About

Maha Marouan is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, African American Studies, and African Studies at Pennsylvania State University. Her scholarship engages the intersections of race, gender, and religion in Africa and the African Diaspora, with specializations in transnational feminisms, African feminisms, African women, gender and migration, African and African diaspora religions, comparative literature, postcolonial literature in French and English, critical race theory, and comparative racialization. She serves as co-director of the African Feminist Initiative and has contributed to the academic community through her research, teaching, and publications, including books, articles, and documentaries that explore themes of spirituality, politics, and identity within African and diaspora contexts.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Traditional medicine
• Media studies
• Gender studies
• Art
• Medicine

Selected publications

• Introduction: African Feminist Subjectivities and the Infinite Dimensions of Relationality

  Feminist formations · 2024-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• What are the challenges facing Africanist and African women's and gender studies scholars?

  Women's studies quarterly · 2024

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Gender studies

  What are the challenges facing Africanist and African women's and gender studies scholars? Gabeba Baderoon (bio), Maha Marouan (bio), and Alicia Decker (bio) [End Page 107] Editors of Pandemonium spoke with Gabeba Baderoon, Maha Marouan, and Alicia Decker on August 4 and 28, 2023. Alicia Decker: Out of our shared challenges came the idea to create an alternative space to engage in critical conversations and scholarly work on feminist issues in Africa and the African diaspora—dynamics that are not equitable all the time. The African Feminist Initiative (AFI) is a transnational virtual community that my colleague Gabeba Baderoon and I started at Penn State in 2015. Gabeba and I came together to create a space to think critically about African feminisms, a truly global transnational collective that is actively engaged in all levels of feminist activism, dialogue, and research both within and outside the academy. In 2018, Maha joined us as our third codirector, so the three of us function as equals … as a triumvirate. As of 2023, AFI has over five hundred members, many from Africa, but also from Europe, South America, Asia, and North America. We have held six international conferences and workshops and have become a hub for virtual transnational feminist movement across different kinds of borders. AFI serves as an example of a feminist community that's growing in the midst of backlash. Transnational feminisms are obviously not new, but it does seem like it is a space that is continuing to grow and thrive, consisting of actively politicized communities addressing some of the challenges the discipline is facing and ensuring there is space for conversations that are more challenging in certain institutional and national settings. Gabeba Baderoon: I'm a South African, so a lot of my work tends to be on South Africa. I have strong connections with the universities there. Austerity has been the reality there, and in the U.S., of course, too. I'm so grateful to have this as my job. So how does something like women's and gender studies in Africa flourish? The story is sometimes a little surprising: sometimes outside of the classroom. But there are also positive developments to report on what is happening inside the classroom and inside the university. For instance, the development of the Department of Feminist Studies at the [End Page 108] University of Cape Town is just a magnificent arrival of something that has been in discussion among many of us for a long time, since the late 1990s. Maha Marouan: I grew up in Morocco, that's my home, but I work at a U.S. institution, so when I do work in the continent, I am challenged differently. Some of the challenges for me are: How do you form feminist solidarities transnationally? How do you challenge global hierarchies? How do you forge feminist linkages without undermining feminist politics of resistance as forged in the specificity of one's history and locale? I get a sense at times that I am caught between two worlds, but most of the time, I feel deeply enriched by my positionality. The work that we do through AFI is to continue to find linkages and learn from one another. We do that through our monthly feminist dialogues, we do it through transnational collaborative projects that reflect the complexity of our commitment and positionality but without privileging one particular mode of knowledge. This does not mean this is a smooth-sailing process. In fact, I am constantly faced with challenges. Identity politics play a part. For instance, Alicia's idea to work collaboratively with scholars from different parts of the continent to examine the state of women and gender studies in academia was an important initiative. But there was a lot of tension when all of us from different backgrounds and locales met. Because Alicia and I are academically situated in the Global North, we were perceived by many of our colleagues in the continent as reinforcing these global hierarchies by undertaking this project. My African belonging was also challenged. As a North African, I was perceived as "less authentically" African—despite the fact that I do not subscribe to the colonial division...

  PublisherDOI

• Moroccan Feminist Subjectivities and the Ethics of Relationality

  Feminist formations · 2024-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract: This essay is a meditation on Moroccan women's subjectivities through an intergenerational lens that connects three generations of Moroccan women: my grandmother who lived through the colonial period (1920s–1950s), my mother whose experiences are marked by the transition into independence and nation building (1950s–1970s), and my own experiences located in the postcolonial era and the surge of globalization (1980s–to present). I conceptualize women/womxn's spaces (where I locate my feminist subjectivity) as liberatory sites of intergenerational knowledge because men did not have access to them (albeit temporarily). By weaving my family's microhistory into the macro-histories of the 20th and 21st centuries, what emerges from this telling is a re-evaluation of an indigenous ethics of interconnectivity as a necessary critique of the brutality of global capitalism and its violent practice of disposability. I locate women's spaces as sites of contestation of colonialism and nationalism while addressing the limits of institutional knowledge as a patriarchal tool that has systemically undermined Moroccan women's contributions to knowledge production. Through the emotional act of remembering and weaving personal and public histories of Moroccan women, I have come to realize that my own subjectivity is intersubjective, intergenerational and grounded in the conception of a future feminist imaginary only possible through radical inclusivity.

  PublisherDOI

• Witches, Goddesses, and Angry Spirits

  2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Psychology
  • Traditional medicine
  PublisherDOI

• When Women Are Central to African Religious History: On Power, Prophecy, and Memory

  Journal of Africana Religions · 2018-01-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article examines the centrality of women's voices in Robert Baum's West Africa's Women of God, where African women emerge as prophetic figures and leaders in their regions, shaping both the political and religious scenes under colonial France. By recovering these women's stories, Baum is able to show how the colonial authority systemically attempted to discount the leadership and prophetic powers of these women, constraining them to private space and to rigid gender roles.

  PublisherDOI

• Santería in Cuba: contested issues at a time of transition

  Transition · 2018-01-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Incomplete Forgetting: Race and Slavery in Morocco

  Islamic Africa · 2016-11-02 · 10 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The systemic silence surrounding the legacy of the trans-Saharan Slave trade in Morocco and the power of personal narratives in dismantling this silence.

  PublisherDOI

• African Religious Systems in the Context of World Religions: Challenges for the American Scholars

  Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks · 2015-01-01 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  I have been teaching religions of Africa and the African diaspora at the University of Alabama for the last six years. The first question that came to my mind when I chose to write on trends in African religious beliefs and practices is to what extent have the views of my students changed about Africa and its belief systems in the last six years. The challenge that faces scholars of Africanist religions in the United States is that we are constantly facing audiences in and out of the classroom who have negative perceptions of Africa. Thus, we never have the luxury of a neutral platform from which to address and communicate with our audiences. In the Deep South, especially, the path of scholars of Africanist religions is even more difficult. One has a hard task in a place that has a problematic racial history and where even Catholicism is still considered a foreign brand. For example, Catholics were on top of the list in the KKK Manifesto.KeywordsWorld ReligionBlack NationalismAfrican DiasporaForeign BrandColonial DiscourseThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

  PublisherDOI

• Race and Displacement: Nation, Migration, and Identity in the Twenty-First Century

  2013-01-01 · 5 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Bradley, David

  African American Studies Center · 2013-03-15

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Philip D. Beidler

  1 shared

• Merinda Simmons

  1 shared

• Houston A. Baker

  1 shared

• Walter Bosse

  1 shared

• Gabeba Baderoon

  1 shared

• Alicia C. Decker

  1 shared

• Trudier Harris

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Nominated for the 2020 PEN America Award