Decolonial World-Making in Luton: How South Asian Muslim Women Artists in Luton Create and Inhabit Multiple Worlds

Much of the scholarship on Muslim women in the arts is concerned primarily with issues of representation, namely through an exploration of negative stereotypes (Morey and Yaqin 2011) or as possessing conflicting identities in secular, majority white geographies (Ralph and Gibson 2021). While highly important work, what is often missing from the frame are the voices and experiences of Muslim women who are producing artistic work that goes beyond the need to represent and be represented, and who do not consider multiple identities across gender, race, religion and nationality as being in conflict.
In a challenge to the limitations of representation and the narrative of contested identities, my research will explore the work of Luton-based South Asian diaspora artists who present rather than represent a multitude of experiences, and in so doing subvert the discourse on representation. I will explore how these artists' creative practices disrupt attempts to essentialise the experiences of British Muslim women. By focusing on place, my research will also investigate how their practices are essential to remaking Luton as a town where decolonial possibilities for living with difference can be tested and lived.
Underpinning the research is Walter Mignolo's (2018) decolonial theory of the pluriverse that proposes a world in which many worlds are possible, as articulated by the indigenous Mexican Zapatista movement. This internationalist lens will be positioned in dialogue with Ruth Wilson Gilmore's articulation of place-making and the infrastructure of feeling that makes material ideologies and "actions that feelings enable or constrain" (2022: 490). The combination of these theoretical frameworks will facilitate an exploration of the ways in which Muslim women artists create and inhabit decolonial worlds within Luton in which difference exists as a fact rather than a problem to be solved.
My research will be led from and by the perspectives of British South Asian
Muslim women and will draw on my existing connections in the creative industries over the last 15 years. The research will focus on Muslim women living in Luton, a plural town with no single ethnicity in the majority (Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity 2013), where Muslims make up 24.6% of the total population (2011 Census), and one of the areas targeted by the UK government's Levelling Up agenda (Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities 2022).
Luton has also featured in national media for its male dominated stories of
right-wing figures such as Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate (Das 2022), and proponents of extremist Islamic ideologies (Smith and Gardham 2017). This research will therefore maintain a local focus within a larger framework of decoloniality and geopolitics informed by gender, religious and racialised identities, and the UK's relationship with a multi-generational diaspora population that has its roots in the postcolonial states of Pakistan, Bangladesh and India.