Screeching Polemics: The Relationship Between Islamophobia, Misattribution, and Incontrovertible Falsehood

• In Event: Challenging Impossibility: Islamophobia, Polemics, Panic, and Free Expression

Abstract

In our current moment of institutionalized patriarchal white supremacist fantasy, the US federal government speaks to its citizenry in a cruel voice, encouraging human suffering inflicted on those who lose within a hierarchy of humanity. This paper investigates 'willful misattribution' - not that vulnerabilities overlap, of course they do, but that vulnerabilities are sloppily overlapped in a conscious activity of misattribution and conflation serving a desire to not be wrong / wronged. Islamophobia, and an unstable constellation of foreignness, brownness, Otherness, mark the governmental discourse that inflicts itself across Sikh, Muslim, black, Mexican, Haitian, hidden under a dishonest mask of ignorance.

Presenter

• Melinda Quinn Brennan, SUNY Oneonta