Anouar Majid to speak at UNH on 'America's Invisible Moors' April 8th
Anouar Majid, Ph.D., associate provost for global initiatives and director of the 51品茶Center for Global Humanities, will present a lecture April 8, 2011 titled "America's Invisible Moors" as part of the University of New Hampshire Department of English
"We often tend to think of Moors in the context of European history and culture," Majid explains. "Shakespeare's play Othello, for example, has done much to popularize the notion of the Moor as an alien, ill-fitting body in a racially defined European civilization. Far less explored or understood is the strange life of the Moor in American history. As in Europe, or perhaps even more so, white Americans blended race and Islam to define their non-European identity. This strategy didn't go unchallenged by novelists and other writers. And in the process of challenging their nation's Eurocentric prejudices, white and black American writers gave substance to the American republic's quest for equality and justice."