‘Messy refusal’, assimilationist moves, and the reproduction of Eurocentric modernity/coloniality: examining anti-Islamophobia in Lebanon

Abstract

ABSTRACT visibly Muslim women in Lebanon, a small country on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, experience significant anti-Muslim racism. Thinking through their anti-racist work, this article identifies and examines a refusal – a pre-emptive move away from power rather than against it that works to make it obsolete and survive despite it. Analysing this movement away, I argue, reveals it as a movement towards a neoliberal ‘civilized’, ‘cultured’, and consumer subject assimilating into Eurocentric modernity/coloniality while surviving in the materiality of its Muslimness. The article accordingly posits this as a form of ‘messy refusal’ – implicated in the cultural and epistemic reproduction of Eurocentric modernity/coloniality – and complexifies refusal’s growing celebration across anti/post/decolonial and indigenous scholarship. In doing this, it contributes to rethinking anti-Islamophobia from the so-called Middle East rather than Euro-America and examining it as a longer process rather than exclusively focusing on the racist moment and site.