Sylvia Chan-Malik’s Being Muslim argues that Muslim women of color in the United States have historically engaged with Islam as concurrent rejoinders to systemic racism and those national and cultural patriarchies directed against them. Chan-Malik centers the divergent experiences and insurgent faith practices of women of color, particularly African American women, within the fundamental character of Islam in the 20th and 21st US. Through the juxtaposition of multiple methodologies—archival, discursive, affective, and oral historical—Chan-Malik follows her subjects’ complex lives rather than inserting them within expedient political or academic discourses that often subsume the intersectional politics of US women in Islam.
Articles by Najwa Mayer
Najwa Mayer is a doctoral candidate in American Studies at Yale University. Her dissertation and first book manuscript, Muslim Americana, considers the global mobilization of "Muslim American" identities via popular visual and performance cultures through theorizations of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, and liberalisms in the 21st century United States. She is a founding member of the North Eastern Public Humanities Consortium (neph) and has contributed to the curation of modern and contemporary work by Arab and South Asian artists in the Yale University Art Gallery as well as the Whitney Humanities Center.