Regarding Muslims: From Slavery to Postapartheid. By Gabeba Baderoon. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2014.

Regarding Muslims: From Slavery to Postapartheid is a pioneering study that examines historical and contemporary representations of Islam and Muslims in South Africa. With intellectual sophistication and creativity, Gabeba Baderoon examines varying forms of visual, culinary, artistic and popular representations in ways that speak back to official historical and colonial records. She reads against the grain of dominant narratives and is keenly attentive to “genres that hover between fiction and fact, and generate the kind of knowledge that fills the spaces between the more authoritative sources” (23). Yet hers is neither a simply reactive nor redemptive response to colonial hegemonies. Baderoon succeeds in presenting intricate and complex analyses of her subject matter, and the reading practices that she adroitly employs are both methodologically and analytically instructive to feminist postcolonial scholars interested in re-imagining archives and authoritative canons.