Amer. Muslims in ReligionArts

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

2016, President Donald Trump banned Muslims from certain countries from entering America. The executive order increased media attention and mainstream discourse, including narrative constructions of Muslims as undesirables—essentially marginalizing three million American Muslims and resulting in an escalation of Islamophobic vandalism and hate crimes. But this begs the questions: what is an American Muslim? From ethnically diverse backgrounds, who speaks for them? As an introduction to American Muslim literature and culture, this course explores the narratives of American Muslims by examining the ways in which they have responded to the pressures of national and transnational belonging, cultural citizenship, and identity formation through a variety of literary and cultural forms, including spoken word, short story, plays, novels, sitcoms, and film. The cultural output of American Muslims are divided into three categories of narratives: immigration narratives, second-generation identity construction narratives, and postcolonial narratives. In doing so, the course will look at how race, gender, ethnic heritage, and immigration policies politicize (and otherize) their identities. We will also consider how the peripheralized can be recentered through counternarratives that have been acculturated into the mainstream, undertaken by an analectic integration rather than a dialectic assimilation.