Coming-out narratives of ex-Muslims in France
“Ex-Muslims and the Politics of Public Apostasy From Islam in Contemporary France”
with Adi Saleem Bharat (CAS ’14)
Assistant Professor, Romance Languages & Judaic Studies, University of Michigan
Tuesday, December 13
2:00-3:30pm
121 Bay State Rd.
This talk examines the “coming-out” narratives of self-described ex-Muslims in France. Generally speaking, two main types of narratives exist: narratives of transition from Islam to atheism and narratives of religious conversion from Islam to Christianity. There are few differences between these two main types. Both narrative types are inherently political, intersecting significantly with broader Islamophobic and secularist-nationalist discourses in France. I argue that public declarations of apostasy from Islam in France (as narratives of salvation embracing the promise of modernity, while critiquing the supposedly inherent backwardness of Islam) are engaged in a particular mode of subjectivation that cannot be understood outside of the ontological afterlives of colonialism.
Adi Saleem Bharat (CAS ’14) is an Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He conducts research and teaches courses on race and religion in contemporary French society, with a particular focus on Jews and Muslims. His work is interdisciplinary, intersecting with cultural studies, media studies, literary studies, and critical discourse analysis. He is currently working on a manuscript tentatively titled Beyond Jews and Muslims, which examines and challenges the construction of a polarized, oppositional category of “Jewish-Muslim relations” in media and political discourse in contemporary France.
