The Race and Religion series at ISGRJ-Newark seeks to center conversations about the intersections of race and religion, and the racialization of religion, from historical and contemporary perspectives, in the U.S. and globally. As categories of identity and identification, race and religion have historically overlapped and competed as primary forms of differentiation and markers of difference.

This Winter/Spring the series will focus on Islam in Africa. One of the consequences of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade was that West African Muslims preceded much of the rest of the Muslim world in their confrontation with imperial power, market economies, and the moral questions they engendered. Later European colonization and the subsequent process of decolonization, and the tensions between discriminating hierarchies of race and the moral commitments of religion, conditioned conflicting ways of imagining community and group membership.