Seminar Gabeba Baderoon and Schirin Amir-Moazami
Last Updated on Friday, 30 April 2010 15:58
Gabeba Baderoon considers the historical representation of Muslims as deviant in her paper ‘Oblique Figures: Islam and the construction of sex and race in South Africa’, this is contrasted by Schirin Amir-Moazami's analysis of conditionality of citizenship tests in contemporary Germany in her paper ‘Governmentalising gendered Islam: Islam-conferences and citizenship tests in Germany’
This event was held at Soas Thursday, 18 September 2008
Gabeba Baderoon
‘Oblique Figures: Islam and the construction of sex and race in South Africa’
Abstract:
Slavery is crucial to understanding the way in which Islam has been represented in South Africa. Compared to contemporary images of militarism and extremism associated with Islam in Europe and the US, contemporary South African images of Muslims show the continuing impact of a picturesque discourse that developed in South Africa during the period of Dutch and British colonialism. Under the Dutch, slaves were imported to the Cape colony in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from territories around the Indian Ocean, including East Africa, India and South-east Asia, and many enslaved people at the Cape were Muslim. At times, the population of slaves outnumbered that of colonists in the colony. Today Muslims constitute a small but visible percentage of South Africa's population. This presentation examines the subsumed legacy of slavery and Islam embedded in language and culture in South Africa, and concludes by examining the complex contemporary artistic and literary images of Islam in the country.
Gabeba Baderoon received a PhD in English from the University of Cape Town.
She has published articles on representations of Islam, slavery and the body, and has held fellowships at the African Gender Institute, the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and the Nordic Africa Institute. Baderoon teaches in Women's Studies and African and African American Studies at Pennsylvania State University.
Schirin Amir-Moazami
‘Governmentalising gendered Islam: Islam-conferences and citizenship tests in Germany’
Brief Description:
This paper explores the shift in the governance of Muslims in Germany post 9/11. It discusses in detail two specific cases: the German Islam conference (DIK) in 2006 and the Baden-Württemberg citizenship test; arguing for them as examples of different types of interventionist/integrationist practices from the State. Both these cases are studied in relation to notions of power and how it can operate vertically and horizontally across civil society and its notions of liberal citizenship. There is also a focus on the intertwined categories of gender and Islam which are often a touchstone for interventionist practices.
Schirin Amir-Moazami holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the European University Institute in Florence.
Currently, she is involved in a larger research project on Muslims in Europe coordinated by the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin, and she teaches both at the European University of Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder and at the Free University in Berlin. Her research focuses on the ways in which Islam is governed in European public spheres with a particular gender perspective.
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