1830s to the Present”. Her publications include Writing British Muslims: Religion, Class and Multiculturalism (2015), articles in books and journals including Race & Class, Textual Practice, and Modern Drama, and a range of edited books and journal issues, including, most recently, “A House of Wisdom: Libraries and Literatures of Islam”, for Wasafiri.

Peter Morey

Peter Morey is Professor of 20th-century Literature at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Fictions of India: Narrative and Power (2000); Rohinton Mistry (2004); Islamophobia and the Novel (2018); and, with Amina Yaqin, Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation after 9/11 (2011). He has co-edited the volumes Alternative Indias: Writing, Nation and Communalism (2006); Culture, Diaspora, and Modernity in Muslim Writing (2012); Muslims, Trust and Multiculturalism (2018), and Contesting Islamophobia (2019).