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Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Articles Available Online


There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

A lattice of diamonds and crosses, painted onto a 21-metre long wall at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, scatters my gaze Artist Navine G Khan-Dossos painted the mural by hand, repeating a motif based on muqarnas – a kind of honeycomb vaulting used in Islamic architecture She moved across the wall on a scaffold, first with a cardboard template and later with paint, expanding the mural in careful variations of colour It shifts from red through to white, heating up at the centre and cooling at the edge, while kite-shaped inner pockets slide through shades of grey, complicating the relationship of flatness and depth   Echo Chamber is a portrait of a woman, although it would be impossible to tell without the accompanying text The woman in question, Samantha Lewthwaite (also known as Sherafiyah Lewthwaite), is a British Muslim who made headlines following her husband Germaine Lindsey’s involvement in the 7/7 London terrorist attacks in 2005 In the aftermath, Lewthwaite spoke out against his actions, but six years later she was charged by Kenyan police with possession of explosives She has since been dubbed ‘the White Widow’ by the press, a sensational moniker used for women radicalised at home in the west, who join the ranks of Islamic extremists   Born a year apart, both Khan-Dossos and Lewthwaite are white British women who became influenced by Islam as teenagers Navine G Khan-Dossos – an anagram for the artist’s birth name Vanessa Hodgkinson – moved to Kuwait in 2003, and later trained in traditional Islamic art in London Lewthwaite converted to Islam as a teenager, and married Lindsey in 2002, at the age of 19   Aside from an interview Lewthwaite sold to The Sun in 2005 denouncing her husband’s actions, she has not had much control over the dissemination of her story Journalists quote from her ‘diary’ – a set of papers seized in Kenya in 2011 – or cite tweets from a Muslim Youth Centre handle @MYC_Press that are rumoured to be hers, but neither are reliable sources Over the course of the years, Lewthwaite has been transfigured into a stock character in a cultural narrative, one that tells the tale

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

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Interview

November 2011

Interview with Margaret Jull Costa

Sam Gordon

Interview

November 2011

On first impressions, this interview with Margaret Jull Costa, happening as it did – for the most part –...

fiction

November 2014

The Ovenbird

César Aira

TR. Chris Andrews

fiction

November 2014

The hypothesis underlying this study is that human beings act in strict accordance with an instinctive programme, which governs...

fiction

Issue No. 5

Sent

Joshua Cohen

fiction

Issue No. 5

These women lived in hope, they lived for the future as if they were every one of them already...

 

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