An international research network exploring the representation of Muslim identities in contemporary cultural discourses.

Seminar Moustafa Bayoumi and Bob Cannon

Last Updated on Friday, 30 April 2010 15:58

Moustafa Bayoumi presents an overview of his recent collection of Muslim experiences in contemporary America called 'How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?  Being Young and Muslim in America Today, this is complimented by Bob Cannon's consideration of Social Justice through Multiculturalism or Cosmopolitanism in his paper  'Goodbye Multiculturalism – Hello Cosmopolitanism? Social Justice in a Divided World'

 

 

This event was held at Soas Thursday, 5 February 2009

 

Moustafa Bayoumi (City University of New York)

'How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?  Being Young and Muslim in America Today'

Abstract

Since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, Arabs and Muslims in the United States have become the newest minorities in the American imagination and the latest 'problems' of American society. In this lecture, Moustafa Bayoumi will discuss how this new reality complicates contemporary American understandings of race, religion, and belonging and how young American Muslims, who seek to forge lives for themselves in a country that often mistakes them for an enemy, are particularly effected.

 

 

Biography

Moustafa Bayoumi is an Associate Professor of English at Brooklyn College, the City University of New York. He completed his Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and is the author of How Does It Feel to Be a Problem: Being Young and Arab in America (The Penguin Press) and co-editor of The Edward Said Reader (Granta). He has published essays in Transition, Interventions, The Yale Journal of Criticism, Amerasia, Arab Studies Quarterly, The Journal of Asian American Studies, The Nation, The London Review of Books, The Village Voice, and other places. He is also an occasional columnist for the Progressive Media Project and an editor of Middle East Report.

 

Bob Cannon (University of East London)

'Goodbye Multiculturalism – Hello Cosmopolitanism? Social Justice in a Divided World'

Abstract

Multiculturalism is under attack from both left and right. At best it is accused of promoting segregation and at worst fostering 'home grown' terrorism. Most of these accusations are factually incorrect and theoretically unwarranted. But multiculturalism for all its benefits is unable to place the question of cultural diversity in a global context: (1) Cultural differences cannot do justice to political conflicts; (2) multiculturalism is too bound by the national-state and (3) it lacks a sufficiently robust defence of universal human rights. In short, multiculturalism doesn't adequately relate to globalization and the geo-political issues that impact upon nation-states. Cosmopolitanism is a better way to think ethnic divisions in relation to issues of social justice at the global level - not least Western foreign policy in the Middle East. Multiculturalism is unable to incorporate these geo-political fault-lines, which is a powerful motive for political Islam. Cosmopolitanism is in a better position to address ethnic tensions at the global level by placing them in a social justice context

Biography

Bob Cannon is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of East London. His work is concerned with defending the normative content of modernity from detractors (postmodernists, advocates of multi-modernity, Marxists) that identify it with oppressive social practices (ranging from colonialism, imperialism, Fascism, capitalism and genocide). This involves developing a theory of countermodernity. He has also written defending multiculturalism from commentators on both the left and the right that blame it for social segregation and 'home grown' terrorism, while advocating cosmopolitanism as a successor approach, better placed to combine respect for cultural diversity with social justice at the global level

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