Cosmopolitanism and the unfollowable routines and rituals in Ishtiyaq Shukri’s The Silent Minaret:
- Authors: Dass, Minesh
- Date: 2017
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/142531 , vital:38088 , DOI: 10.1080/02564718.2017.1290382
- Description: This article explores how Ishtiyaq Shukri’s The Silent Minaret critiques the limited and severely uneven forms of hospitality that characterise post-9/11 Britain. It also examines how the text gestures towards the possibility of a non-violent, inclusive cosmopolitanism. The piece begins by relating recent debates surrounding the “War on Terror”, as well as Britain’s decision to leave the European Union to the novel’s major concerns. It then turns to the novel, and summarises incidents in which the principal character, Issa Shamshuddin, is traumatised and harmed by the Islamophobia and anti-immigration policies evident in the London portrayed in the text. Next, it turns to an analysis of the strange and irreproducible rituals of Issa’s neighbour, Frances. The article concludes that that these unfollowable rituals posit how a truly cosmopolitan society would function.
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“[A] ll just surface and veneer”: the challenge of seeing and reading in Ishtiyaq Shukri’s I See You
- Authors: Dass, Minesh
- Date: 2017
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/142577 , vital:38092 , DOI: 10.1080/17533171.2017.1312749
- Description: This article considers challenges posed to reading practices and hermeneutics by Ishtiyaq Shukri’s I See You. The content of the novel is at times didactic, and surface reading might seem an appropriate means of analysis, yet the form is experimental: it includes radio reports, characters’ reflections and journalistic work. The connection between these “documents” is not readily apparent, thus one is obliged to study the gaps between them to make sense of the text. Symptomatic reading might seem apposite, but the protagonist’s photographic work reveals the limits of this form of reading, too. I argue that Shukri’s text demands a process that interweaves symptomatic and surface reading in complex ways that require the reader to assess the ideological position from which s/he reads. The novel therefore draws attention to the ways in which reading, like seeing, is a political act.
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