Confusing Muslim and Asian

Through autoethnography, this chapter, “Confusing Muslim and Asian,” pivots Making Muslimness . It uses the author’s own movements throughout the city in the weeks and months after the attack to demonstrate how Muslimness and Asianness were conflated and confused while being mapped onto the Brown, straight, male body. This chapter argues that the racial politics of public space in Manchester renders Muslim and Asian coterminous, both as perceived by non-Asian or non-Muslim Britons and as perceived by many British Asians and British Muslims themselves, ultimately cheapening the racial and ethnic expansiveness of Muslimness as a whole. “Confusing Muslim and Asian” concludes by articulating the racialized aurality of Muslimness through analyzing the logics that British Muslim youth used when developing a radio play in the author’s devised theatre work. Setting up Chapters 5 and 6 , the closing of Chapter 4 demonstrates the theatrical and pragmatic power of voice when facilitating a process of developing community-based theatre, especially in the context of gendered racialization.