Religionizing Christianity: Towards a Poststructuralist Notion of Global Religious History

By relying on poststructural theory, this article will demonstrate how a consistent historicization can help us increase our understanding of how religious contexts changed in light of colonialism and globalization during the nineteenth century. While it is well known that such changes took place in non-Western regions, the article will show – by example of German liberal theology – that it was also in the so-called West that common systems of knowledge were transformed against the backdrop of global entanglement. On the basis of some prominent protagonists of so-called Culture Protestantism (Kulturprotestantismus), I will demonstrate how global debates led to a certain re-conceptualization of Christianity as a world religion in the late nineteenth century. By identifying different traditions such as Christianity or Buddhism as equivalent, those theologians supported the emerging global awareness of religion as a universal aspect of human life and a category sui generis.

Introduction

This special themed section examines the multilayered engagements between Africa and the Soviet Union as a central, if overlooked, global encounter of the mid-twentieth century. We call this worldview and the entanglements it generated the “African-Soviet Modern,” an asymmetrical combination of aspiration, materiality, and practice that was rooted in diverse African states and in the Soviet Union. As an analytical category, the African-Soviet Modern speaks to the gap between the grand rhetorical and ideological scope of the Cold War moment and the relatively discrete channels in which it materialized, which gave this mode of thinking a particular vitality and instability. African-Soviet entanglements unfolded in an expansive and uneven geography that incorporated diverse regions of Africa, the USSR, and beyond. Avoiding the temporal and spatial silos of either Soviet or African history, the four essays in this section focus on the spaces where African and Soviet students, politicians, and scientists interacted with one another, creating “connected chronologies” and complementary archives of evidence. Weaving together documentary and oral sources, these articles recover a global entanglement that was energized by unbounded political, economic, and technological aspiration, but that produced an uneven material footprint in newly independent African states.

Global Entanglements of Recycling Policy and Practice

In line with rising public and policy concern about wastes, there has been a distinct rise in scholarly analyses of these and other developments associated with economies of recycling, focusing especially on people’s material and moral encounters with reuse. These range from nuanced investigations into how lives and materials can both be re-crafted by recovering value from discards; following an object through its many social lives; or focusing on a material such as plastic or e-waste and tracking how waste is co-produced at each stage of creation and (re)use. Examining contested property rights in wastes, together with the infrastructures and ethics of engagements with wastes and their recovery or otherwise, reveal how global economies intersect with a rapidly shifting policy environment and systems of waste management. The global entanglement of policies and practices not only shapes what becomes of waste but also how it is variously imagined as pollutant or resource.

Ambiguous Masculinities: Gender and Sexual Transgression in Contemporary Dance Works by Senegalese Men

Contemporary dance in Senegal emerged and thrives at the interstices of the local and the global. Multiple expectations and values, of which gender and sexuality are no small part, converge at the site of creation and production, enlisting choreographers to navigate oftentimes conflicting ideologies. Based on ethnographic research, this article examines three works by Senegalese men that employ gender and sexual transgressions alongside the artists’ seemingly contradictory verbal articulations of their work. Using the local-global entanglement as an analytical framework, I argue that these works offer ambiguous assemblages of masculinities that challenge conventional masculinity in Senegal, thereby elucidating the potentiality for contemporary dance to transcend singular meaning-making capacity.