Becoming Black/Being Muslim, Race and Religion: The Question of Performativity, African Islam, Intersectionality and Multiple Identities

Abstract

intersectionality. It aims to unpack the diverse settings of Islam and Islamic culture, circumscribed around issues of the performativity of Islam and identity construction. The key hypothesis maintains that identities are constructed through difference; therefore it highlights African Islam and African Muslims identifications and their inflection by the politics of race and religion. The article interrogates gendered African Muslim subjectivities, and the experience of multiple discourses of exclusion, due to ethnicity, race, identity and religion. Examining a religious category involves sensitivity as well as the politicisation of this identifier, because of its relationship to Islamophobia, exclusion and racial discourses in the Western imaginary. There is need to integrate the political introduction of the framework that deals with the concept of the ‘Other.’ Accordingly, I have argued for a necessary permeability of discipline boundaries that provides points of convergence, thereby broadening possibilities for research analysis and widening the parameters of what we can know, specifically about the marginalized raced and gendered Islam of an African subject.