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Far from Mecca: Gender and the Performance of Piety in the Muslim Caribbean
April 7, 2022 @ 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
Abstract: The changing norms of Muslim women’s dress and national participation are intersectionally gendered and racialized in the twenty-first-century Anglophone Caribbean, where nineteenth-century subcontinental Indian indentured labor, rather than translatlantic African slavery, has been more visibly linked to regional Islam. Gendered Muslim dress and cultural practices are framed as obstructing postcolonial creolization projects and demonstrating allegiance to a radicalized “global Islam”, rather than to the Caribbean nation-state.
Aliyah Khan is associate professor of English, and Afroamerican and African Studies, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is also director of the U-M Global Islamic Studies Center. Her research fields are 19th-21st Caribbean literature and Muslim and Islamic literatures, with emphases on race, gender, and sexuality. Khan is the author of Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean (Rutgers University Press 2020 and University of the West Indies Press 2021), the first academic monograph on the history, literature, and music of enslaved African and indentured South Asian Indian Muslims in the Anglophone Caribbean. Far from Mecca received honorable mention in the 2021 Modern Language Association Prize for a first book. Khan’s writing and interviews also appear in the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, the Journal of West Indian Literature, Caribbean Quarterly, GLQ, and Pree: Caribbean Writing, and on podcasts and in media including Sapelo Square, The Polis Project, the Black Agenda Report, Chicago’s Radio Islam, National Public Radio, and the Washington Post.