Composed of a mix of faculty and students, this roundtable brings a diverse set of analytical perspectives to the question of how the “postcolonial” and “decolonial” are used in the study of religion today and how that usage has evolved over the years. As a recent article from Postcolonial Studies observes, “the decolonial perspective has come to be explicitly defined as a critique of and an alternative to postcolonial theory.” Intrigued by this often-elided tension between decolonial studies and postcolonial studies, we hope to spark a conversation around the following questions: how do we understand the relationship between the “postcolonial” and the “decolonial”? In what ways do these contemporary debates reprise some of the animating theoretical problems of deconstruction? Do “postcolonial” and “decolonial” represent fields defined by different geographic regions, or are their differences methodological? What distinctive contributions do each of these “disciplines” make to the study of religion?
| Mayanthi Fernando | mfernan3@ucsc.edu | View |