Religion, Colonialism, and Postcolonialism Unit

In addition to papers and proposals dealing with religion, colonialism, and post-colonialism more broadly, we invite papers on the following topics:

• Palestine, in particular the resonances between Black thought and Palestinian thought, and historical moments when the intellectual traditions intersect
• Borders, partitions, margins
• Colonialism and ecotheology
• Settler colonialism and Marxism, in particular the role of “primitive accumulation” and “commodity fetishism” in these debates
• Settler colonialism in the transpacific context
• Religion and militarism
• Theologies and philosophies of anti-historicism in colonial contexts
• An "Author Meets Critic" session on An Yountae’s book, The Coloniality of the Secular: Race, Religion, and Poetics of World Making (Duke, 2024). (co-sponsored with the Philosophy of Religion Unit)
• Race and Research (co-sponsored with the Cultural History of the Study of Religion Unit): Despite the field’s storied emphasis on interdisciplinarity and methodological self-reflection, the field of Religious Studies has fallen short when it comes to critical reflection about the racialization of the discipline and its methods. This failure–and sometimes outright refusal–of critical engagement often happens simultaneously with official initiatives in which new ranks of scholars of color are recruited into the field. We invite proposals for papers, panels, or roundtables that engage the questions and contradictions emerging at the impasse of institutional diversity initiatives and anti-racist, anti-colonial critique. What is the relationship between them? What does it mean for specifically racialized scholars to adopt the study of religion and its various disciplinary forms–the archive, the field, the language seminar? To what extent does our presence in the guilds of religious studies confirm disciplinary integrity, create conditions for interdisciplinarity, or something else? What politics emanate from these spaces of racialized research?

Please note that the Religion, Colonialism and Postcolonialism Unit is deeply committed to inclusion and diversity. Please ensure that any full panel proposals are sensitive in their consideration of a plurality of gendered and racialized voices.

Thank you for considering sending a proposal to the Religion, Colonialism, and Postcolonialism Unit and we look forward to seeing you in San Diego.