Abstract

Drawing Canadian and Swedish national imaginaries into comparative dialogue, this dissertation considers how ideals of liberal, anti-racism paradoxically persist alongside white supremacist investments in the sanctity and authenticity of a white citizenry as well as the terror of Black and Muslim subjects. A sense of fear, threat and vulnerability are examined as useful bad feelings nurtured for the ends of white nation-making; while, the contingencies for assimilation reveal how ideals of racial tolerance can simultaneously be retained. Engaging with tropes of rescue-ability this dissertation proposes that the Muslim woman who performs witnessable acts of assimilation and possession can allay the terror of Islam that she otherwise represents. A death by honour-killing however is what signifies her most triumphant assimilatory act and greatest prospect for national and human belongings. White liberal solidarities solidify through a collective mourning and horror over her brutal death and thus fear of violent, unassimilable Muslims can persists. Contemplating the refusal of Black humanity, the unremarkableness of Black death, the dread of Black reproduction, and the fetishization of Black womens pain this dissertation questions whether assimilatory futures and mournable human life are equally available to Black Muslim women. Analyzing case studies from Canadian and Swedish media, I argue that Black Muslim women must figuratively kill their Black and Muslim selves for the possibility of being re-born into the grievability of Canadian or Swedish whiteness. Even so, the narratives of Afro-Swedish Muslim women reveals how one might trespass on the dictates of assimilation by refusing to wholly surrender the antagonist parts of the self. Women become slippery subjects who are unpredictable in their acculturation. Public humiliation, however, is wielded as a painful pedagogy to discipline she who troubles the matrices of assimilation. Finally, by analyzing representations of the Black Muslim female figure in Canadian performance and visual art, this dissertation explores what it might mean to release desires for national and human belonging by choosing to embody the alien or the monster. In this way, women are visually displayed as releasing the demands of assimilation as they willfully inhabit the non-human.