Islam\u27s Low Mutterings at High Tide: Enslaved African Muslims in American Literature

This dissertation traces the underexplored figure of the African Muslim slave in American literature and proposes a new way to examine Islam in American cultural texts. It introduces a methodology for reading the traces of Islam called Allahgraphy: a method of interpretation that is attentive to Islamic studies and rhetorical techniques and that takes the surface as a profound source of meaning. This interpretative practice draws on postsecular theory, Islamic epistemology, and “post-critique” scholarship. Because of this confluence of diverse theories and epistemologies, Allahgraphy blurs religious and secular categories by deploying religious concepts for literary exegesis. Through an Allahgraphic reading, the dissertation examines modes of Islamic expression in a wide range of American works spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To unravel the diverse Muslim voices embedded within the American literary tradition, the dissertation proceeds chronologically through specific periods in African American culture and history, moving from slavery to post-Reconstruction to the post-civil rights era. The first two chapters focus on the nineteenth century and examine the works of ʿUmar ibn Sayyid, Bilali Muhammad, and Joel Chandler Harris. In these chapters, Allahgraphy is used to consider the material inscription of the source texts, specifically the African-Arabic manuscripts. The second half of the dissertation examines Islamic expressions in twentieth-century American texts. Through an analysis of works by Malcolm X and Toni Morrison, these two chapters explore the multiple sensory registers of Allahgraphy. The dissertation concludes by considering the appearance of the African Muslim slave in the diary of the Guantánamo prisoner, Mohamedou Ould Slahi. Ultimately, the dissertation aims to widen literary approaches to Islam in American works and to demonstrate the continuity of Muslim voices in the American literary works. In doing so, it delineates a long tradition of black Muslim Americans’ responses to Islamophobia

Talismans and Fragments of Enslaved African Muslim Women in the Americas

Between 1809 and 1835 approximately twenty slave revolts took place in Bahia, Brazil; the most substantial uprising was known as the Malê revolt of 1835, or the Muslim revolt, where as many as 500 rebels were involved (Gomez 103). Although women were involved in the rebellion, their role remains largely indiscernible in historical documents since, as historian João José Reis contends, “[w]omen were conspicuously absent from Malê rituals” (1993, 107). Despite the underrepresentation of the black female Muslim slave in the archives, her presence can still be illuminated through traces and fragments. This paper takes as its site of inquiry a few of those fragments found in runaway slave notices (compiled by Lathan A. Windley) and transcripts of the trials of Conceição da Praia, Brazil (cited in Reis’s Slave Rebellion in Brazil). I will focus on the complex and fraught roles of black female Muslims in the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade and in the wider Islamic community. Indeed, in the face of violence, exploitation, dispersal, and separation, enslaved African Muslim women turned to their faith to contest the risk of erasure. More specifically, I suggest that these remarkable women deployed an Islamic epistemology—evident in their dress and distribution of Islamic talismans—to retain a sense of identity and to counter a system that negated their personhood

18. The “Third Ear” Decolonizes: Integrating Deaf Students into Post-Secondary Classes

Can we effectively integrate Deaf students into our post-secondary classes before recognizing and listening to them? Studies indicate that Deaf students continue to struggle, be silenced, and experience isolation when mainstreamed. Deaf students, or second-language students, inevitably develop new identities once included; however, we cannot justly ask that they abandon their own cultural identities, nor ignore that they have their own cultural and individual identities. This paper draws on the literary theorist Homi Bhabha, specifically his notion of the “third space.” I propose that as educators we enter and create this space for our students and begin listening to them using a “third ear” so as to enable the surfacing of their cultural identities in hopes of countering their struggles, perpetual silencing, and isolation. The essay focuses largely on the implementation of the third ear and third space by programs found in the humanities