Artistic (Self)-Representations of Islam and Muslims: Perspectives Across France and the Maghreb is a collection of essays that explores the question of artistic representation(s)/self-representation(s) of Muslim religious and cultural identity in France, the Maghreb and in/between since the 2000s. The volume offers a plurality of feminine and masculine voices and points of view on cultural Islam (Franco-French, Franco-Maghrebi, Maghrebi), all the while addressing the impact of events like 9/11, the tragic attacks in France in 2015-2016 (Charlie Hebdo, Stade de France, Bataclan, Nice), and the Arab Spring. Taken together, the volume features a transnational and transversal set of artistic voices that are not looking for consensus, but rather invoke dissensus (Rancière) and a full range of expression. A necessary part of that full range of expression is (self)-representations: Muslims representing themselves, though this is no facile (self)-representations, as artists continue to use the properties of the imagination and performance to complexify an easy reading, reductive meaning, or oversimplified interpretation. This interdisciplinary study contributes to the fields of French and Francophone Studies, Humanities and Global/Cultural Studies such as political studies, sociology, political philosophy, literature, cinema, visual arts and media studies with a focus on broadening views on the topic of Islam and Muslim (self)-representations across disciplines.

This book provides an interdisciplinary exploration of the cinematic representations of the experiences of African women and girls in situations of political conflict. The role of cinema is important in providing information about the situation of women and girls in situations of political conflict, and the main characters often also become signifiers of wider social, political and economic ideas, at both global and local levels. Drawing on fictional and biographical cinematic representations, this book considers films covering a range of different regions, experiences, historical periods and other contexts, to draw a nuanced picture of African women and girls who participate in or are affected by African political conflicts. The films are analysed using a decolonial feminist cultural approach, which combines cultural approaches, African feminisms and the contrapuntal method to ensure an inter-textual, intersectional and decolonial examination. The book engages with multiple themes and topics, including nationalism, nation-building, neocolonialism, memory, history, women’s and girls’ agency and activism. Through these themes and topics, the book explores how the films represent African women’s and girls’ agency in relation to their participation in social, economic and political activities. This book will make a significant contribution to literature focused on African women and girls within politics, conflict studies and film studies.

The LAMALIF anthology presents a wide variety of articles from LAMALIF, Morocco’s longest-serving Francophone journal. Active between 1966 and 1988, LAMALIF covered the most critical periods of Moroccan history and engaged in crucial debates about democratization, feminism, culture, education, Third World relations, and decolonization. However, LAMALIF was not just a journal; it was a real school, where Morocco’s, North Africa’s, and the developing world’s emerging and established writers, artists, and thinkers found a space to disseminate their ideas and address readerships across different cultures and geographical areas in French. This anthology is the first comprehensive translation into English of a wide selection of LAMALIF’s articles covering literary and art criticism as well as critical theory, feminism, Islam, and emigration. In addition to making available to Anglophone readerships articles about transnational solidarities and connections between North Africa and the rest of the world, LAMALIF anthology historicizes this sociocultural and political project within the painful period of authoritarianism in Morocco and reveals how culture worked as a trenchant weapon in the struggle against repression and silence.

Representations of Islam in United States Comics, 1880-1922 examines the depiction of Islam, Muslims, and the Islamic world in U.S. popular culture, particularly comics and related artifacts, between 1880 and 1922. Through cartoons, comics, editorial cartoons, serialized advertisements and other materials the book unfolds a narrative about how the Islamic world and its people were understood by the American government and its people. This “knowledge,” garnered from popular culture of the day, produced a lens through which domestic and international relationships were created and maintained. Representing a wide swath of U.S. popular culture and discourse, the reflections these artifacts offer are united in their depiction of the “Oriental” in an era that is largely assumed to have been marked by American un-interest in the region, peoples and religion. An exciting contribution to a growing field, this book resituates the U.S. within the Islamic world, using the everyday medium of comics to provide a fresh perspective on the subject.

This book is a case study in the literary, psychoanalytic, and theological encounters between diasporic Muslim intellectuals and secular western modernity. It centres on the simultaneous search for the possibility of both a reformation of Islamic fundamentalism and a transformation of the exclusionary limitations of western public institutions. With roots in original research in the fields of comparative religion and cultural studies, and drawing on sources in English, French, and Arabic, the author introduces and elaborates the concept of "Western-Islamic public sphere". This concept defines what is at stake in the formative play of public representations where traditionalist foundations and modernist adaptations meet, clash, and produce discourse around their common disequilibrium. The Western-Islamic public sphere (which is secular but not secularist and which is Islamic but not Islamist), within which a critical Islamic intellectual universe can unfold, deals hermeneutically with texts and politically with lived practices. It emerges from within the arc of two alternative, conflicting, yet equally dismissive suspicions defined by a view that critical Islam is the new imperial rhetoric of hegemonic orientalism and the opposite view that critical Islam is just fundamentalism camouflaged in liberal rhetoric. This innovative and original scholarly apparatus offers a third view -- one that arises in its practice from ethical commitment to intellectual engagement, creativity, and imagination as a portal to the open horizons of conflictual history.

Despite their distinct theological differences, Shi'a and Sunni Muslims, followers of the two main branches of Islam, share a number of core beliefs including an allegiance to and love for the Prophet Muhammad and members of his family. For Shi'a Muslims, reverence for the Prophet and allegiance to his household (Ahl al-bayt, 'People of the House'), comprising his immediate family and their descendants, constitutes an essential principle of belief that has directly impacted how Shi'i artists, rulers, patrons and ritual participants have conveyed their love and loyalty through material culture and religious ritual. The 22 essays in this volume, richly illustrated with over 200 colored images, present a diversity of beliefs and practices expressed through the arts, architecture, material culture and ritual that spans Shi'i history from the tenth century to the present day. With contributions from experts in the fields of anthropology, religious studies, art and architectural history, numismatics, film studies and contemporary art, the book also calls attention to the global diversity of the artistic and devotional expressions of Shi'a Muslims from across Trinidad, Senegal, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, India and China. Additionally, some essays draw upon important female Shi'i figures and female ritual practices and many chapters underscore the theme of love for the Ahl al-bayt beyond Sunni and Shi'i demarcations. This work contributes to a growing body of scholarship dedicated to the religious arts and rituals of Shi'a Muslims around the world.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1962.