Contemporary Muslim Writers on Borders
Description
In his pivotal, posthumously released scholarly text What is Islam: The Importance of Being Islamic (2015), Shahab Ahmed astutely notes that “In using the term ‘Islamic’ we, modern Muslims and non-Muslims alike, are engaging in an act of ordering the world and making it meaningful for ourselves in terms of what we believe we know Islam to be” (108).
In this seminar, we invoke Ahmed’s conjecture to center how the contemporary Muslim writer makes meaning of their world through their spotlighting and interrogation of the borders that surround them: borders of religion and spiritual practice, borders of stereotype (good Muslim/bad Muslim), borders of racial/ethnic identity, borders of gender and sexuality, borders of nation-state, and of course, as writers, borders of genre. What does it mean for the contemporary Muslim author to recognize the politics of borders in their writing, and use their power as storytellers to contest, challenge, and/or uphold these dominant regimes of bordering?
Papers that explore the intersection of Critical Muslim Studies–which seeks to understand Islam not only as a religious or cultural imperative, but also as a locale for decolonial identity and thought–and Gender Studies are of particular interest to this seminar. We are invested in how the interplay between gender and borders reveals a precise touchpoint for understanding the capacity of meaning-making within storytelling for the contemporary Muslim narrative. We are also interested in the racialization of Muslim identity and welcome discussions of comparative racialization, the politics of borders, and the production of displacement.
We invite papers that define the term “literary text” broadly, and that investigate how contemporary authors ascribed the label “Muslim writer” engage the literary in relation to any of the following themes/key terms:
Borders
Boundaries
Partitions
Nation-States
Settler Colonialisms
Displacement and Refugee Crisis
Decolonial identity formations
Challenging gender scripts
LGBTQIA+ Muslims
Racialization of Islam
Ummah/Community-building
Muslim Diaspora
While the seminar will be held in English, we welcome papers about texts produced outside the English publishing context as well.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Mariam Khan is a PhD student at Rutgers University. She is interested in 20th and 21st century postcolonial Global Anglophone literature, with a specific focus on South Asian literature. Her research considers the gendered, colonial, religious, and national aesthetics that emerge in postcolonial contact zones and explores how literary narratives from these regions both assist in the formulation of these discourses and subvert them.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Samina Gul Ali is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Kean University, and the Program Coordinator for Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research and teaching interests include Contemporary U.S. Literature, U.S. Latine/x Literature, Asian American Literature, Critical Muslim Studies, and Feminist Theory.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Sajad S. Yazdi (he/they) is an educator and researcher of queer studies, critical Muslim studies, life writing, and their assemblages, currently living on the unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh lands. As an interdisciplinary scholar, Dr. Yazdi’s work focuses on a decolonial approach to the study of non-fictional creative writing, particularly those from the Global South and diasporas, to explore the transformative potential of queer life writings in inciting social change.
Speaker Bio
Emily Davis is an Associate Professor of English and Women & Gender Studies at the University of Delaware. Her current research centers on the role of fiction and ethnographic storytelling in reshaping contemporary understandings of human rights.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Eman Al-Drous is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Haverford College. Her research focuses on the rhetorical and literary analysis of refugee representation in global Anglophone literature.