Description

This lecture considers the preponderance of cultural and political concern with the assimilation of Muslim minorities primarily in the US, but also in Europe. Such an emphasis on producing “good Muslims” comes from both the right and the left, and in the discussions on assimilation there is little talk of the forms of being that have to be given up, renounced, or sacrificed for the sake of assimilation. The putative promise of assimilation is that the state would extend its protections to the assimilated subject, protecting assimilated Muslims from exposure to violence. And yet the sacrifice demanded of minority subjects happens in a political and economic climate of neoliberal rationality. How might sacrifice as a historical and social problematic help us to analyze the renewed emphasis on Muslim assimilation?

Zahid Chaudhary, Associate Professor of English, Princeton University. Chaudhary specializes in postcolonial studies, visual culture and critical theory, and is the author of Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India.