Buchbesprechung: Boricua Muslims – Everyday Cosmopolitanism among Puerto Rican Converts to Islam

Among Puer­to Rican con­verts to Islam, mar­gin­al­iza­tion is a fact of dai­ly life. Their “authen­tic­i­ty” is ques­tioned by oth­er Mus­lims and by fel­low Borícua on the island and in the Unit­ed States. At the same time, they exist under the shad­ow of US col­o­niza­tion and as Mus­lims in the con­text of Amer­i­can empire. To be a Puer­to Rican Mus­lim, then, is to nego­ti­ate iden­ti­ty at numer­ous inter­sec­tions of diver­si­ty and dif­fer­ence. Draw­ing on years of ethno­graph­ic research and more than a hun­dred inter­views con­duct­ed in Puer­to Rico, New York, Flori­da, Texas, New Jer­sey, and online, Ken Chit­wood tells the sto­ry of Puer­to Rican Mus­lims as they con­struct a shared sense of peo­ple­hood through every­day prac­tices. Borícua Mus­lims thus pro­vides a study of cos­mopoli­tanism not as a polit­i­cal ide­al but as a mun­dane social real­i­ty – a real­i­ty that com­pli­cates schol­ar­ly and pub­lic con­ver­sa­tions about race, eth­nic­i­ty, and reli­gion in the Amer­i­c­as. Expand­ing the geog­ra­phy of glob­al Islam and recast­ing the rela­tion­ship between reli­gion and Puer­to Rican cul­ture, Borícua Mus­lims is an insight­ful reck­on­ing with the man­i­fold entan­gle­ments of iden­ti­ty amid late­mod­ern glob­al­iza­tion.

The event can also be viewed online at https://uni-erfurt.webex.com/uni-erfurt/j.php?MTID=m7778341be8f4ab70a51b35781db97dd9. Reg­is­tra­tion is not required.