Muslimah: Decolonising and Re-Presenting Contemporary British Cinematic Representation of Black Muslim Women

Much discussion has surrounded the notion of decolonisation¹, particularly in the context of education, which calls for a widening of study texts to include creators and writers of colour. Organisations such as The Black Curriculum Project (Stennett, 2019) seek to broaden representation of the racialised other within education (Arday and Mirza, 2018); meanwhile in media and the creative industries, the reproduction of ‘reactive tropes’ at the hands of ‘industry lore’ is also being challenged (Saha, 2018). Alongside these discussions, particularly in the creative industries, are explorations into how far the reverberations of a previously colonised world manifest themselves in our creation, understanding and absorption of art (Lorde, 2018).
With these questions in mind, this thesis postulates a dearth of Black Muslim women in British narrative cinema, theorising alongside cultural and critical race scholarship, to interpret culturally dominant representations of the ‘other’ on screen. It merges issues of both seeing and showing with regards to representation, and posits the value of conscious spaces in
which to rehearse an interrogated, theoretical undoing of long-established colonial ideologies (Young, 1996, pp.183-184), conversing with the notion of decolonisation in the process.
In the spirit of Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives (2019) in literature and Fairview (Drury, 2018) in theatre, this study rehearses a decolonised approach to (screen)writing, theorising the conscious undoing of colonial gaze when representing the Black Muslim woman on screen.