From Orientalism to American Ummah: Race-ing Islam in contemporary U.S. culture, 1978-2008.

From Orientalism to American Ummah tracks the discursive production of "Islam"---as religion, stereotype, racial signifier, marker of identity, and global culture---upon what writer Toni Morrison has called the "wholly racialized" terrains of the contemporary U.S. I follow this formation from a historical moment at the close of the 1970s in which Islam and Muslims in the U.S. could seemingly only be critically defined through an orientalist lens, onto a post-9/11 American landscape on which an emergent community of "Muslim Americans" is now tasked with the responsibility of defining itself, both as one of the myriad of socio-political-cultural groups in the U.S. marked by race, religion, gender, sexuality, etc., and as part of global community of believers, or ummah. Through interdisciplinary modes of analysis, I argue that cultural constructions of "Islam" and "Muslims" as the nation's foremost orientalized Other that have evolved over the course of the last three decades have not simply arisen out of traditional East-West orientalist hierarchies through which the imperial West has sought to control, restructure, and have authority over the Islamic "East" or the exotic oriental. Rather I contend that cultural representations of Islam which have arisen over the course of the last thirty years are also always rooted in domestic logics of race, gender, class, religion, and sexuality, and in many cases, are directly tied to the longstanding relationships between Islam and Black American communities, as well as the vexed legacies of anti-blackness that initially facilitated such cultural and spiritual ties. Engaging an eclectic archive which includes examinations of media coverage of the 1979 women's movement in revolutionary Iran, the mainstream feminist press of the late-1970s, a series of Hollywood films about Black-White intimacy and racial reconciliation, and recent debates between immigrant and Black American Muslim communities, I advance a cultural and historical genealogy of the late 20th-early 21st century as narrated through a series of crises-driven intersections of American racism and orientalism, which I argue have manufactured the thoroughly "race-d" cultural significances of Islam in the contemporary national imaginary.