Black Muslim Refugee: Militarism, Policing, and Somali American Resistance to State Violence

Join the Race, Coloniality and Migration in Europe working group for the second installation of our speaker series on Colonialism, Fascism and European Innocence: "Black Muslim Refugee: Militarism, Policing, and Somali American Resistance to State Violence" in conversation with Maxamed Abu-maye. This multisited project, the first of its kind, exposes the deep links between US military violence abroad and police brutality at home through a in-depth exploration of Somali refugee lives in their globe-spanning journeys from civil war–era Somalia to the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, to their eventual arrival in San Diego. Analyzing their experiences through the dual lenses of anti-Blackness and Islamophobia, Maxamed Abu-maye reorients our attention to Somali subjectivities, and highlights their critical and creative capacity to defy the mechanisms that seek to "manage" and ultimately control them.

About the speaker: Maxamed Abu-maye is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University. He is the author of the book Black Muslim Refugee: Militarism, Policing, and Somali American Resistance to State Violence (University of California Press, 2025).

Event organized by the Race, Coloniality and Migration in Europe Working Group

Kindly sponsored by

European Studies Council of the Yale MacMillan Center

The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund
The Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration,

Ethnicity, Race and Migration