Race and Religion: Postcolonial Formations of Power and Whiteness

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 210-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malory Nye
Keyword(s):  
Racial Formation ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Religion And Race ◽  
Race And Religion ◽  
Critical Religion

Abstract I have two ambitions in this paper. The first is to explore a framework for talking about the intersections between the categories of race and religion, particularly with reference to critical race and critical religion approaches. The second is to discuss how discourses on religion are a particular type of racial formation, or racialization. The premise for this discussion is the historic, colonial-era development of the contemporary categories of race and religion, and related formations such as whiteness. Both religion and race share a common colonial genealogy, and both critical studies of race and religion also stress the politically discursive ways in which the terms create social realities of inequality. Although the intersections between these terms are often discussed as the ‘racialization of religion’, in this paper I follow Meer (2013) and others by concluding that the category of religion is in itself a form of racialization.

Derrida, Agamben, Wynter

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent W. Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Religion And Theology ◽  
Homo Sacer ◽  
Religion And Race ◽  
Race And Religion ◽  
The Way

This chapter explores the way race and religion are articulated together in the work of leading critical theorists Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. It probes how these theorists stand on the border between philosophy of religion and theology, and it argues that it is only because of secularist assumptions that this divide between outsider’s philosophy of religion and insider’s theology can be maintained. For Derrida, both religion and race function as loose threads that can be pulled in order to unravel a system of thought. For Agamben, the protagonist of modernity, homo sacer, is both racialized and sanctified. Yet Derrida and Agamben’s accounts are skewed by a Eurocentrism and a failure to take religious ideas sufficiently seriously. The black feminist Sylvia Wynter offers an antidote, similarly linking race and religion but doing so in a way that attends to how racialization is produced theologically and goes hand in hand with patriarchy. Wynter’s work implies that philosophy of religion that refuses secularism is always black theology and that black theology must engage seriously with questions in philosophy of religion.

scholarly journals Pendidikan Agama Islam Berwawasan Inklusif-Pluralis

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-404
Author(s):  
Nasri Kurnialoh
Keyword(s):  
Religious Education ◽  
Islamic Education ◽  
Comprehensive Understanding ◽  
Sectarian Conflict ◽  
Religion And Race ◽  
Race And Religion ◽  
Religious Differences

Abstract: In countries with multi-ethnic consists of religion, and race such as Indonesia, the role of Islamic religious education is very important and strategic. See sectarian conflict based on culture, ethnicity, race and religion going on in our society, it seems the paradigm of inclusive vision of Islamic education which emphasizes the concept of pluralism in sosial life need to be developed. Furthermore, Islam is an inclusive religious education should provide a comprehensive understanding of religion through teaching with respect religious differences without losing identity as followers of a particular religion. Keywords : Islamic Education, Inclusive, Pluralist.

The Past & Future of American Civil Rights

Daedalus ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 140 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas S. Massey
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Formation ◽  
First Century ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
American Society

Although American society will not become race-blind anytime soon, the meaning of race is changing, and processes of racial formation now are quite different than those prevailing just two generations ago. Massey puts the present moment in historical perspective by reviewing progress toward racial equality through successive historical epochs, from the colonial era to the age of Obama. He ends by exploring the contours of racial formation in the United States today, outlining a program for a new civil rights movement in the twenty-first century.

scholarly journals Blinded by Sight: The Racial Body and the Origins of the Social Construction of Race

2016 ◽  
Vol 41 (04) ◽  
pp. 1062-1068 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Omi ◽  
Howard Winant
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
Racial Formation ◽  
Racial Ideology ◽  
Sociology Of Law ◽  
Critical Race Studies ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Race Studies ◽  
The Social

Osagie K. Obasogie's Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race through the Eyes of the Blind (2014) makes important contributions to both to the sociology of law and to critical race studies. The book challenges “colorblind” racial ideology by showing empirically that people who are blind from birth nevertheless “see” race, grasping it as a nearly omnipresent feature of social interaction and social organization. These insights, however, do not diminish the importance of the racial body. Beyond refuting colorblindness, Obasogie's book points to a neverending tension, embedded in what we call racial formation, between the social construction of race and the corporeality of race. This tension has been present since the dawn of empire and African slavery. Obasogie's achievement of falsifying colorblindness should not lead us to neglect the importance of the racial body.

Religion and Race in the Greater South, 1500–1800

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Anne Goetz
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Indigenous People ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Crucial Component ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Religion And Race ◽  
A Site ◽  
Race And Religion

This chapter examines Roman Catholic and Protestant race-making in the colonial South and Caribbean. Religion was both a site for defining race and resisting racial definition. Protestants and Catholics held similar ideas about the exclusive rightness of their religious beliefs, and both groups sought to convert enslaved Africans and indigenous people. Enslaved Africans and indigenous people used Christianity to resist enslavement and other European abuses, though enslaved Africans retained their own beliefs as well. In the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century South and in the Caribbean, race and religion were categories that Europeans had to strive to create and recreate. Religion proved a crucial component in defining and making race.

scholarly journals A Lacanian understanding of the southern planning theorists’ identification under the hegemony of western philosophy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohsen Mohammadzadeh
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Global South ◽  
Discourse Theory ◽  
Planning Theory ◽  
Local Context ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
The Core ◽  
Lacanian Theory

As a planning theorist who has studied and taught planning theory in the Global South and North, I grapple with the question – “What does planning theory mean in the Global South?” To answer this question, I ontologically investigate the meaning of Southern planning theory based on a Lacanian approach. Drawing on the Lacanian theory of human subjectivity, this article explains how planning theorists’ identities are constituted through their interactions within academia. Lacanian discourse theory assists in exploring how most Southern planning theorists adopt, internalise, and use hegemonic Western philosophy, ideas, and discourses as the only accepted mechanism of truth. Consequently, this process profoundly alienates Southern planning theorists from their local context, as they often devalue, overlook, and neglect non-Western beliefs, ideas, knowledge, and philosophy. I argue that although the number of Southern planning theorists has increased during the last decades, non-Western philosophy is seldom utilised as the core of their critical studies. Based on the Lacanian discourse theory, I show that they mostly remain in the hegemonic mechanism of knowledge production that is embedded in the colonial era.

The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
American History ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
American Christianity ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Religion And Race ◽  
Christian Myth ◽  
Indigenous Religions ◽  
Music Film ◽  
Race And Religion

The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History is a reference work in which thirty-seven leading scholars from the fields of History, Religious Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, and others investigate the complex interdependencies of religion and race through American history. The book covers the religious experience, social realities, theologies, and sociologies of racialized groups in American religious history. It explores how religion contributed to their racialization, and race to perceptions about the validity of their religious expressions. Religion played a significant part in creating race. While Euro-American Christianity was hardly the sole force in this process, Christian myth, originating from interpretations of biblical stories as well as speculations about God’s Providence, necessarily was central to the process of racializing peoples in the Americas––to imposing hierarchies upon groups of humans. But if Christianity fostered racialization, it also undermined it. Sacred passages and practices have been powerful but ambiguous, and arguments about God’s Providence in colonization, proselytization, and slavery have always been contentious. Assumptions about race have also helped to define religion in the United States, and what counts as protectable under the First Amendment. Practitioners of indigenous religions, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, humanism, and others have drawn on their traditions to claim religious freedom, foster group identity, challenge racialization, and participate in race-making. Race and religion have also been created and debated through popular culture, and this volume includes considerations of music, film, sports, and photography in addition to the chapters covering theoretical approaches, traditions, and historical periods.

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