CMENAS Colloquium Series. Ambivalent Encounters: Migration, Conversion, and Historical Anxiety in Spain’s “Muslim City”

This talk explores the way historical entanglements across the Mediterranean shape the politics of multiculturalism in modern Europe. I argue that historical anxieties about the implications of Islam for Spain’s European belonging produce ambivalence about the growing Muslim population today. Through ethnography of Muslim and non-Muslim historical memories of al-Andalus, I trace how both Islamophobic and Islamophilic discourses shape the possibilities and limitations of Muslim inclusion.

Mikaela Rogozen-Soltar received her PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Michigan in 2010. She is now an Assistant Professor at the University of Nevada, where her research and teaching focus on Islam, migration, and historical memory in Spain. Her first book, “Spain Unmoored: Migration, Conversion, and the Politics of Islam” will be published by Indiana University Press in March.