Black Muslim Refugee - Militarism, Policing, and Somali American Resistance to State Violence

"Maxamed Abumaye's outstanding transdisciplinary work draws connections from East Africa to California, illuminating linkages between the American military's use of drones in Somalia to stop-and-frisk policies in San Diego's City Heights neighborhood, from the treatment of refugees in Kenya to Black Lives Matter activism in the United States. A tour de force."--Fatima El-Tayeb, Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, Yale University

"An uncommonly riveting work that elucidates the various levels of international, continental, and municipal intersections arbitrating the everyday experiences of Somalis at home, in Africa, and in a Southern California military town. Abumaye's usage of collaborative methods and personal testimony endows this work with a quality that so-called more objective researchers cannot match."--James Lance Taylor, author of Black Nationalism in the United States: From Malcolm X to Barack Obama

About the author

Maxamed Abumaye is Assistant Professor in the Department of African American and African Studies at Ohio State University.

Summary

This multisited project, the first of its kind, exposes links between US military violence abroad and police brutality at home through an exploration of the lives of Somali refugees. Black Muslim Refugee traces the journeys of these refugees from civil war–era Somalia to the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya to their eventual arrival in San Diego. Maxamed Abumaye analyzes Somali refugees' experiences through the dual lenses of anti-Blackness and Islamophobia. He situates their displacement within the larger context of East Africa's colonial history, as well as the policy consequences of the American-backed war on terror and war on drugs. Throughout, Abumaye's centering of Somali subjectivity underlines this community's critical and creative capacity to defy the mechanisms that seek to "manage" and ultimately control them.

Product details

• Authors: Maxamed Abumaye, Mohamed Abumaye
• Publisher: University Of California Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 03.06.2025, delayed
• EAN: 9780520356313
• ISBN: 978-0-520-35631-3
• No. of pages: 208
• Series: Critical Refugee Studies
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Education > Social education, social work; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories; USA, Ethnic Studies, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology of Religion, RELIGION / Islam / General, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Refugees, United States of America, USA, Religious groups: social & cultural aspects, Black & Asian Studies, Refugees and political asylum, Refugees & Political Asylum, Social groups: religious groups and communities, Relating to African American / Black American people