Type of Document Master's Thesis Author Frazier, Lisa Renae URN etd-07172009-161013 Title POWER AND SURRENDER: AFRICAN AMERICAN SUNNI WOMEN AND EMBODIED AGENCY Degree Master of Arts Department Women's Studies Advisory Committee
Advisor Name Title Amira Jarmakani Committee Chair Layli Phillips Committee Member Margaret Mills Harper Committee Member Keywords
- Agency
- Empowerment
- Islam
- Spiritual memory
- Religious memory
- Conversion narrative
- Testifying
- Embodiment
- Spiritual body
- Polygamy
- African American Sunni women
Date of Defense 2009-06-29 Availability restricted Abstract This thesis addresses the lack of scholarly attention devoted to African American Sunni women by examining how they use collective memory to negotiate embodied agency. Through an analysis of African American Sunni women’s narratives of testifying conversion, and vignettes from diaries and interviews, I show how African American Sunni women utilize racial, religious, and spiritual memory in the form of ritual practices and Islamic texts to multiply construct their bodies, and how this construction allows them to enact multimodal and nomadic forms of agency. A contextual analysis also illustrates how environment and interpretation (tafsir) further mobilizes forms of agency, articulating a need for flexibility in regard to the concept of embodied agency and challenging the dichotomy prevalent in Western and Eurocentric conceptions of liberatory agency.Files
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