The Modern Language Association of America announced it is awarding its 28th annual Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book to two authors and two honorable mentions. GISC Director, Dr. Aliyah Khan was awarded an honorable mention for her first book Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean, published by Rutgers University Press and the University of the West Indies Press. See the committee’s citation of Dr. Aliyah’s book below:
At once pathbreaking and paradigm shifting, Aliyah Khan’s Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean asks us to redraw the parameters of postcolonial diaspora in the Caribbean by shedding light on the heretofore untold stories of Muslim experience in this complex region. Khan’s close examination of a variety of texts introduces us to the images of the multivalent everyday Muslim subjects in the Caribbean, to the global Muslim community, and to how the life imperatives are to be reinterpreted in a context some distance from the traditional denizens of Islam. Told with clarity and concision, Far from Mecca complicates the concepts of creolization and hybridity that have been theoretical mainstays of Caribbean postcolonial discourse for several decades and represents an important intervention into broader intellectual debates on difference and marginality.
