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'The Homegrown Threat: Rethinking Race, Religion and Nation'

The Department of Religious Studies will host "The Homegrown Threat: Rethinking Race, Religion and Nation through Muslim-Americans," a lecture by Zareena Grewal, on April 27. Grewal is the director of the Center for the Study of American Muslims at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, assistant professor in the departments of American studies and religious studies and the Program in Ethnicity, Race and Migration at Yale University, a documentary filmmaker and a regular contributor to the Huffington Post. Her talk will track dominant American discourses and representations of American Muslims throughout the "terror decade."

According to Grewal, nativists - those interested in protecting the interests of native inhabitants against those of immigrants - have justified the removal of rights and the restoration of racial profiling of some Muslim populations by citing security issues. But she sees emergent nativist narratives as less concerned with homeland security and more concerned with the threat of cultural domination, or the Islamization of America. The author of numerous articles and chapters on the intersections of race and religion in American Muslim communities, Grewal will soon publish "Unmapping the Muslim World," a book exploring the global religious networks that connect U.S. mosques to the intellectual centers of the Middle East. She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in Egypt and is a recipient of the Fulbright's prestigious Islamic Civilization Grant.

Grewal 's talk, which is free and open to the public, is Wednesday, April 27, at 4:30 p.m. in the Charles Chu Asian Art Reading Room in the Shain Library.



April 22, 2011