Nothing Has to Make Sense: Upholding White Supremacy through Anti-Muslim Racism

In the post-9/11 world, Western nations have consolidated their whiteness through the figure of the Muslim, as explored in Sherene H. Razack's book "Nothing Has to Make Sense: Anti-Muslim Racism and the Protection of Whiteness." Razack argues that law operates through media discourses and historical and contemporary realities, and that the logic of law breaks down when the subject is Muslim. She examines four sites of anti-Muslim racism: efforts by American evangelical Christians to ban Islam in the school curriculum; Canadian and European bans on Muslim womens clothing; racial science and the sentencing of Muslims as terrorists; and American national memory of the torture of Muslims during wars and occupations. Razack demonstrates that anti-Muslim racism is a revelatory window into the operation of white supremacy as a global force.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 272 pages
Publication date: 19 April 2022
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press

While much has been written about post-9/11 anti-Muslim racism (often termed Islamophobia), insufficient attention has been given to how anti-Muslim racism operates through law and is a vital part of laws protection of whiteness. This book fills this gap while also providing a unique new global perspective on white supremacy. Sherene H. Razack, a leading critical race and feminist scholar, takes an innovative approach by situating law within media discourses and historical and contemporary realities. We may think of law as logical, but, argues Razack, its logic breaks down when the subject is Muslim. Tracing how white subjects and majority-white nations in the post-9/11 era have consolidated their whiteness through the figure of the Muslim, Razack examines four sites of anti-Muslim racism: efforts by American evangelical Christians to ban Islam in the school curriculum; Canadian and European bans on Muslim womens clothing; racial science and the sentencing of Muslims as terrorists; and American national memory of the torture of Muslims during wars and occupations. Arguing that nothing has to make sense when the subject is Muslim, she maintains that these legal and cultural sites reveal the dread, phobia, hysteria, and desire that mark the encounter between Muslims and the West. Through the prism of racism, Nothing Has to Make Sense argues that the figure of the Muslim reveals a world divided between the deserving and the disposable, where people of European origin are the former and all others are confined in various ways to regimes of disposability. Emerging from critical race theory, and bridging with Islamophobia/critical religious studies, it demos.

Weight: 392g
Dimension: 216 x 141 x 20 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781517912352