Prophets of rage: Race, nation, Islam and the cultural politics of identity

This dissertation is an attempted intervention into the debates surrounding globalization, the nation-state, immigration, multiculturalism and anti-racist struggle that are taking place throughout much of Europe and the United States in the post 9/11 era. In linking the history of American empire, enslavement and conquest with European modernity and colonialism, this project seeks to understand the role and place of culture (cinema, television, hip-hop culture and sports) as a site of contestation and struggle over the meanings and relationships between race, nation, Islam and cultural identity.; Chapter One explores cinema and television and the manner in which the Immigrant Muslim is constructed as the quintessential Other that threatens the domestic space of the American nation. These discourses not only resonate deeply with the xenophobic, nativist rhetoric that is central to American nation building, but they also mobilize a multiracial national family against the Immigrant Muslim which obscures the power of white supremacy and the deep race, class and gender fissures within American society.; Chapters Two and Three place African-American Islam within the long and prolific history of Afro-diasporic radicalism and internationalism. Chapter Two explores hip-hop culture as a powerful site for exploring the relationship between Blackness and Islam and the poetics of resistance embodied by these cultural activists (Mos Def, Rakim, Public Enemy and Ice Cube) as they speak truth to power---defiantly critiquing history, slavery and American imperialism. Chapter Three explores the world of sports as a site in which complex wars around Black identity have constantly been waged, as African-American Muslims (Muhammad Ali and Mahmoud Abdul Rauf) have forged complex identities in relationship to the American nation-state.; Chapter Four explores how expressive cultures around Muslim identity inform and are informed by the larger powerfields of race, nation, immigration and colonial history within Europe in general and Britain specifically. This chapter uses film and hip-hop culture as spaces in which Muslims in Britain negotiate complex political and cultural currents in the face of displacement, racism and colonial memory---forging new forms of identity beyond the limiting structures of the modern nation-state.