Black History, Islam, and the Future of the Humanities Beyond White Supremacy

Abstract

Interpreting Islam as a form of Black history offers a scholarly framework for reimagining the humanities beyond white supremacy. This paper theorizes such a framework first by showing how modern Black people in Africa and the African diaspora constructed Islam as a religion and civilization of resistance to Euro-American imperialism and anti-Black racism. Second, and more importantly for the future of the humanities as a whole, it argues that reading Islam as Black history undermines regnant disciplinary maps of global culture and civilization that locate human normativity in white chronoscapes. Philosophy, comparative religion, and general education courses on Western civilization are in need of emancipation from their nineteenth-century racialist ontologies. Islam as Black history offers one means to free these fields from their white supremacist bonds. The final half of the paper provides humanities instructors with African and African diasporic primary and secondary sources that can help to inspire a humanities renaissance beyond white supremacy.