Events

FAU Presents the Lecture “The Muslims Are Coming: Racism and the Politics of Empire”

BOCA RATON (October 8, 2012) – Florida Atlantic University’s School of Communications and Multimedia Studies in the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters will host Deepa Kumar, associate professor of Media Studies and Middle East Studies at Rutgers University with the lecture “The Muslims Are Coming: Racism and the Politics of Empire.” The lecture will be on Thursday, October 18 at 7 p.m. in the Performing Arts Building, room 101, on the Boca Raton campus, at 777 Glades Road. The lecture is free and open to the public.

”Islamophobia” became an especially familiar term in the United States following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. The term has been used as much to combat anti-Muslim sentiment or efforts as it has been to attack Muslim-Americans and deny the very existence of what can be identified as Islamophobia.

In a new book “Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire,”  Kumar argues that Islamophobia has a long history. In fact, creating anti-Muslim fervor was vital to European and American projects of empire building.

“This book is about the image of ‘Islam,’ that mythical creation conjured out of the needs of empire that has led even progressives to claim that Muslims are more violent than any other religious group,” Kumar writes in the introduction.

Kumar is the author of “Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization and the UPS Strike.” She has explained her unique understanding of Islamophobia in a wide array of international media outlets, including the BBC, USA Today, Philadelphia Inquirer, Mexico’s Proseco, China International radio, and Gulf News from Dubai.

For more information about the lecture, contact Noemi Marin at nmarin@fau.edu or 561-297-3851.