CMENAS Colloquium Series. The Caribbean Qasida: Muslim Devotional Performance in Guyana and Trinidad

This lecture explores the evolution of Guyanese and Trinidadian Muslim devotional songbook and music albums featuring pre-Partition, Sufi-influenced, nineteenth-century qasida poetic praise songs brought by Urdu-speaking indentured Indian Muslims to the Caribbean. Professor Aliyah will focus on the material Indo-Caribbean qasida songbook and its subcontinental antecedents, including the popular Indo-Muslim text "Milad-e-Akbar," showing that the Caribbean qasida is a devotional song that propagates Indian Islam and preserves Urdu through performances of religious and cultural authenticity while engaging with global revivalist Islam. The qasida is simultaneously conserved and creolized in transliteration and translation, becoming a cultural art form accessible to Afro-Caribbean people as part of Caribbean postcolonial nation-building.

Aliyah Khan is Director of the Global Islamic Studies Center (GISC), and Associate Professor of English, and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She specializes in Islam in the Caribbean and the Americas. Dr. Khan has also presented and taught widely on Muslims in comics and graphic novels. Her award-winning book Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean (Rutgers UP and University of the West Indies Press 2020), is the first monograph on the comparative literature, history, and music of enslaved African Muslims and indentured Indian Muslims and their descendants in Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica. Dr. Khan’s academic work, creative nonfiction, and interviews have appeared in many journals, anthologies, and media venues including I Will Not Go: Translations, Transformations, and Chutney Fractals (Kaya Press 2024), Guernica magazine, Caribbean Quarterly, Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, Journal of West Indian Literature, National Public Radio, Times of India, Washington Post, and Sky TV (U.K.)

Accommodation: If there is anything we can do to make this event accessible to you, please contact us. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.
Email: -- warsansa@umich.edu