Human Rights in Ireland

This post features an interview with Prof. Sherene Razack, conducted by our regular blogger Mairead Enright. Sherene Razack is professor, Sociology and Equity Studies in Education, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. Her most recent book is entitled Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims From Western Law and Politics.

Interview with Sherene Razack

Readers may also be interested in Mairead’s August interview with Prof. Seyla Benhabib which is available here. During the interview, Mairead asks Prof. Razack the following questions:

1) It is striking that you have chosen to approach the question of state violence against Muslims, the othering of Muslims, through the frame of race rather than the frame of ‘religious/culture rights’ more prevalent in Europe. Why is that? What can an understanding of what is happening to Muslims in the US, Canada, Europe etc as bound up with ‘race thinking’ and ‘colour lines’ tell us that a religious/cultural framing cannot? Can it tell us anything about what the counter-terrorism agenda means for those of us who are ‘not of that race’?

2 ) Much of your work has looked at the ways in which power, and particularly racial power is anchored spatially, and you advocate ‘unmapping’ as way of deconstructing the ways in which power operates through space. I especially like your suggestion that certain spatial arrangements – particularly arrangements of suspended violence – force us to perform certain power asymmetries in the context of intimate physical encounters. You have written of course of spaces where law is suspended in the course of the ‘War on Terror’. Reading that work lately, I thought about the so-called ‘mosque at Ground Zero’ and I also remembered the image of the woman in the burqa who is to asked to remove her burqa in ‘public’ or ‘state’ space (in court in a sexual assault trial, in the welfare office, in the street). I wonder if you might say something about spatialities of Muslims’ exclusion in the ‘West’.

3) In a recent piece (‘Race Desire and Contemporary Security Discourses’) you have suggested that Muslims’ exclusion from European society is not simply a matter of hatred by ‘we the good’ of ‘they the bad’ but also involves a (gendered) ‘abiding desire for intimacy with the racial subject’(as in Bonnie Honig’s work about how xenophobia is accompanied by xenophilia). What do you mean by that, and what impact does that desire have on ‘Western’ state approaches to Muslim women? And is this image of wounded desiring masculinity a productive image of sovereignty for those who are interested in resisting state violence against Muslims?

4) A great deal of your work turns on the links between racial othering and law. In your work on indefinite detention, you suggest that in depriving detainees of access to law/ access to ‘process’/access to a ‘trial’, the state fundamentally undermines citizenship. You object – like Judith Butler – to their abandonment by law, presumably because you see some potential in legal process to enable detainees to resist state violence. But in discussing the legal regulation of ‘cultural harms’ such as forced marriage you criticise the appropriation of law by ‘civilizing’ imperialist forces, and criticize feminists for colluding in the production of Muslim men as dangerous and Muslim women as hopelessly imperilled. Yet, you don’t seem to advocate a return to a formalist law which escapes culture entirely because you have also drawn attention to law’s capacity to contain racial violence even and especially where we hope that it can provide a platform for the voices of those who have suffered wrongs. When you write about legal approaches to the Muslim other, do you have in mind an alternative legal project or an alternative sense of legal subjectivity? (I am thinking of some of your work in the 1990s on law and feminism).

Related Posts

• May 27, 2010 -- The Month in Burqa Bans (4)
• June 28, 2010 -- Burqa debate shows no signs of abating (1)