Talk by Samah Choudhury (Religious Studies, Ithaca College)

Our contemporary moment has witnessed a precipitous rise in the presence of American Muslim comedians in pop culture - on television, movies, and on the stage. I map their unprecedented popularity to the contemporary moment when American “Muslim” humor is named as such, as well as the complications that arise from imposing a religious referent interchangeably with terms like “racial” or “ethnic” as they relate to the constitution of the 21st-century Western subject. This gendering, racialization, and a growing progressive consensus on issues of intersectionality have come to provide a common language for comedians to identify as Muslim over strictly racial and ethnic nomenclature. Yet this humor replicates a subjugating racialized, religionized, and "masculine" vision of Islam – outside of themselves – by limiting its articulation to normative Sunni ideals and injunctions. For comedians like Hasan Minhaj, there is an inconsistent stepping in and out in of language that names him as Muslim, Indian, Desi, or simply “brown” that relies on aesthetics of American Blackness to register an opposition to white secularity.

Samah Choudhury is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Ithaca College. Her research surrounds Islam, humor, and the politics of social legibility in the United States. Her current book manuscript looks at the ways that Islam and Muslims are articulated through standup comedy and how they speak back to broader transnational practices and discourses of race, masculinity, and secularism. She holds a PhD from UNC Chapel Hill in Religious Studies.

Co-sponsored by the Asian American Studies Program and the Religious Studies Program.

Photo: Netflix/Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj

Join us for an information session to learn more about the new cycle of Migrations grants, open to all PI-eligible faculty (including tenured, tenure-track, professors of practice, senior research associates, and clinical-track faculty), irrespective of their college or school. Faculty-led programs and centers within the university are also welcome to apply.

With support from the Mellon Foundation Just Futures Initiative and Global Cornell, we are funding U.S.-focused work that has long-term and discernible benefits addressing racial and immigrant justice on campus and beyond. Research that has a broader international focus may apply for multispecies, interdisciplinary Migrations grants on any subject related to migration. We offer two tracks, based on our funding sources.

Track 1: Mellon Foundation Just Futures Initiative: Supports research and engagement focused on the United States and centered on the connections between racism, dispossession, and migration in interdisciplinary, innovative, and impactful ways.

Just Futures Team Research Grants, three grants of up to $150,000.Just Futures Small Grants, up to five grants of up to $10,000.Just Futures Engagement Grants, four to eight grants of up to $25,000.Track 2: Migrations: A Global Grand Challenge: Researching, Teaching, and Building for a World on the Move. Supports innovative, multispecies, and interdisciplinary approaches to key international migration issues. Aims to cultivate collaborations that advance science, scholarship, teaching, outreach, and engagement in ways that generate new insights into critical problems.

Migration Cross-Disciplinary Research (Team Research Grants) and Migrations Research (Individual Faculty): $10,000–$50,000 maximum awards. The objective of this funding opportunity is to promote path-breaking research on migrations at Cornell and, in particular, research with an impact that might resonate across multiple fields of study.The Cornell Migrations co-directors will address any questions about priorities, selection criteria, budgets, and other guidance on how to prepare a successful application. Proposals are due January 31, 2022.

This is a hybrid event. Please join us in person in Uris Hall G08 or register via Zoom for virtual.