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Podcast: New Books in Literary Studies
Episode: Masood Ashraf Raja, "Democratic Criticism: Poetics of Incitement and the Muslim Sacred" (Lever Press, 2023)
Description: After the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), the poetics of incitement— found in texts originating in the West containing themes and representations of Islam hurtful to Muslims—became an accepted method of textual production in the West. Production of such texts intensified after the attacks of 9/11. Democratic Criticism: Poetics of Incitement and the Muslim Sacred (Lever Press, 2023) by Masood Ashraf Raja urges a new mode of reading, one that permits Western readers to transcend local reading practices in order to, as best as one can, read from the point of view of the Other. Raja argues that the l...