Somali, Muslim, British: Striving in Securitized Britain by Giulia Liberatore (review)

Giulia Liberatore’s Somali, Muslim, British: Striving in Securitized Britain is a sensitive and engaged ethnography on Somali women’s striving for moral Muslim womanhood, generational change, and ethics in the context of a securitized Britain. Based on 18 months of fieldwork in London, Liberatore investigates “how Somali women differently engage with publicly problematized questions of what it means to be Muslim, Somali and British, and how they rework and challenge dominant categories and debates in the process” (2). As such, the book is a welcome addition to the anthropology of Islam, the sociology of migration, and the production of knowledge in the context of minoritized peoples.

Somali migrants and their children have bared the brunt of racialized suspicion in a post-9/11 and post-7/7 environment in contemporary British life. Since the ostensible end of “multiculturalism,” as a guiding principle of British public life, Muslim minorities in general, and Somalis in particular have become the target of a wide range of surveillance and disciplinary practices done in the name of rooting out potential “terrorists.” Somalis, because of their status as double minorities—minoritized by racialized notions of national belonging, and as Muslim outsiders—face life in Britain as “problems” to social and political integration in British public culture and in academic discourses. Somali women’s aspirations (their capacities to meaningfully imagine and work towards a future) are therefore framed by powerful discourses around race, migration, security, Islam, and liberalism. In Chapter 1, Liberatore does an excellent job in linking these discourses, which imagine European Muslims as a problem to integration under shifting forms of governance, to the everyday, embodied practices of first- and second-generation Somali women in London as they negotiate and contest these problematizations, “areas of knowledge that have come to pose a problem for contemporary politics” (8). Liberatore then shifts the discussion away from common tropes in migration studies that understand Islamic reform-ist movements as consequences of disintegration and minority anomie to questioning why Islam is seen as a problem in the first place. This shift allows her to problematize the knowledge produced about Somalis and Muslims in Europe and, more important, to meaningfully engage in the life-worlds of her interlocutors.

In Chapter 2, “An Ethnography with Somali Women in London,” Liberatore outlines the premise and methodology of the study, that of documenting the processes of social and generational change within a securitized context. She begins by “plac[ing] the mother–daughter relationship at the center of analysis [and] . . . as a lens through which to view historical changes within Somali society and Britain” (27). She focuses on the experiences of Somali female migrants of the nationalist generation compared to that of their daughters, raised in the context of an increasingly securitized Britain. This is an important shift that I had hoped would have been explored in more depth in the ethnography; nevertheless, locating struggles over generational and religious change in the lives of women moves the discussion towards the primacy of motherhood in processes of cultural transmission and change.

Chapter 3, “Memories of Modern Mogadishu,” begins with the experiences of Somali women of the nationalist generation under the rule of Siyaad Barre. With a nuanced exploration of Soomalinismo, a pan-Somali identity rooted in a traditional past, it situates first-generation Somali women within the particular historical juncture of modernist postcolonial nationalist projects that anchored postcolonial sovereignties in much of Africa. The chapter also begins with a clear historical outline of Somalia’s post-independence history. Liberatore then moves to her titular concern, how Somali women remember this past in the dislocation of exile, a past that is remembered through a “nostalgia for the modern” (39). This structure of feeling for these Somali women oscillates between critique and nostalgia for the early, exuberant days of Barre’s rule. Religion, though important to Somali nationalism, occupied an ambivalent place under Barre’s socialist modernity and is reflected in the ways in which...