Rehana Ahmed

I am a specialist in twentieth and twenty-first century postcolonial literature and culture, with particular interests in British Asian, South Asian, and Muslim literature and culture; literary and cultural representations of multiculturalism; and the history of the South Asian diaspora in Britain.

My monograph Writing British Muslims: Religion, Class and Multiculturalism (Manchester University Press, 2015, pbk 2017), supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship, examines contemporary literary representations of Muslims by British writers of South Asian Muslim descent to explore the contribution they make to urgent questions about multicultural politics. Taking a materialist approach that centres on class, the book seeks to complicate and challenge the dichotomy of secular freedom versus religious oppression that frequently constrains thinking about British Muslims, as well as to reframe freedom of speech controversies involving Muslims.

This interdisciplinary work built on a range of journal articles and book chapters. More recently, I co-edited (with Rachel Carroll) a special issue of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature on 'British culture after 9/11', and (with Nadia Atia) a special issue of Wasafiri on ‘The House of Wisdom’ which reflects on Islamic civilisations creatively and critically. Taking its name from Baghdad’s famous Abbasid library, the issue explores libraries, books, script and scriptures from the Abbasid period right through to the present day.

Currently, I am working on a book, tentatively titled 'Literary Solidarities: Writing, Publishing, and Reading British South Asian', which explores articulations of solidarity and community in recently published British Asian writing. Responding to a turn to collective forms of protest among Britain's racialized citizens today as well as pressing debates about the publishing industry's treatment of race, the project maps literary visions of resistance against the racializing and individuating practices of neoliberal society and the marketplace, while also tracing connections between formations of social and literary activism today and those of the period following the 1948 Nationality Act and subsequent rise in immigration. The historical dimension of this project relates to the archival work I am doing as Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded project 'Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1830s to the Present'.