The "New Migration": Clashes, Connections, and Diasporic Women's Writing

Abstract

Have we survived the dangerous dance of two nuclear superpowers during the Cold War only to succumb to the “clash of civilizations” that Samuel Huntington predicted in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996)?1 In the aftermath of 9/11, the Bush administration invaded Iraq, spied on thousands of Americans, and swept thousands of Muslims into U.S. detention and the prisons of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay in indiscriminate searches for links to Al Qaeda and the attack on U.S. soil that traumatized the nation. Europe became the site of repeated clashes between Muslims and non-Muslims. In November of 2004, for example, a gunman shot and stabbed Theo van Gogh in retaliation for his film protesting Islamic treatment of women. In the fall of 2005, Paris was burning – with Muslim youths torching cars and barricades in the heart of immigrant France. The September 2005 publication of twelve cartoons depicting Muhammad as a terrorist in a Danish newspaper led to boycotts of Danish goods and the burning of Danish embassies and American flags in many parts of the Muslim world. Nativist sentiment deeply impacted many elections in Europe and the United States. The Western media responded with sensationalist accounts of the “clash of civilizations,” making Huntington's phrase a household term in many parts of the world.2 As Robert Wright wrote in The New York Times, the Muslim world's response to the Danish cartoons was creating an astounding consensus in the United States: “The American left and right don't agree on much, but weeks of demonstrations and embassy burnings have pushed them toward convergence on one point: there is, if not a clash of civilizations, at least a very big gap between ‘the Western world’ and the ‘Muslim world’” (A23).

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