The papers in this panel work at the intersections of Black, Latinx, and Asian American Buddhisms in the North American context. Taking a variety of methodological and theoretical perspectives in critical focus, including sociological, literary, historical, they seek to explore interracial Buddhist solidarities, tensions, and dialogue. Through this, they bring into critical focus issues of neoliberal multiculturalism, appropriation, Buddhist exceptionalism, White supremacy, and orientalism.
Since the 1970s, Buddhist and Buddhism-informed prison outreach programs have flourished in the U.S. Leaders of these efforts often assert that Buddhist teachings, practices, and concepts benefit incarcerated people because they teach them to transform (and reform) themselves ontologically. This paper analyzes such discourses as narratives of Buddhist exceptionalism. It argues that this rhetoric constructs a dichotomy between the so-called angry “criminal” and the compassionate “Buddhist” and gains popularity through racializing discourses attached to each category. Drawing on archival research, oral histories, and memoirs by incarcerated Buddhists, the paper considers the ways rhetoric about the transformative potential of Buddhism behind bars juxtaposes Orientalist stereotypes of Buddhism as passive and feminine with other racial stereotypes—like those about Black and Latino men as criminals—and forms new subjectivities through a process of racialization. It also discusses the relationships between Buddhist exceptionalism, American exceptionalism, and Black exceptionalism in this dynamic.
Responding to Rima Vesley-Flad’s Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition, this paper unpacks the imagined and realized forms of solidarity amongst Black and Asian American Buddhisms. I read Vesley-Flad’s work alongside Chenxing Han’s Be the Refuge to track these resonances. I reference Comparative Ethnic Studies scholarship that tracks historical and imagined Black-Asian solidarities that are polycultural, internationalist, and anticolonial. Polycultural engagement with Blackness and Asianness broadly understood has shaped theorists in Black Studies and Asian American Studies that express subjectivities that are uncommodifiable and resistant to whiteness. However, American Buddhist scholarship on non-white Buddhist practitioners and communities continues to rely on the centers/periphery model to critique white supremacy in American Buddhism. I urge the field to move away from engaging whiteness to resolve white supremacy and instead explore Black-Asian entanglements in Black Buddhism, Asian religious cultures, and Asian engagements with Blackness as Su’ad Abdul Khabeer analyzed in Muslim Cool.
This paper studies the contents, contexts, and circulations of American author, filmmaker, and practicing Zen Buddhist priestess Ruth Ozeki’s literature among its contemporary audiences through literary analyses of Ozeki’s works, as well as juxtaposition of them with literatures of secondary scholarship in political ecology, new materialism, and political economy. In doing so in conversation with religious and ethnic studies, it points to how religious and economic racialization are tandem forces, and how transpacific Asian American art and literature reveal both the damaging and constructive potentials of these forces.