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.