AADS Speaker Series: “Rethinking Afro-Asian Solidarity from the Muslim Left: Islamic Malcolmology and the Muslim American Struggle for Black Lives”

Following the concomitant rise of anti-Asian violence and the police murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, as well as other Black Americans during the summer months of 2020, political organizers and academics alike began revisiting the terms of Afro-Asian solidarity. This talk draws on over two years of ethnographic research with Islamic scholars and pious youth of color involved in anti-surveillance and anti-Islamophobia activism in Greater Los Angeles to examine the role of South Asian Americans and West Asian Americans (predominantly Arab Americans) in advocating for Black Lives. More specifically, it considers how Muslim Americans of immigrant backgrounds promote an ethic of solidarity in their communities by invoking Malcolm X, or El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, as primarily a religious figure, rather than a secular one. In doing so, these activists engage debates in Malcolmology that foreground the place of Islam as an abolitionist tradition and Muslim Americans as a political community in the struggle against counterinsurgency policing, white supremacy, and anti-black and anti-Muslim racisms in the context of the ongoing domestic War on Terror.

M. Bilal Nasir is currently the Chau Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies at Pomona College. His current book project titled, The LAboratory: Surveillance, Race, and Islamic Politics in the City of Angels, explores transformations to race and policing under emergent regimes of anti-Muslim racism from the perspective of pious Muslim American activists in Greater Los Angeles. Bilal's research interests include policing and carceral studies, critical race studies, Asian American social movements, critical Muslim studies, and the anthropology of Muslims and Islam.

Pre-registration is required: https://tinyurl.com/afro-asian-solidarity

If you need a disability-related accommodation, please contact Asian American and Diaspora Studies (dukeaasp@duke.edu) by January 1, 2022.