ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a decolonial/transmodern master signifier founded on an ethico-political subjectivity, which is the positivization of two negative subject positions afforded by the war on terror discourse. The key to disrupting Islamophobic representations in the politico–media complex is not through Islamophilic ones, but through Real representations of material Muslims. The material Muslim subject as Real is a critical humanist corrective to the dehumanizing figures of both the conceptual Muslim and the objectal Muslim. Having named the US Muslim as one ethico-political subject around which political organizing occur is the question of liberation praxis remains. The chapter deals with a consideration of three “practices of hope”: politics of resistance, adversarial aesthetics, and ethics of liberation. These practices of hope are counter-hegemonic strategies against the discourse of terrorism with its violent politics of fear, the fantasy of Islamophobia/Islamophilia with its oppressive aesthetics of hate, and hegemonic subjectivity with its Liberal—Conservative ethics of freedom.
