The Legacies of Black Power or Why I Study My Umi: ISM Fellows Lunch Talk with Su’ad Abdul Khabeer

This event will be held in Room HQ 276 in the Humanities Quadrangle (320 York Street, New Haven).

Black feminist scholarship provokes us to reimagine archives in creative and speculative ways and to “Cite Black Women” in acknowledgement of how intellectual canons, like cannons, are weapons that preserve and take life. This work echoes everyday Black communities’ deep investment in memory that rejects the idea of African-descended people as a people without history. Dr. Su’ad Abdul Khabeer enters this discourse through Umi’s Archive, an interdisciplinary multimodal research project that engages everyday Black women’s thought to investigate a key question: What new knowledge arises from narrating stories that officially don’t matter? 

Drawing on a family archive dating from the late-1920s and spanning three continents and the Caribbean, Umi’s Archive is a scholarly exploration into the life of one New York City-based Muslim woman activist, Amina Amatul Haqq (1950-2017), née Audrey Weeks, whom she called umi (Black Arabic for my mother). Amatul Haqq was an everyday person who lived a remarkable life: Harlem-born, Queens-raised, and granddaughter of Caribbean immigrants; she integrated her junior high, was a Pan-Africanist, dancer, Black Panther, Muslim, public school teacher, and single parent whose life story is a generative space to examine Black worldmaking.

In this experimental performance talk, ISM fellow Su'ad Abdul Khabeer will share a performance work-in-progress that explores the legacies of Black Islam in the afterlives of the Black Power Movement and may require audience participation.

This event is free, but registration is required. Lunch will be provided.

Open to Yale Community only.

Contact: Katya Vetrov

Speaker bios:

Su’ad Abdul Khabeer is a scholar-artist-activist originally from Brooklyn, NY. She is the curator of Umi’s Archive, a multimedia project documenting Black and Muslim histories and co-founder of Sapelo Square, a digital media and education collective on Black Muslim in the US. Su’ad’s first book, Muslim Cool: Race, Religion and Hip Hop in the United States, is a field defining study on Islam and hip hop that examines how intersecting ideas of Muslimness and Blackness challenge and reproduce the meanings of race in the United States. Su’ad’s written scholarly work on Islam and hip hop is accompanied by her performance-based work including her one woman solo show, Sampled: Beats of Muslim Life.  In 2018, Su’ad was profiled as one of 25 influential American Muslims by CNN and she has written broadly for outlets including: The Root, the Washington Post, Vice and Ebony Magazine, and has appeared on Al Jazeera English. Su’ad received her PhD in cultural anthropology from Princeton University, is a graduate from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and completed the Islamic Studies diploma program of the Institute at Abu Nour University (Damascus). Su’ad is currently an associate professor of American Culture and Arab and Muslim American Studies at the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor.

As an ISM fellow Su’ad will complete of a creative work, a solo performance ethnography, based on her project Umi’s Archive. The performance will introduce audiences, through dance, music, and monologue, into the worlds and world-making of Black Muslim women as racialized, gendered and spiritual subjects.