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This essay examines the work of twenty-first century Somali Anglophone writers and artists, analyzing how they confront the connected experiences of displacement, migration, and surveillance. The work of Warsan Shire, Diriye Osman, Ladan Osman, and Ifrah Mansour embodies place-based transnationalisms that resist stereotypical media and political representations of Somali refugees as invasive and dangerous, especially gendered clichés of Somali, Muslim men as inherently violent and Somali, Muslim women as universally oppressed. Through writing, art, and performance, these works reveal how the state prevents communities from caring for one another through state apparatuses and articulate instead a right to mutuality and caretaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Minnesota is home to the largest US Somali population, and Musa Syeed's 2016 film, A Stray , shows aspects of the Minneapolis community usually obscured by the US media. This essay argues that Syeed's film marks a departure from conventional human rights films about refugees through its refusal to show bodily suffering or play to clichés about Muslims conflicting with Western social norms. Instead, A Stray thematizes the many forms of territorial control to which people inhabiting the Minneapolis Riverside Plaza projects are subject and focuses on the improvised and communal spaces that enable the characters to create sustaining networks. I interpret A Stray as a film that deploys neorealism's most prominent elements to narrate a relational humanism that embeds Adan in his community and sustains his religious faith. A Stray defies the genre of human rights films that attempt to humanize refugees in order to appeal for rights or animate audience sympathies. It does so through its encounters (often nomadic) with the urban spaces of Minneapolis, its incorporation of religious motifs and hadith, and its refusal to propel its characters toward assimilation or liberal notions of self-responsibilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the 2006 book "The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf" by Mohja Kahf, focusing on how the book shows the turn towards postsecularism in Muslim American literature. Other topics include a discussion of the book's main character, Khadra Shamy, a discussion of secularism from a Muslim American perspective, and the role of the book as a female Muslim bildungsroman.