Beyond the canon: un-learning the “Muslim woman” in UK higher education classroom with a “pedagogy of opacity”

Abstract

My contribution to this special issue is non-orthodox. Far from Islamic Feminism's hermeneutics, and bearing in mind the limitations of anthropological works and representative paradigms in Orientalist critique, I take cues from postcolonial scholar Edouard Glissant’s (1990) seminal work, Poetics of Relations, notably his notions of détour, retour, and érrance, and draw on my experience in teaching gender studies in relation to the Middle East in UK higher education institutions to posit a “pedagogy of opacity” when producing knowledge on Othered bodies —in this instance, the fictive category of the “Muslim woman”. We see how a pedagogy of opacity forces home, self, and early mis/information about the other to realign and confront each other. This triadic realignment showcases the workings of home (the UK)—not of a geographically distant Islamic culture—in the manufacturing of the Muslim woman Other.

Exploring the Relationship between Colonial Education and Nationalism in Indonesia: A Reading of Pramoedya A. Toer’s This Earth of Mankind

“…Within the Indonesian context, these erudite individuals were colloquially termed "brown-Dutchmen," emblematic of their assimilation of European cognitive frameworks juxtaposed against their ethnically congruent physicality. This dichotomy precipitated a pervasive sense of "disquietude," wherein these individuals, notwithstanding their education, grappled with an ontological incongruence: they remained peripheral to European socio-political paradigms yet diverged from their uneducated counterparts only in intellectual orientation, preserving their ethnic homogeneity (Allouche, 2023;Hadzic, 2022).…”