African American Studies Commons^™

Black Islamic Evangelization In The American South, Chester Warren Cornell

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Broadly speaking, my research focus is on African American religion, with particular interest in the various manifestations of black Islam in the United States. I am particularly interested in the question “Has religion served as an opiate or stimulant for black political protest?” And my research attempts to answer it by chronicling the experiences of black Muslims in southern prisons. My dissertation builds on Michelle Alexander’s groundbreaking book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010). Alexander argues that African Americans were not over-represented in America’s prisons in the 1970s, but with President Reagan’s War on …

Historicizing Muslim American Literature: Studies On Literature By African American And South Asian American Muslim Writers, Wawan Eko Yulianto

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In response to the challenge of understanding Muslim Americans in a way that highlights their integral role in the United States through literature, this research starts with two questions: 1) how should we read Muslim American literature in relation to the lived experiences of Islam in America? and 2) how does Muslim American literature contribute to the more mainstream American literature.

To answer those questions, this research takes as its foundations the theories by Stuart Hall and Satya Mohanty on, firstly, the evolving nature of diaspora identity and on the epistemic status of identity. Following Hall’s argument that every expression …