Papers by Ibtisam M. Abujad
Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature, 2024
This article analyzes resistance of Muslim Uyghurs to the genocide perpetrated against them by th... more This article analyzes resistance of Muslim Uyghurs to the genocide perpetrated against them by the Chinese government under the global war on terror. We use historical, political, and cultural analysis of journalism, personal narrative, poetry, film, and traditional music to argue that Uyghurs use cultivation-bearing witness, zikr and remembrance, communal religious practices, and ecopoetry-as part of their practices to actualise survival and liberation. In doing so, we uncover how the global war on terror is employed as a policy and justification by a network of states (China, the United States, and countries in the Arab world) to serve the conflicting political and economic interests that enable settler-colonial dispossession, displacement, and elimination of Indigenous and racialised people-Uyghurs and Palestinians-especially women and children.
Editorial, Decolonial Subversions, 2023
This is an introduction to the 2023 general issue of Decolonial Subversions in which authors enga... more This is an introduction to the 2023 general issue of Decolonial Subversions in which authors engage in a dialogue about colonial racial capitalism from different locations and by looking through different critical lenses. Instead of the working backwards of Eurocentric research and cultural consumption/production, with its assumption of a universalist god-eye-view that closes/forecloses thought, in this issue, there is an authentic generative journey of grappling with social, political, and economic forms of domination which operate on a global scale and manifest in local structuring of access. The works in this issue use different methods in their critique and praxis: research, poetry, visual expression, a digital archive, thought exercise and theory, personal narrative, and translation. Collectively, they develop methods to Thinking Otherwise as a process of generating knowledge that challenges the racial order without being tethered, consumed and constituted by it. They cultivate to unmask domination and root in communality. In doing so, they reclaim authority over the narratives and histories that have been coopted and distorted in the colonial imaginary to locate self-determination that brings about futurity for people subjected to colonial and racial domination. This authority and self-determination are part and parcel of decolonial subjectivation out of patriarchal objectification, state exploitation and cooption, and settler-colonial elimination.
Ethnic Studies Review, 2021
Hyphenated identities continue to be prominent in twenty-first century scholarship meant to uncov... more Hyphenated identities continue to be prominent in twenty-first century scholarship meant to uncover and confront assimilative structures of power in the Global North. However, the “Arab-Muslim” hyphen, in particular, continues to be used as a convention without a proper examination of its assimilative and racial dimensions. This commentary confronts the power dynamics at play in the use of the hyphen and calls for a more equitable understanding of Muslimness as it intersects and diverges from American Arabness. Ultimately, this commentary seeks to build from the already vigorous resistance to xenophobia and ethnocentricity in Muslim Studies, Arab American Studies, and other branches of Ethnic Studies by calling attention to the ways in which the hyphen counteracts the scholarly imperative of equity at the center of these frameworks of inquiry.
Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media, 2021
The exploitation of the hijab in fetish images and pornographic films invites the consumer to exp... more The exploitation of the hijab in fetish images and pornographic films invites the consumer to explore their colonial fantasies and to ponder the raced conceptions of Muslim women and men. The fetishization of the hijab, niqab, and burqa signals this racialization; this new racism depends not only on epidermalization, but on ethnicity, geography, and culture. It is these fetishized forms of religious symbology which invite the epistemic violence of the imperial gaze, as they do with their facilitation of the male gaze. This work seeks to uncover the imbrication of the manufacture of desire in globalist politics, while also confronting the gendered, classed, and raced dimensions of the colonial imaginary. It examines how pornographic images and film equally exploit the violent Muslim man trope and, its converse, the emancipated Muslim woman trope to perform submission for the Western consumer, and subjugate Muslim bodies, minds, and labor.
Conference Presentations by Ibtisam M. Abujad
National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) Conference, 2024
I discuss the relationship between the spectacular masculinist sexual violence by the Israeli mil... more I discuss the relationship between the spectacular masculinist sexual violence by the Israeli military against Palestinian Muslim men and the invisiblized domesticating sexual violence of Palestinian Muslim women to uncover how both are ways to destabilize Palestinian social structures, diminish public resistance to the state's genocidal carcerality, and perpetuate Orientalist, anti-Muslim and Islamophobic racist ideologies. I also discuss how young Muslim women document the resistance and persistence on social media as a "will to visibility" that uncovers and deconstructs the patriarchal dimensions of these genocidal violences by the colonizer.
Middle East Studies Association Conference, 2024
In her futuristic political art, Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour predicted that Israel, beyond... more In her futuristic political art, Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour predicted that Israel, beyond its settler-colonial violence in Gaza and in Palestine, aspires to become global empire. In my presentation, I discuss how these global aspirations are imagined in Plan 2035, an AI-generated image of post-destruction Gaza that was developed by unnamed businesspeople and released by Netanyahu in May of 2024. I analyze the ecologically oriented forms of resistance that Sansour's work offers in relation to Israeli fantasies of dominion. My presentation considers the following questions: What is the relationship between the imperial gaze and the manipulation (decimation and reconstruction) of environmental, religious, and social landscapes? What is the significance of artificiality (Artificial Intelligence) as a human proxy and the human-less neoliberal space in the AI-generated image? How does this relate to the culture-nature binary in colonial fantasies and imperial interests? How does Larissa Sansour imagine the role of the natural environment in resistance to this Israeli imperialism? What is the role of gender, family, and community? How do cultural texts become political imaginaries, and what is their role in coloniality and decoloniality?
Palestine and The Colonial Present Event Panel Discussion, 2023
In this brief conference presentation, I discuss the colonial common sense in the enactment of ge... more In this brief conference presentation, I discuss the colonial common sense in the enactment of genocide against the Palestinian people. I speak about the racial dehumanization of Palestinians that is used by the Israeli government to justify the enactment of inhumane violence against Palestinian bodies and communities.
critical poetry by Ibtisam M. Abujad
(DES)TROÇOS: JOURNAL OF RADICAL THOUGHT, 2024
"Read a Poem for Gaza" discusses the censorship and silencing of calls for decolonial justice by ... more "Read a Poem for Gaza" discusses the censorship and silencing of calls for decolonial justice by Palestinian academics and writers at institutions and in public forums following October 7th, 2023. It considers the liberatory impact (and limitations) of poetic and epistemic forms of resistance for displaced Palestinians in the global north who were dispossessed of their lands and homes by Israeli settler-colonial violence funded by U.S. imperial investments, while being privileged in their situation within the global north as mobile American citizens. It asks: What about the silenced voices of those martyred in Gaza? Should we speak for them, how do break barriers to speak alongside them, and do their words deconstruct the temporal and spatial borders of the nation-state to allow us to challenge in our own speech acts the violence of settler-colonialism and the politics and economics of empire? It is also an examination of the role of memory and the maternal, the passing down of knowledge of collective and felt trauma and the Muslim and Palestinian ethos of care and struggle beyond institutional erasure of this trauma from official history. The poem was translated by and published in (DES)TROÇOS: JOURNAL OF RADICAL THOUGHT.
Pathways to Diverse and Inclusive Curricula: The Way Forward, 2024
This poem speaks from the global north at the border between the university and the public space.... more This poem speaks from the global north at the border between the university and the public space. In it, I begin with an awareness of being able to speak back to institutional coloniality as a Muslim woman because of the power afforded me in my relationship to the university, something that reminds me of the “emerging dominant” of Spivak. It examines the relationships between ability, voice, and agency. The “here” of this poem is one at the heart of empire, the concrete cement, one that interpellates Others into hierarchy and positions them on the margins. The bells are from the church that sound regularly as the identity of the university, those that tell a specific version of time . Hearing the bells takes me into my body, back to my own transnational relationship with my being in the Middle East hearing the adhan that marks the sonic landscape of Muslim ways of being. Suddenly I find myself ripped from my body into lack as I realize my access to these Muslim melodies is mediated through a Eurocentric temporal and spatial filter. I imagined them only through my adjacency to the church bells, standing underneath them. This colonial sonic landscape confines me in an alternative temporality apart from my liberation, the adhan calling individuals into community and Muslims from consumption into relationality and awareness. I find myself out of place and out of time, not knowing if agency and the liberational Muslim ways of being can be located as a possibility from within this Euro-north-American institutional space. Ultimately, this poem navigates subalternity and the experience of Muslims within institutions of learning in the global north.
The Nasiona, 2019
This is a work of autoethnographic poetry that does memory work in examination of the collective ... more This is a work of autoethnographic poetry that does memory work in examination of the collective generational traumas of settler-colonial displacement for Palestinian families. In telling a personal story of loss, it examines the act of storytelling for many families who find refuge in the work of remembering together out of erasure. It stops at a point in time when there is a passing of the elder. Elder becomes ancestor, and then the next generation assume the becoming-into-elder as the holder of the story responsible for rooting generations in the memory of the past so that they can find a future.
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Papers by Ibtisam M. Abujad
Conference Presentations by Ibtisam M. Abujad
critical poetry by Ibtisam M. Abujad