“Racism, Racialization, and African-American Islam in the Americas” Conference

Johnson Center, George’s (3rd Floor above JC Library)

In the last two decades, a renewed interest in African Muslims’ forced and voluntary journeys into American continent produced a number of noteworthy publications. Combined with an increased awareness on a) US Muslims’ long durée experience in American religious landscape since the slave trade, b) African and African American “indigenous” Muslim institutions and movements, c) the socio-economic and racial hierarchies built into securitized Muslim life in the US, and d) popular expressions of Muslim identity in the discursive spaces of arts, poetry and sports, African and African American Muslim experience has been the subject of an emerging sub-field.

This conference seeks to evaluate this multi-disciplinary, multi-method scholarship on the one hand, and highlight emerging venues for new research and identify potential gaps on the other hand, through bringing insights from the scholarship on racial politics and “racialization of Islam” in the Americas.

Speakers

Sylvia Chan Malik (Rutgers University)

“Finding Florence: Black American Women in the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam, 1920-1923”

Nancy Khalil (Yale University & University of Michigan)

“Islamophobia and its Latent Racism: A Case Study of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center”

Su’ad Abdul Khabeer (University of Michigan)

“Black Islam as Theory and Praxis”

Kayla Renée Wheeler (Boston University)

“’Eating the Other’: Islam, Multicultural Fashion Marketing, and the Erasure of Blackness”

Aisha Khan (New York University)

“Local and Global: Islams and Islam in Comparative Racial Formations”

Abbas Barzegar (Georgia State University)

“African-American Muslim Discourse?: Oral History and Archive as Critique”

Abdullah Ali (Zaytuna College)

“Defining the African-American Muslim”

SpearIt (Texas Southern University)

“Islam in America: Salve for Strained Race Relations”

Besheer Mohamed (Pew Research Center)

“The Meaning of Racial Identity Among US Muslims”

Sohail Daulatzai (University of California, Irvine)

“Specters of Race: The ‘War on Terror’ and the Afterlives of Empire”

Timur Yuskaev (Hartford Seminary)

“Speaking Qur’an: An American Scripture”