UC Riverside

“Let Me LOOK at You:” The Post-9/11 Representational Imperative & Muslim* Refusal argues that the War on Terror produces hegemonic notions of Muslim American identity in order to contain anti-imperialist critique. My dissertation makes an intervention in Critical Muslim Studies by articulating how gendered racialization works to depoliticize “the Muslim” within US imperial ideology. In addition to demonstrating how the post-9/11 representational imperative functions, I consider how Muslim women and queer Muslim poets and performance artists mobilize form to reject recognition by the settler-imperialist state. By looking at the work of poets and performance artists Naomi Shihab-Nye, Solmaz Sharif, Safia Elhillo, Fatimah Asghar, Andrea Abi-Karam, Arshia Fatima Haq, and more, my project asks: what kind of ethics of care emerges when Muslim poets and performance artists betray the impulse for representation? Post-9/11 Representational Imperative & Muslim* Refusal works alongside the poetry and performance of women and queer people caught under the post-9/11 spotlight of “the Muslim” to understand how they language a world beyond coloniality and the US imperial project it engenders.