Date of Award
7-24-2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English
First Advisor
Jodi Melamed
Second Advisor
Gerry Canavan
Third Advisor
Ben Pladek
Abstract
My dissertation theorizes Muslim Cultural Resistance as a decolonial method of critique and practice, rooted in Muslim ways of knowing, concepts, and epistemes as critical theory. My dissertation is interdisciplinary, braiding decolonial theory and theories on settler-colonialism with theories of race, feminist theory, and economic and political theories. I conduct qualitative research and analysis of political rhetoric in relation to creative, imaginative, and activist texts by Muslim cultivators throughout the ummah who locate alternatives to globalized colonial racial patriarchal capitalism. The resistance that I analyze in my dissertation, in addition to being refusal of the colonial condition that functions according to a global colonial matrix of power, is critique and practice conducted in social, political, and economic spheres. My dissertation rejects the opposition between the secular and the religious, instead recognizing that this binary is a symptom of modernity that privileges the global north as white secular capitalist and imperial settler-colonial supremacism. The texts that I analyze, predominantly by Muslim women cultivators, assert that transnational networks of coalition, care, and horizontal sharing of social and economic power act as locations of political agency to resist the racial ordering and bordering of the globe especially impacting Muslims, Black communities, migrants, and Indigenous people whose communities, families, and knowledge systems are dominated, exploited, extracted, and eliminated. These cultivators, in acting to generate knowledge, imagine alternatives and form transnational networks, create the methods, means, and conditions for the growth of communities that have historically and persistently been subjugated by colonial states and their neoliberal racial patriarchal structures. As a Muslim Palestinian woman academic impacted by the structures that I examine, I engage in cultural resistance alongside these cultivators by braiding my qualitative research and analysis with poetic speech acts rooted in Muslim and Indigenous Palestinian ways of knowing to move into action through thought and affect.