Muslim Cultural Production in the Wake of the "War on Terror"
Description
Nearly twenty-five years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, it is undeniable that the event’s geopolitical aftermath has permanently transformed the existing world order. Iterations of the global “War on Terror” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, Lebanon, and Yemen have produced civil instabilities that, in turn, have triggered waves of mass migration out of those imperiled nations. The rise of the surveillance state, escalating anti-Muslim sentiment, and the exponential increase of asylum-seekers have called into question the parameters of modern citizenship in the global North and South alike. The first quarter of this century has produced an entire generation of Muslims across the world who have come of age amidst the precarity of the post-9/11 era. Though much work has been published on topics such as 9/11 in American fiction, Islamophobia in literature, and media representations of Muslims, less prominent is scholarship on post-9/11 cultural production from the perspective of Muslims themselves that depicts the existential effects of living through two and half decades of the “War on Terror.” Work by such artists as Mohsin Hamid, Kamila Shamsie, H.M. Naqvi, Ayad Akhtar, Ramy Youssef, Riz Ahmed, and Wafaa Bilal all portray, at different points in this century, various ways that Muslims have incorporated the exigencies of the post-9/11 era into the practice of everyday life. This seminar asks: how do we see the cascading geopolitical effects of the “War on Terror” expressed in literary, visual, cinematic, musical, theatrical and televisual art that centers the experience of Muslims in the twenty-first century? Panelists may consider questions such as: How does art portray the experience of twenty-first century Muslims grappling with belief and crises of faith in response to the mainstream faulty conflation of Islam and terrorism? How are the societal consequences of inhabiting specific modes of dress or grooming depicted in the visual and literary arts? How do we see the specter of interrogation and detention affect modes of speech and writing? Are there genres of visual and literary arts more prevalent in representing the precarious citizenship of Muslim immigrants, migrants, and refugees? Other theoretical, formal, or philosophical inquiries into the the experience of Muslims in the post-9/11 era as reflected in cultural production are certainly welcome. The goal of this seminar is to begin a conversation that will form the basis of an edited volume to be published by Palgrave. Questions about the seminar should be directed to Nasia Anam ([email protected]).
Schedule
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Speaker Bio
Ruba Bouzan is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Connecticut. Her research bridges postcolonial and feminist theory, focusing on Muslim women’s narratives, veiling and forced unveiling, diaspora, and motherhood across Anglophone literature and film. She teaches First-Year Writing and mentors student-athletes, bringing multimodal and accessibility-minded pedagogy to the classroom. Her dissertation traces how devotion, embodiment, and state power shape women’s storytelling.
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I am an Assistant Professor of English at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). Prior to this, I completed my PhD on the literature of Partition in Pakistan, India and Palestine from the University of Cambridge. My research interests include: anti-colonial resistance poetry, the ‘ghostly’ in postcolonial narratives, South Asian literature and Palestinian literature.
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Rukma Prince is an Assistant Professor of English at Azim Premji University, Bhopal, India. Her research interests include South Asian studies, memory and trauma studies, and human rights literatures.
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Hiba Ahmed is an Assistant Professor of English and is currently teaching a course on Critical Thinking at Ashoka University, India. During her Mphil from the University of Delhi she explored the Indian Muslims’ ever changing identity in the Indian subcontinent and the conflicts arising in an increasingly hostile political and social landscape. Her research delves into memory and post memory of violence and the reformations of identity that are an inevitable result of it.
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Sahid Mondal is a PhD Candidate in English at Brandeis University. He holds a BA from Calcutta Univ. and an MA from Jadavpur Univ., both in English. His research traces Indian Muslim aspiration and futurity through a material lens and focuses on how film, fiction, photography, and graphic narratives envision political possibility and forms of belonging. With a background in designing Learning Management Software, he is also committed to advancing digital pedagogical tools in classrooms.
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Heather King is a PhD student in the English Department at Rice University. Her work focuses on 20th and 21st century Global Anglophone literature and film, social reproduction, and queer theory.
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Maryam Khan is a second year English Language and Literature PhD student at the University of Michigan. Her research concerns surveillance as a theme, structuring form, and technology in post-9/11 popular literature and media featuring Muslims.
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Sara Grewal is Associate Professor in the Department of English at MacEwan University. Her research interests include Urdu literature, historical poetics, race and ethnicity studies, diaspora, and global hip hop. She is currently completing a book on Sikh hip hop, titled Dis-locatia, Deterritorialization, and Diaspora in Sikh Hip Hop: The Varieties of Sikh Experience.
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Iqra Raza is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at University of Houston where her dissertation interrogates the limits and exclusions of the Human Rights framework, and the discourses through which the 'Human' becomes legible. Her work also looks at how these concerns inflect genres across the Anglophone world. She is also a poet and an aspiring translator.
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Diana Filar is Assistant Professor of English and Assistant Department Head of Humanities at the United States Merchant Marine Academy. Her research focuses on names and naming in the 21 st century transnational migrant novel and migrant cultural production more broadly. You can find her work on state archives and Valeria Luiselli in Post45, on Maggie Nelson and individualism in Contemporary Literature, and on immigrant whiteness in the contemporary novel in The Polish Review.
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Zainab Abdali is a PhD candidate in English at Rice University. Her dissertation project, titled "Reading the War on Terror: Towards an Abolitionist Horizon," examines South Asian and Arab cultural production, and considers the forms of anti-war resistance and solidarity being articulated through these works. Her work has been published in Religion and the Arts and Western American Literature and she is committed to anti-war political education and programming through her Public Humanities work.
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Nasia Anam is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her forthcoming book, Muslim Heterotopias: Colonial Logics of Space in Literatures of Migration examines representations of Muslim migration in Anglophone and Francophone literature from the post-WWII to post-9/11 eras. Her writing appears in the Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literature, PMLA, Interventions, ASAP/Journal, the Journal of Narrative Theory, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and Post45: Contemporaries.
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Muhammad Hassan Qadeer Butt is a PhD candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature at Åbo Akademi University, Turku.