Slow nonviolence: Muslim women resisting the everyday violence of dispossession and marginalization

Abstract

This paper draws upon ethnographic research with Muslim communities in Hyderabad, India and South Asian Muslim American communities in Seattle, USA, showcasing the work of grassroots women’s organizations that negotiate and theorize tangled webs of marginalization and their violent effects. Building from their insights, I offer a critical theorization of slow nonviolence, or ideas and actions focused on long-term, incremental (but substantial) change, which resist both the visible and invisible effects of structural violence. I argue that these organizations undertake slow nonviolence by responding to the slow violence of dispossession, operationalizing the everyday as a site of politics, and constructing more equitable relationships. This slow nonviolence varies across place and community, but demonstrates a purposeful effort to contest violence as organizers encounter it, as a complex, everyday, layered, diffuse, slow, and yet material reality.