About the Author

Mahwash Shoaib is instructor of American Literature at Central Piedmont Community College.

Reviews

From comic books to poetry to the fine art of love, Muslim American Hyphenations is a unique and necessary anthology, as well as a welcome addition to the growing literature on Muslim Americans. The wide-ranging and deeply intelligent essays in this book break new ground by examining Muslim Americans not simply as objects of study but as complex producers of culture in their own right.

In this thoughtful volume, scholars brilliantly reflect on the multiple voices of Muslim artists from literature and film to TV and music, showing the vitality, depth, and inclusiveness of their works and visions. This ambitious collection fills a critical void and offers a sophisticated look at the incredibly dynamic and multifaced Muslim American imagination. A must read, it is a wonderful, essential contribution.

Muslim American Hyphenations is a fresh expansion of a widening discourse on the study of Muslim identities in the United States. Through a theorizing of the hyphen (as in Muslim-American), this collection of brilliant scholarship offers a critical outlook on race, class, gender and religion in relation to Muslim American artistry. Surely, it is a valuable contribution to growing conversations about Muslim life and ways of knowing in the modern world.

Muslim American Hyphenations is a must-read for anyone interested in contemporary Muslim American's creative cultural production or learning more about how Muslims in the U.S. navigate life under the white Protestant gaze. The contributors in this volume show how Muslim Americans in a post-9/11 world create alternative representations of Muslims as neither victims nor mystical heroes, rather as regular people navigating a complex world of binaries. This intellectually rigorous and accessible volume puts intersectionality at the forefront, recognizing that Muslims are race, gendered, and classed people. Muslim American Hyphenations shows its readers that representation won't save us, but it might just be the first step to creating new worlds for Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Muslim American Hyphenations offers a valuable and appreciated contribution to the growing literature on US Muslim cultural production in its entanglement with politics, state surveillance, belonging, and artistic expression. Examples of the art of words and the art of images, skillfully analyzed by a cast of diverse scholars, are stitched together into a quilt that renders Muslim American lives in all their complexities and complications, while celebrating art as a mirror of our existence.

The radicality of differentiation, of celebrating the infinitely multivalent truths of Muslim American experience, of immigrant American experience, cannot be overstated. Even saying "Muslim American" or "immigrant American" casts the "Muslim" as grammatically subordinate to the American monolith. Shoaib has assembled something truly generous here, generous and intimate and bone-hard and searching and yes, fearless. It's radical because it rejects the inertia of received gaze, because it doesn't flatten us to narratives already proven legible to empire. It's radical because it sees us alive.

This incredible collection of new work deals with complex questions of religion, race, class, gender, and migration laced with layered issues of nationalism, popular culture, surveillance, war, borders, and Islamophobia in nuanced and creative ways. It is an important contribution to critical Muslim studies and cultural studies by a diverse group of scholars that rethinks existing frameworks of religion/secularity from the mainstreams and margins of Muslim communities in fascinating and innovative ways. I have been waiting for a book such as this!

This is an important collection offering serious analyses of American Muslim expressive arts in diverse media under one cover, a welcome and valuable addition to multiple shelves: Muslim studies, gender studies, American studies, Black studies, ethnic studies.