Rutgers’ Deepa Kumar, an expert in Islamophobia, is available to discuss anti-Muslim racism and empire building; myths about Islam widely accepted in the United States; how Islamophobia affects foreign policy and facilitates political repression.
“In the 20 years since 9/11,” she writes in her forthcoming book Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire: Twenty Years after 9/11, “Islamophobia has functioned in the United States both as a set of coercive policies and as a body of ideas that take various forms: liberal, conservative and rightwing. This particular form of bigotry continues to have horrific consequences not only for people in Muslim-majority countries who become the targets of an endless war on terror but for Muslims and those who ‘look Muslim’ in the West as well.”
Kumar, a professor of media studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, is internationally recognized as a leading scholar of Islamophobia. She is working on another book, tentatively titled “Terrorcraft: Empire, Race and Security,” about the political and cultural production of the terrorist threat in the era of neoliberalism.
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