This session explores the ways APIA communities in the United States have navigated the various state institutions and theological discourses that enact, perpetuate, and enforce the organizing logics of American secularism. It will open with a historical analysis of the theological presuppositions built into the nation's secularist legal regimes as they applied to Chinese laborers, followed by a contemporary exploration of processes by which Hindu ritual practices at a New Jersey temple have been reshaped to address secular assumptions of American life. A final paper then returns to the late-nineteenth century to scrutinize how the translation practices of Japanese Pure Land Buddhists influenced the community's legibility as "religion" within the American context.
This paper offers a close reading of The People v. Chin Mook Sow, an 1876 California murder trial. Chin Mook Sow was one of several cases from the late-19th century in which the “dying declarations” of Chinese laborers were challenged because of their alleged lack of belief in an eternal system of rewards and punishment. The Chin Mook Sow court engaged in an extended inquiry into the content of Chinese religion that ultimately vindicated the victim’s rights. Yet it did so by mobilizing religious and racial logics that worked together to reinforce notions of the Chinese as essentially different. My analysis focuses on what the case reveals about the unfinished project of legal secularism. In wrestling with the implications of proper belief for democratic citizenship, the court's inquiry revealed the theological presuppositions that continued to buttress U.S. law even as it was being stripped of its explicitly religious underpinnings.
This paper examines the interplay between the secular and religious dimensions of the "Festival of Inspirations" at the Swaminarayan Hindu temple, Akshardham, in NJ, USA. As the largest Hindu temple in the Western hemisphere, Akshardham epitomizes Hindu art, architecture, culture, spirituality, and modern secular facets. Utilizing textual, media, and ethnographic research, this paper illustrates not only the mutual influence of the religious and secular but also the fluid and inseparable nature of these categories, and argues for the theoretical integration of these two categories. It contends that reshaping religious practices to address secular concerns and adapt to changing facets of modernity brings about everyday experiences among practitioners that are simultaneously immanent and transcendent, personal and political. Its data-driven arguments also raise crucial questions within the broader discourse on secularism and secularization, and address them from within the perspective of treating the secular and the religious as fundamentally inseparable theoretical categories.
When Japanese Pure Land Buddhists came to the United States and Hawaii in the late-nineteenth century, they often translated their religion and traditions into the English language so they could be comprehensible to state institutions and cultural observers. Linguistic translations proved necessary for both simple material reasons, such as filling out legal forms and interacting with American society, and also complex ideological reasons, such as rendering religious expressions, practices, and structures in terms consistent with American definitions of religion. This essay argues Pure Land Buddhist translations between Japanese and English were a function of competing transpacific imperial political projects asserting distinct legal definitions of religion and modernity. An analysis of Japanese and English-language Pure Land Buddhist documents and texts from around the turn of the century demonstrates that language and linguistic translation are significant mechanisms of secular governance and societal power to shape foreign communities into legible subjects.
| SueJeanne Koh | sj.koh@uci.edu | View |