Dissertation Defense: Rahma Maccarone

Candidate: Rahma Maccarone

Major: Spanish

Advisor: Joanne Rappaport, Ph.D.

Title: Afroislamic Diasporic Countercultures: West African Muslim Writers in the Americas and the Making of the Muslim Diaspora

Many academics have written about the historical significance of slave narratives in relation to the international abolitionist movement in the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean. However, despite the wide efforts, no comprehensive reading exists that does analyze the ways in which Islamic abolitionist discourses and Afro-Islamic cultural complexities are articulated in the literature produced by enslaved African Muslims in the Americas during the nineteenth century.

Using a cluster of theoretical approaches, namely, Orientalism, Infrapolitics and Rememoration, to a) understand how the literate West African Muslim was marginalized through a processes of “othering” thus diminishing the political significance of their writings; and b) comprehend how these writers deploy Islamic epistemologies as liberation practice, I show that enslaved Muslims engage in abolitionist discourses while simultaneously recreating Afro-Islamic traditions of knowledge transmission and writing as a practice to disseminate Islamic education. To understand the mechanism through which West African Muslims structured and composed their literature to address slavery and spread Islamic knowledge, it is crucial to study slavery and abolition in West Africa as well as Islamic traditions of literacy and manuscript culture before and during the Sokoto caliphate (1804-1903). Through my research, it becomes evident that the literary works of Omar Ibn Said Life (1831), Muhammad Kaba Saghanughu’s Kitab al-salat (1823) and his Emancipation speech (1838), Abubakr al-Saddiq (1834), Sheikh Sana See (1850) and Biography of Mohammad Gardo Baquaqua (1854) collectively reflect a series of what I call

“Afro-Islamic diasporic countercultures” that are constitutive of the black Atlantic. They reflect a deep connection to a West African Islamic intellectual tradition of literacy, education and knowledge which continues to resonate with contemporary struggles for justice and liberation among Afro-Brazilians and African American Muslims. Euro-American processes of knowledge production have long denied the viability of Afro-Islamic knowledge and epistemologies as a category of analysis. In this research, I hope to dislodge such notions and provide new ways of understanding ignored practices of West African Muslim diaspora in the Americas.