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

Abstract

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.