Suaad Abdul Khabeer

Twitter:
@DrSuad

Su’ad Abdul Khabeer is a scholar-artist-activist who uses anthropology and performance to explore the intersections of race and popular culture. She received in her PhD in cultural anthropology from Princeton University and is a graduate from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and has an Islamic Studies diploma from the Institute at Abu Nour University (Damascus). Her latest work, Muslim Cool: Race, Religion and Hip Hop in the United States (NYU Press 2016), is an ethnography on Islam and hip hop that examines how intersecting ideas of Muslimness and Blackness challenge and reconstitute US racial orders. Su’ad’s written work on Islam and hip hop is accompanied by her performance ethnography, Sampled: Beats of Muslim Life. Sampled is a one-woman solo performance designed to present and repr

esent her research and findings to diverse audiences in a way that disrupts accepted narratives on race and gender, religion, popular culture and citizenship in the contemporary United States. Her publications include
“Muslim Youth Cultures” (The Cambridge Companion to American Islam, 2013), “Rep that Islam: the Rhyme and Reason of American Muslim Hip Hop” (The Muslim World, 2007), and “Black Arabic: African American Muslims and the Arabic language” which appears in the edited volume Black Routes to Islam (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Additional forthcoming publications include “All the Men are Muslim, All the Americans are White, But
Some of Us are Brave” in With Stones In Our Hands: Reflections on Race, Muslims, and U.S.  Empire (University of Minnesota Press) and “Africa as Tradition in African American Muslim Identity” in Handbook on African American Islam (Oxford University Press). In line with her commitment to public scholarship, Su’ad leads a digital humanities project, www.sapelosquare.com, the first website dedicated to the comprehensive documentation and analysis of the African American Muslim experience. She has also written for TheRoot.com, the Washington Post, trans-missions.org and the Huffington Post and has appeared on Al Jazeera English. Additionally, Su’ad is a Senior Project Advisor for the USPublic Television award-winning documentary, New Muslim Cool and her poetry was featured in the anthology Living Islam Out Loud: American Muslim Women Speak.