Tuesday Noon: Mayanthi Fernando—The Republic Unsettled
UC Santa-Cruz anthropology professor Mayanthi Fernando is interested in how Muslim French draw on both Islamic and secular-republican traditions as they create new modes of ethical and political engagement. The author of The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism alternates between an analysis of Muslim French politics, ethics, and social life and the contradictions of French secularity that this new Muslim subjectivity reflects and refracts. Fernando visits Scripps to explore how the institutions, political and legal practices, and dominant discourses that comprise French secularity regulate, govern—and profoundly disrupt—Muslim life and to argue that “the Muslim question” is actually a question about secularism.
This program is presented in partnership with the Office of Public Events and Community Programs.