Research

My dissertation explores the shifting relationship between global Islam, socialism, and Third World internationalism in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from the 1950s to the present. It asks if religion is compatible with global emancipatory left-wing politics by tracing Chinese Muslims’ historical attempts to theorize and narrativize the relationship between Islam, anti-imperialism, and socialism through translingual writing and media practices. Studying global intellectual and cultural exchanges in the Mao-era, I ask how and why Islam, which once connected China and the Arab world, came to be seen as incompatible with anti-imperialist solidarity in Afro-Asia encounters and revolutionary literature. Finally, I investigate the legacies of these experiments in post- socialist literature that attempted to re-imagine a left-wing Islam beyond the nation-statism of the Bandung movement. My dissertation takes seriously creative endeavors to imagine inter- ethnic and inter-cultural solidarity, the negotiation of difference in the context of competing universals, and their accompanying contradictions. I also attempt to formulate an alternate logic to world literature by examining South-South literary encounters in the context of Third Worldism and its legacies in a post-socialist world.

I have conducted archival work in both China and Egypt. My research has been supported by the Social Sciences Research Council Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship (SSRC-IDRF), as well as the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life (IRCPL) and Weatherhead East Asian Institute (WEAI) at Columbia University. My Arabic language study at the prestigious Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) Program at the American University of Cairo (AUC) was supported by the Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship.

I have presented on my research at the Association of Asian Studies (AAS) and Middle East Studies Association (MESA) annual conferences, as well as at workshops at Columbia University and Lingnan University in Hong Kong.