Rutgers

Faculty Member, American Studies

UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow

UC Santa Cruz

Thesis Title: From Orientalism to American Ummah: Race-ing Islam in Contemporary U.S. Culture, 1978-2008

About

I am a literary, cultural, religious, and comparative ethnic studies scholar whose work examines the racialization of Islam, and more broadly, the theorization of racial-religious identities in a "post-racial" age.  I ask: How do we incorporate categories of religion and the sacred into existing ethnic and gender studies frameworks of intersectionality and multiple critique? 

I am currently completing a manuscript entitled "A Part of Islam": Race and the Making of Muslim America, 1958-2008.  In it, I track the cultural and political transformation of "Islam" from domestic symbol of Black nationalism and social protest in the Cold War and civil rights eras into an orientalized symbol of a global, anti-American Terror, as well as the religion of the nation’s fastest-growing and most diverse spiritual community.  I consider historically-situated cultural constructions of Islam and Muslims in the nation's racial imaginary, as well as the resolutely transnational contexts of geopolitical power relations between the U.S., South Asia, and the Middle East 

My archive for this project includes a series of first-person interviews with African American and South Asian Muslim women from the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam (called the first "multiracial" Muslim community in the U.S.); U.S. media coverage of the Iranian women's revolution of March 1979; the "post-racial" narratives of Hollywood films such as "Crash" and "Reign Over Me"; discussions and debates concerning "Black-immigrant" difference within Muslim American communities; Islamic Anglophone literature in the contemporary U.S. and Europe; and the emerging identities of "New Muslim Cool," i.e. the assertion of Islamic identities as the basis of a burgeoning cultural vanguard in the U.S. and beyond.

Through my analysis, I reveal the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and religion that construct "Muslim America," and demonstrate how a rich racial and religious syncretism, borne out of processes of interaction and exchange between various Black, Arab, White, Latino, and South Asian Muslim communities, has always been the hallmark of Muslim American identity, community, and cultural formation. I insist that such an understanding of Islam in America’s racialized and gendered pasts—both in mainstream culture and in Muslim American communities themselves— constitutes the most urgent prerequisite for combating contemporary discourses of Islamophobia, as well as the making of a vibrant, multiracial Muslim America.

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