Panel: Ken Chitwood, Aliyah Khan, William Calvo-Quirós, and Jocelyn Fenton Stitt. The Global Islamic Studies Center (GISC) and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (LACS) are proud to highlight and launch the new books of current and former University of Michigan faculty in religion and feminist studies in the Americas. The authors of three books in the field read from and discuss their work at a roundtable moderated by Dr. Ken Chitwood, author of The Muslims of Latin America and the Caribbean (2021). William Calvo- Quirós discusses his Undocumented Saints: The Politics of Migrating Devotions (2022), which follows the migration of popular Catholic saints from Mexico into the U.S. and the evolution of their meaning in the context of racism and Latinx immigrant battles for survival. Aliyah Khan talks about Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean (2020), the first academic monograph on Muslims in the English-speaking Caribbean, focusing on the gendered fiction, poetry, and music of Islam of enslaved West African Muslims, indentured South Asian Indian Muslims, and their descendants in Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica. Jocelyn Fenton Stitt's Dreams of Archives Unfolded: Absence and Caribbean Life Writing (2021), the first academic book on pan-Caribbean life writing and the recent use of the genre by Caribbean women to explore historical and archival absences. This talk focuses on Cuban Jewishness, feminism, and formal practices used to write about historical absences. Ken Chitwood will be moderating this conversation. He is a religion scholar conducting research on ethnographic journalism with the University of Southern California’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture’s Engaged Spirituality Project and on Latinx Muslim philanthropy with the Muslim Philanthropy Initiative (MPI) at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at IUPUI. He is the author of the award-winning book, The Muslims of Latin America and the Caribbean (2021). This event is brought to you by the Global Islamic Studies Center (GISC) and co-sponsored by The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (LACS). To keep up for more events like this you can follow our center at: @UmichGISC on Twitter https://twitter.com/UmichGISC https://facebook.com/UmichGISC You can also keep up with us by joining our monthly email newsletter here: https://myumi.ch/nbW83 Islamic Studies Minor: https://myumi.ch/R5YnQ Email islamicstudies@umich.edu Masters Program: https://myumi.ch/v2gVP Email MIRS-info@umich.edu

Dr. Ken Chitwood (Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures & Societies, Freie Universität Berlin) discusses how studies in Latin America and the Caribbean can challenge the scales of observation and omission that have compartmentalized global Islam. Includes a response from Prof. Dr. Claudia Derichs (Humboldt Universität Berlin zu Berlin) and questions from attendees.

An interview with Cynthia H. González about her research among Sufis in Mexico City.

An interview with Dr. Aisha Khan on her approach to the study of Islam and Muslim communities of the Americas.

This presentation views the story of Islam and Muslim communities- past and present- as part of, rather than as alien to, Latin America and the Caribbean. Instead of telling the stories in isolation from one another, Chitwood shares an overview of the historical and contemporary story of Muslims in Latin America and the Caribbean while not losing sight of hemispheric connections across the Americas.