The video Century’s Container includes excerpts of texts by Judith Butler, Toby Rollo, Mona Saeed Kamal, Hari Kunzru, and Sham-e-Ali Nayeem, and was produced for the public forum “Sense of Emergency,” organized in December 2016 by Andrew Weiner at NYU. It was screened at Parliament of Bodies in Athens in January.
The "Muslim" is this century’s container for the Other; but the definition of the Other is also always changing, while the expulsion impulse remains a constant—just ask Polish Jews, Iraqi Kurds, Bengali Hindus, Turkish Armenians, or Japanese Americans. The same year that we experienced an intense backlash in North America and Europe, the Bangladesh government pushed Rohingya refugees (also "Muslim") back into Myanmar and toward escalating violence, under the eyes of Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.