The Asian American / Asian Research Institute (AAARI) was established on November 19, 2001, by The City University of New York (CUNY) Board of Trustees, in a resolution introduced by Chancellor Matthew Goldstein. The Institute is a university-wide scholarly research and resource center that focuses on policies and issues that affect Asians and Asian Americans. It covers four areas: Asian American Studies; East Asian Studies; South Asian Studies; and Trade & Technology Studies.
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Four American Moslem Ladies': Racial and Gendered Insurgencies in Early American Islam
This talk investigates the history of the first known photograph of Muslim women in the U.S. Taken in 1923, the photo features four African American Muslim women in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicagoat the time known as the Black Metropoliswho had converted to Islam through the Ahmadiyya movement, a South Asia-based missionary sect. Through an analysis of the photo and the historical, social, and cultural circumstances surrounding it, Sylvia Chan-Malik narrates how Islam emerges as an affective and embodied experience in the early-20th century urban North, constituted by and through such womens engagements and negotiations with forms of global citizenship, racial belonging, feminist desires, and Islamic practices, all of which, she argues, enable alternative definitions of the racialization of Islam.