From oral histories to visual narratives: re-presenting the post-September 11 experiences of the Muslim women in the USA

Abstract

Since the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC on 11 September 2001, Muslims or Muslim-looking people in the USA have experienced a significant increase in hostility and hate violence. The anti-Muslim hate crimes have affected the lives of these people of color in significant ways. In this article I seek to recover part of the post-September 11 experiences of American Muslims that were obfuscated by the dominant anti-Muslim master narrative, which conflated the Islamic faith with terrorism and constructed all Muslims as dangerous anti-American outsiders. I explore a way of telling stories about these experiences using the expressive power of geospatial technologies. Using the experiences of a Muslim woman in Columbus (Ohio, USA) as an example, I describe how the technological spaces afforded by geographical information systems (GIS) may be used to illuminate the impact of the fear of anti-Muslim hate violence on the daily lives of Muslim women and to help articulate their emotional geographies in the post-September 11 period.