Tuesday, August 27, 3-4:30 p.m. Foster Auditorium 

Sylvia Chan-Malik
Associate Professor, Departments of American Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies
Rutgers University

“Being Muslim: Women of Color in American Islam.”

In this lecture, Professor Chan-Malik will focus on the lives, subjectivities, and labors of U.S. Muslim women as a means to understand Islam’s historical presence in the United States as both Black protest religion and universal faith tradition. Drawing on archival images, cultural texts, popular media, and interviews, she addresses how communities of American Islam became sites of safety, support, spirituality, and social activism, and how women of color were central to their formation. By accounting for American Islam’s rich histories of mobilization and community, she will highlight the forms of resistance that U.S. Muslims, and in particular, U.S. Muslim women, have engaged, and continue to engage, in the 20th-21st-century United States. Through engagement with lineages of Black and women-of-color feminism, liberation theology, and social justice movements, Chan-Malik offers a new vocabulary for understanding U.S. Muslim communities and identity formation that is as conscious of race, gender, sexuality, and nation, as it is region and religion.