Muslim cultural production in the United States predates the nation’s settler formation, yet the mass circulation and canonization of “Muslim American” consumer genres accompanied the cultural economies of the War on Terror as products of multiracial capital, global exports, and social attempts to recover an “American Islam.” On the one hand, genres like Muslim American comics, punk, and standup comedy circulated as technologies of racial and secular neoliberalism in South and West Asia through US state department or private cultural projects invested in reforming Muslims through aesthetics and markets. On the other, a range of US-based Muslim social movements—consumer, anti-capitalist, feminist, and abolitionist—have leveraged genres like conversion narratives or science fiction toward political repertoires. Tracing the transnational social life of Muslim American forms, this talk examines the biopower of genre within US empire.
Najwa Mayer is an interdisciplinary scholar and teacher of Asian American, Gender and Sexuality, and Critical Muslim Studies, specializing in the cultural politics of US empire. Her current book manuscript examines the invention and conventions of “Muslim American” genres through the neoliberal intersections of racial, secular, and sexual politics within transnational markets. Her next project traces the geo-capitalist intimacies between weapons and art across the supply chains of the War on Terror, and through their afterlives in refugee cultural labor. Her research has received support from the Social Science Research Council, Andrew Mellon Foundation, and Henry Luce Foundation, among others. She holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University.