Tuesday, April 22, 2025
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.
Muslim France and the Contradictions of Laïcité: A History of the Present
Mayanthi Fernando, University of California Santa Cruz
In 1989 three Muslim schoolgirls from a Paris suburb refused to remove their Islamic headscarves in class, igniting a debate – still raging more than 30 years later – about the place of Muslims in the French Republic and its governing tradition of laïcité (secularism). Fernando’s talk reconsiders the dominant narrative about laïcité, both in France and in the US media, that in 1905, church and state were fully separated and religion restricted to the private sphere. She complicates the history of the present and shows how laïcité has entailed not the separation of religion from politics and the public sphere but rather the French state’s intervention into religious life, including defining what counts as religion, belief, practice, and symbol, and how those definitions have significant consequences for Muslim French.
This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Popel Shaw Center for Race & Ethnicity, the Women’s & Gender Resource Center, the departments of women’s, gender & sexuality studies, Africana studies, international studies, sociology, French & Francophone studies, Read more