“We tick: Other” – race, religion, and literary solidarities in three essay anthologies and the neo-liberal marketplace

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Essay anthologies
• race
• religion
• Nikesh Shukla
• Sabeena Akhtar
• Mariam Khan

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For an excellent discussion of the neo-liberalism of the creative marketplace, which delineates the increasing dominance of market logics across the publishing industry and literary production, see the introduction to Paul Crosthwaite (2019).

2. See, for example, my discussion of memoirs by Sarfraz Manzoor and Yasmin Hai in Writing British Muslims (Ahmed 2015, chap. 6).

3. Given that the essay form and autobiographical mode employed in these anthologies no doubt contribute to their reception as “authentic” accounts at the expense of aesthetic innovation, a contrast with the reception of recent anthologies that encompass a more diverse range of forms – for example, Sabrina Mahfouz (2017) – would be instructive but lies beyond the confines of this article.

4. Contemporary literary organizations committed to writers of colour and collective production include Spread the Word, Rewrite London, and the magazine Wasafiri, as well as Shukla’s The Good Literary Agency, and publishing imprints Dialogue Books and Round Table Books.

5. Examples of Shukla’s advocacy for writers of colour include his founding of the Good Literary Agency and the short-lived literary magazine The Good Journal. For more on recent initiatives for writers of colour, see Dele Fatunla (2022).

6. This is not to obscure the fact that publishing an essay in an anthology is often for authors a first step towards publishing a novel. The rise of anthologies of essays by racially and religiously minoritized writers is also evidence of the gatekeeping that keeps them at the margins of the industry.

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.