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

The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, in partnership with the Society for the Humanities, presents this symposium featuring five cutting-edge researchers whose work crosses disciplinary lines to tackle some of the world’s most pressing problems.

Join postdoctoral fellows Mohamed Abdou, Eman Ghanayem, Bamba Ndiaye, Eleanor Paynter, and Grace Tran for a discussion of their work in the fields of migration studies and global racial justice. Topics will include identity, colonialism and decolonization, indigeneity and dispossession, refugee studies and mobility, economic and social justice, and critical race theory. Learn how new approaches and developments are changing scholarship in these critical fields.

Einaudi Center director Rachel Beatty Riedl will introduce the event, and Viranjini Munasinghe (Department of Anthropology) will moderate.

Speakers

Mohamed Abdou, Global Racial Justice Postdoctoral Fellow, Einaudi Center"Non-statist Indigenous and Muslim Conceptualizations of Sovereignty: The Decolonial Inseparability of Race from Religion"

Eman Ghanayem, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Comparative Literature and Society for the Humanities"Being Native, Being Refugee"

Bamba Ndiaye, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Music and Society for the Humanities"From Mbas Mi to Mbëkk Mi: Covid-Induced Migration and Social Movement Advocacy in Senegal"

Eleanor Paynter, Migrations Postdoctoral Fellow, Einaudi Center"Witnessing Migration 'Crises': Race, Coloniality, and Asylum in Italy"

Grace Tran, Migrations Postdoctoral Fellow, Migrations Initiative"What’s Love Got to Do With It?: Transformative Effects of Vietnamese-American Engagement in 'Marriage Fraud' Arrangements"

Learn about the Laidlaw Undergraduate Leadership and Research Program. Open to first- and second-year students, this 2-year program provides generous support to carry out internationally-focused research, develop leadership skills, engage with community projects overseas, and join a global network of like-minded scholars from more than a dozen universities.

Join us to learn more about the program, its benefits, and the application process, as well as tips for approaching potential faculty research mentors and writing a successful application. Sponsored by the Tatkon Center for First-Year Students and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

Please join us for a talk by James Robson 羅柏松 (James C. Kralik and Yunli Lou Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University).

It has become increasingly well-known that religious statues throughout Asia have hidden cavities that are filled with various objects inserted during a consecration ritual. This talk explores the hidden world of these statues through a discussion of a large collection of statues from throughout East Asia (China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam), including some intriguing European examples. The history of such images has been the object of much research in Japan and Korea that this talk will also use to contextualize the Chinese Buddhist images. These statues provide a valuable glimpse of local religion, ritual practice, lay devotion, and sutra fragments. These statues also raise a host of significant interpretive questions for historians of religion, including issues such as the place of icon animation, idolatry, and iconoclasm in Chinese Buddhism and Chinese Religious history generally. The images discussed in this talk contain a niche carved into their back (or sometimes in the uṣṇīṣa, base, or pedestal) that is filled with a variety of objects, including relics, religious manuscripts and printed texts, medicinal herbs, desiccated insects, talismans with magical writing, and a “consecration certificate” or “vow text.” These statues are ubiquitous but have had a particularly intriguing history of visibility and concealment in East Asia and in Western scholarship. This talk will raise questions about why sacred images and icons such as these have been objects of extreme devotion for some, but also presented problems for priests, politicians, missionaries, philosophers, and academics who for various reasons have found them distasteful, attacked their validity and power, and have tried to hide them away or destroy them. Why, even in the face of ideological critique and iconoclastic destruction, have they persisted and proliferated?

The Cornell Buddhist Studies Seminar Series is co-sponsored by the GPSA-FC, the Departments of Anthropology, Asian Studies and Philosophy, by the South Asia Program, and by the Society for the Humanities. The talk is open to all interested; for accessibility queries please contact buddhiststudies@cornell.edu

A Conversation with Timothy Mitchell, William B. Ransford Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University and Kaushik Basu, Professor of Economics and Carl Marks Professor of International Studies at Cornell University.