Islam Became a Racial Category in French Colonial Algeria | Prof. Muriam Haleh Davis

Algeria's complex colonial landscape serves as the backdrop for a deep dive into the intersection of race, Islam, and capitalism. Dr. Muriam Haleh Davis unravels how the French colonial state weaponized Islam as a racial category to structure economic inequalities. The conversation expands into the enduring legacy of Frantz Fanon, exploring the complex dynamics of national liberation and third-world revolutionary aspirations. Uncovering a rich, often-overlooked intellectual history, the discussion highlights the Algerian scholars and philosophers who actively fought to define their own nationhood.

00:00 Introduction  
01:43 An Intellectual Journey to Algeria  
04:40 Connecting Religion and Capitalism  
06:50 Defining Racial Capitalism
10:59 Ideological Threats in the Cold War  
12:50 Citizenship and the Colonial Status of Islam  
17:22 Economic Policies of Settler Colonialism  
23:05 Early Strains of Algerian Nationalism  
28:36 Beyond the Mythology of Frantz Fanon  
39:05 An Accident of History  
43:31 Theory Production from the Global South  
45:35 The Circuits of Intellectual Production  
48:54 Highlighting Overlooked Algerian Scholars

Muriam Haleh Davis is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she directs the Center for the Middle East and North Africa. She is the author of Markets of Civilization: Islam and Racial Capitalism in Algeria (Duke University Press, 2022) and the co-editor of North Africa and the Making of Europe: Governance, Institutions, and Culture (Bloomsbury Press, 2018). She is currently working on a second book, Decolonizing Sociology: State-Building and Knowledge Production in the Maghreb, which examines how intellectuals in North Africa appropriated and transformed the discipline of sociology after independence. She is co-chair of the editorial committee for MERIP (Middle East Research and Information Project) and co-editor of the Maghreb Page for Jadaliyya. She holds an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown, an MA in Culture and Theory from UC Irvine, and a PhD in History from NYU (2015). She has been a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence and a fellow at IMéRA in Marseille.

Connect with Muriam Haleh Davis 👉 https://instagram.com/muriamhaleh

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