Adi Saleem Bharat

"Figural Jews and Muslims in France"

This is not a project that will tell us much about the diverse, rich, and varied lives and experiences of actual Jews and Muslims. Instead, my project focuses on how the racialized figure of the Jew and the Muslim has been imagined and deployed in a variety of ways in modern French and European history with important consequences for political life in the contemporary period. By examining a range of journalistic, literary, and political writings, I examine the figure of the Jew and the Muslim in order to understand how historical and global narratives drawing on a series of interrelated Jewish and Muslim stereotypes continue to serve an important symbolic role in contemporary France. Specifically, I chart the conceptual correspondences between antisemitism and Islamophobia in modern European thought, while arguing that these myths and tropes have broadly structured political and popular discussions and debates on a range of issues from immigration and education to climate change and the economy. The overarching goal of my project is to critically interrogate the ways in which figural representation operates as a tool of domination and the manufacture of consent for otherwise unpopular policies. As such, my project also builds on existing postcolonial and decolonial scholarship on the political and cultural genealogies and functions of race in modern Europe.

Adi Saleem Bharat is Assistant Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures and Judaic Sudies.