Term: Fall 2019
Semester Dates: September 3, 2019 to December 12, 2019
Participating Campuses: Host – Rutgers University | Receiving – University of Michigan, Penn State University, University of Maryland
Course Number & Title:
- Rutgers University: 01:050:344 Islam in/and America
- Penn State University: RLST 116 Muslims in America
- University of Michigan: AMCULT/ARABAM 301 Special Topics in American Culture
- University of Maryland: AAST 298A Special Topics in AAST | HIST219V Special Topics in History | AMST298I Selected Topics in American Studies
Times: Tuesday & Thursday 2:50pm-4:10pm Eastern
Professor: Dr. Sylvia Chan-Malik | s.chanmalik@rutgers.edu
“Islam in/and America” examines the history and presence of Islam in the United States, and the construction and evolution of U.S. Muslim identity, community, and culture. In the contemporary moment, “Islam” is perhaps the most misunderstood term in the national lexicon, and stands at the heart of numerous cultural and political debates about “who we are” as a nation. Much of these debates rest on the misguided notion that Islam is a foreign presence, a threat to American values and democracy. In actuality, Islam’s presence in the Americas stretches back four centuries, to when over one third of African slaves forcibly transported here were Muslim. In this course, students will simultaneously examine the diverse historical presence of Muslims in the United States, alongside representations and stereotypes of Islam and Muslims in media and popular culture. Students will approach their study of Islam and Muslims through critical frameworks of religion, race, gender, and sexuality, paying particular attention to the experiences and representations of Black American Muslims and U.S. Muslim women. The class seminar is discussion-based, and in addition to weekly readings, it will incorporate film, media, audio, and digital texts into class conversations and coursework.
Students are able to enroll directly at their home institution for course credit. For more information about this course, including textbook information and instructions on enrolling, please contact digital.islam@umich.edu.
About the Instructor: Dr. Sylvia Chan-Malik studies the intersections of race, gender, and religion in the United States, with a particular interest in how these categories intersect in contemporary struggles for social justice. Her current research focuses on the history of Islam in the United States, and specifically the experiences of U.S. Muslim women. Her book, Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color and American Islam (NYU Press, 2018) offers an alternative narrative of American Islam in the 20-21st century that centers the lives, subjectivities, and voices of women of color. In it, she brings together the stories of African American women and their engagements with Islam as social protest religion and spiritual practice; encounters between “Islam” and “feminism” in the media and popular culture; the cultural production and political expressions of South Asian and Arab American Muslim women during the late-20th century; and finally, the diverse experiences of U.S. Muslim women in post-9/11 America. Through their stories, the book tracks Islam’s shifting meanings in women’s lives and in national political and cultural discourse, and situates issues of race and racialialization—and in particular, logics of anti-blackness, xenophobia, orientalism, and white nationalism—as critical determinants of women’s experiences of being Muslim in the U.S. Her next project examines how race informs religious hate crimes in the United States.