Proposed panel for the Association for Asian Studies conference, AAS to be held in Boston in March 2027.

This panel will foreground how Muslim minorities encounter and acculturate cooperative networks of solidarity, plurality, creativity and affect beyond closed notions of nation, region and sovereignties. In this context we will look at ruptures which persist due to the rigid and restrictive processes of neocolonial and neoliberal regimes and how it continues to shape the lived and material realities of South Asian Muslims across national and diasporic contexts. Papers will explore junctures, events, overlaps, and nodes, situated across time and space, which act as vestibules between the idea of “Muslimness” and “belonging”. Conceptions of belonging will explore linkages with religiosity, class, caste, gender, hegemonies, place making, pioneership, and rootedness. The aim is to move beyond problematizing authority and representation / mis-representation and invest in narratives which are first-person, self-reflexive, agency specific and advance critical foresight. In particular we will discuss how Muslims build solidarities beyond the strictures of caste, sect, region, gender and sovereignty to actively dispute and subvert the enduring processes of tradition and modernity. We will thus also discuss how colonisation, partition, trade, migration, war and majoritarianism continues to shape the inter- and trans-national movement of Muslims within and beyond South Asia. Importantly, this panel will explore the emotional residue of these movements and its enduring imprint on labour, language, art, music, devotion, rituals, affect, text, and image. This panel aims to bring together early career and advanced scholars of Muslim subjectivities to think through the varied possibilities of Muslim solidarities across time, space and media, in the debilitating contemporaneity of rupture, discord and erasure.