The racialized figure of the Africana Muslim has been hypervisible in the logics and practice of racism from the days of Columbus to the present yet has been largely invisible in scholarship on race and white supremacy on the one hand, and regional scholarship on Islam and Muslim histories on the other. This two-year seminar, sponsored by the Mellon Foundation and hosted at the University of Michigan, brings together leading scholars to reconceptualize the study of the African and the Muslim. The seminar's aim is to trace the intersection of race and religion in the production and reproduction of white supremacy as well as resistance to it, in both theory and praxis.
One might ask, though, why this particular focus? In recent decades, the figure of the African and the Muslim, separately and overlapping, have gained renewed use-value in sustaining structural racism—for example, with Clinton's "super predator," the unprecedented growth of the carceral state, Obama "birther" conspiracies and accusations that he was Muslim, Trump's Muslim Ban, and the over-fifty-year War on Drugs and endless War on Terror at a cost of$1 trillion and $8 trillion respectively. The fungibility of racist tropes and practices adds meaning to W. E. B. Du Bois's conception of white supremacy as global: we are prompted to move with Du Bois beyond the Black-white binary and attend to the "color line that belts the world." Indeed, Du Bois connected particular injustices with the project of universal emancipation when he noted that white supremacy needs “the poor unwhite thing” for its planetary projects of slavery, genocide, and colonialism. We will connect these racializing projects and their sites through the Muslim, the African, and their almost entirely neglected intersection.
To address this need, our research team has assembled an innovative and interdisciplinary Sawyer Seminar that convenes leading scholars from around the world in hybrid sessions that prioritize accessibility and collaboration. Our invitees bring methods from the humanities and interpretive social sciences in six sessions, each one centered around a key site of study: Prisons, Plantations, Courts, Courts, Media Culture and Theory.