This multisited project, the first of its kind, exposes the links between US military violence abroad and police brutality at home through a profound exploration of Somali refugee lives. Black Muslim Refugee traces the globe-spanning journeys of these refugees, from civil war–era Somalia to the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya to their eventual arrival in San Diego, and Maxamed Abumaye analyzes their experiences through the dual lenses of anti-Blackness and Islamophobia. He situates their displacement within the larger context of East Africa's colonial history, as well as the policy consequences of the American-backed war on terror and war on drugs. Throughout, Abumaye's centering of Somali subjectivity underlines this community's critical and creative capacity to defy the mechanisms that seek to "manage" and ultimately control them.
Maxamed Abumaye is Assistant Professor in the Department of African American and African Studies at Ohio State University.
"Maxamed Abumaye's outstanding transdisciplinary work draws connections from East Africa to California, illuminating linkages between the American military's use of drones in Somalia to stop-and-frisk policies in San Diego's City Heights neighborhood, from the treatment of refugees in Kenya to Black Lives Matter activism in the United States. A tour de force."—Fatima El-Tayeb, Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, Yale University
"An uncommonly riveting work that elucidates the various levels of international, continental, and municipal intersections arbitrating the everyday experiences of Somalis at home, in Africa, and in a Southern California military town. Abumaye's usage of collaborative methods and personal testimony endows this work with a quality that so-called more objective researchers cannot match."—James Lance Taylor, author of Black Nationalism in the United States: From Malcolm X to Barack Obama
208 pp.5.5 x 8.5Illus: 1 b/w illustration
9780520356320$29.95|£25.00Paper
Jun 2025