Paper short abstract:

How do Dutch daughters of Moroccan migrants accommodate 'Muslimhood' in their life stories? Using the analytical concept of the 'dialogical self', religious and secular articulations of identity and alterity in four self-narratives representing various identity strategies will be discussed.

Paper long abstract:

The proposed paper discusses how ‘Muslimhood’ features in the life-stories of women of Moroccan descent in the Netherlands. Since social identifications always include power-related ascriptions by selves and others, it will be asked how narrative identity is constructed through both religious and secular articulations of identity and alterity. Four self-narratives representing various identity strategies to accomodate Muslim descent in a secular environment will be discussed.

The paper aims to have both theoretical and methodological relevance by demonstrating that the concept of the ‘dialogical self’ (based on Bakhtin’s ‘dialogism’) is a particularly useful analytical tool to study identification processes by European citizens with a Muslim background. The dialogicial self refers to the temporary outcome of people’s responses to the different ways in which they are addressed on the basis of their positions in the various social and cultural fields in which they participate. Thus viewed, identity is developed by orchestrating the voices within the self that speak from these different positions, voices that are embedded in field-specific repertoires of practices, characters and discourses.