CURA: 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 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.