Course details

Name: ENGL - 493

Title: SEMINAR IN AMERICAN LIT: MUSLIM POP CULTURE

Section: 01

Semester: Spring - 2018

Credits: 3

Description:
Muslim Popular Culture in the USA and Beyond: Between Islamism and Islamophobia

“The main arena for jihad today is culture, not combat”
--Egyptian-American playwright Youssef el Giundi
(qtd in Rock the Casbah by Robin Wright, p 214)

Professor Fawzia Afzal-Khan

No prerequisite

Description:

This course will introduce undergraduates to a variety of pop culture forms from around the Muslim world including Muslim (sub) cultures in non-Muslim countries like the USA and Britain. As state apparatuses everywhere attempt to control their citizenry either directly (though force) or hegemonically (via consent of the governed), popular and youth cultures become the ideological terrain on which battles for freedom of expression are fought out; in the case of Muslim cultures, the contest is sometimes framed in terms of secular liberalism of thought and behavior, at others, in support of stricter religious orthodoxy even as the language and forms deployed are those of pop culture viz. “Islamic” fashion, music, comic books, film, theatre etc.
The challenge the course poses—one that is global in nature and requires students to synthesize materials from an array of disciplinary vantage points—is to think through the ongoing battle for hearts and minds of Muslim youth around the world. This battle can be summed up through the competing ideologies of Islamism on the one hand, and on the other, Islamophobia. How do we steer a course between this contemporary Scylla and Charbydis? Herein lies the challenge.
We will watch and discuss singers and bands via music videos, feature films, satellite preachers, stand-up comics, comic book heroines and the like, and read selections from various secondary texts that utilize the multidisciplinary ethos of a cultural studies methodology, all with a view to understanding and analyzing the postcolonial historical and political contexts within which these complex current debates about Muslim popular culture are best understood.



Last updated on 2017-11-13 By Afzal-Khan Fawzia (khanf)

Schedule: Tuesday,Thursday From 11:30 am To 12:45 pm

Graduation requirements:

  • Any Literature (1e)
  • ()
  • ()
  • ()
  • ()
  • Other American (TE 1d)
  • Post-1900 (1d)
  • International Issues (3a)
  • Ethnic Studies (3b)
  • World Cultures (TE 7a)

Teaching Faculty: Afzal-Khan Fawzia (khanf)

Is course canceled: No