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

Thursday, April 12, 2018 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM EDT
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.

 

10:00am-1:00pm - Panel I – Chair: Peter Mandaville (GMU)                 

Su’ad Abdul Khabeer (University of Michigan)

“Black Islam as Theory and Praxis” 

Abbas Barzegar (Georgia State University)

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

Aisha Khan (New York University)

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

Besheer Mohamed (Pew Research Center)

“The Meaning of Racial Identity Among U.S. Muslims”

SpearIt (Texas Southern University)

“Islam in America: Salve for Strained Race Relations”

 

2:00pm-5:00pm - Panel II - Chair: Ahmet Selim Tekelioglu (GMU) 

Abdullah Ali (Zaytuna College)

“Defining the African American Muslim” 

Sohail Daulatzai (University of California, Irvine)

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

Nancy Khalil (Yale University & University of Michigan)

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

Sylvia Chan Malik (Rutgers University)

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

Kayla Renee Wheeler (Boston University)

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

Timur Yuskaev (Hartford Seminary)

“Speaking Qur’an: An American Scripture”