Religion, race, and colonialism: decolonizing the academic study of religion
* Exploring a new collaborative research project *
What I am presenting here is the starting point for what I hope will be a research proposal — for a multi-site project, involving hopefully a range of scholars. One of the key challenges at this stage is to put together a practical team to plan this work, to work out clear sets of methodology to conduct research to achieve its goal, and to present it as a (hopefully successful) funding application. If you are interested in being involved in this project, then it would be great to talk with you (my email address is malorynye@gmail.com).
For a discussion of some of the theoretical work I have been doing in advance of this, my paper on ‘Decolonizing the study of religion’ has been published open access in the Open Library of Humanities in June 2019.
There is a growing acknowledgement in the humanities that race and British colonial history are not just an object of study, they are in fact integral to all aspects of academic studies conducted within this range of disciplines. This is most obviously illustrated by the recent ground-breaking report of the Royal Historical Society (in 2018) on Race, Ethnicity and Equality in UK History, the growing exploration of British (and US) universities’ legacies of slave-holding and colonialism, and the numerous articles, seminars, and conferences on decolonizing various disciplines, approaches, and curricular.
When applied in the context of different humanities disciplines, the questions of race and decolonization produce different issues. Thus, for example, a key area in the discussion of decolonizing the classics has been the idea of ‘civilization’ and its connection to the Hellenic world. In contrast, decolonizing medieval studies has focused on the blind spot of ‘race’ within studies of the pre-modern (European) world, along with the use of populist forms of (white) medieval history by violent right-wing groups. Within the study of religion, Tomoko Masuzawa’s work stands out in particular, in the reconsideration of how the idea of religious differences (i.e., of distinct ‘world religions’) has become a dominant discourse in both teaching and research.
Despite this, however, the discussion of race, racialized exclusion, and colonial legacies in the institutional study of religion is at a very early stage. Unlike in history and other disciplines, no empirical research has yet been conducted on how the discipline could be made more diverse and inclusive, both in terms of staff and students, and also in terms of theory and methodology. The recent (May 2019) British Academy report, titled Theology and Religious Studies Provision in UK Higher Education, made reference to some issues of race, but with no detailed analysis or data.
The idea that the study of religion is based on differences is well accepted, inasmuch as most RS scholars perceive the field as looking at the religions of different people and cultures of the world. Despite this, however, there has been very little exploration of how this has framed contemporary approaches to the study of religion, in particular the colonial-era based racialization of non-Europeans in terms of the concept of religion, and the connections between European colonial powers, their self-racialization as white (and civilized), and the dominant Protestant Christian traditions that formed around these relations of power.
Alongside this, recent political and social developments in Europe and north America have highlighted the continual colonial legacies of the contemporary world, including the Trump presidency, with its emphasis on ideas of white racial purity (symbolised by the excluding border wall) and white Protestant ascendancy. In Britain, the debates and politics of Brexit have revived long simmering assumptions about British identity as a legacy of former colonialism (including increasing racialized attacks and the idea of ‘Empire 2.0’ as the basis for a post-Brexit foreign policy). Through much of Europe there has been an emerging sense of white ‘populist’ and nationalist identity, such as Rassemblement National (formerly Front National) in France, the AfD in Germany, and Viktor Orbán’s Fidescz in Hungary. All this has interacted with the explicitly Islamophobic racialization of Muslims (as a homogenous entity) as dangerous, predatory, anti-western, and as inimical with white/Christian/European ‘values’.
The academic study of religion has been engaged in all of these debates to a large extent. For example, the field has seen a considerable growth in studies of Islam in response to the 2001 terrorist attacks on September 11, the ensuing ‘war on terror’, and the rise of the Islamic State/Da’esh. One result of this has been the movement within some aspects of Islamic studies to tend towards a quasi-apologetic approach to Islam, emphasising that ‘Islam is not violent’, and thus producing a normative approach in which ‘Islam is…’ framed as good/peaceful/non-violent. Although this is understandable within the context of increasingly virulent Islamophobia in US society and politics, it produces in itself a homogenisation of the vast diversity within Islamic traditions, as well as suggesting that the purpose of teaching and researching religions is normative and apologetic (i.e., defending Muslims from misrepresentations and state violence).
It is therefore important in a contemporary climate in which there has been an intensification of issues of race, racist violence, and the racialization of religious groups that scholars working in the field of the study of religion engage in some reflection and detailed research on how their knowledge, theory, and practice contributes to such public debates.
The aim of this project, therefore, is to explore a combination of both practical issues within the field, together with theoretical and methodological issues relating to how modernist conceptualizations of race and racialization feed into academic discourses on the study of religion.
At present, this suggests there being a few main elements to this on-going research process:
- To reflect on and seek to challenge/change dominant discourses in the discipline derived from colonialism, which rely on pervasive values of whiteness. Key to this are canon and curriculum, but also much more.
- To explore and bring to the mainstream other discourses on (what is called) religion from subaltern perspectives — that is, to pluralise the field’s approaches and assumptions of knowledge, relying on an exploration of (1) above and also on research methodologies.
- To make an audit of the practical issues of race and decolonization among those engaged in the field, in particular with regard to staffing and students taking programmes in related topics, and also (potentially) with regard to interest in the subject area at school level.
- To engage with student (and potentially staff) decolonization activist groups, such as at SOAS, Cambridge, and the University of Kent Canterbury to hear these groups’ perspectives and experiences of decolonization of the study of religion. Potentially to use their perspectives as case studies for good practice and theory.
Religion Bites is edited by Malory Nye, an academic and writer who currently teaches on part-time courses at the Universities of Glasgow and Stirling. He can be found on Twitter (@malorynye) and on his website, malorynye.com.
He produces two podcasts: Religion Bites and History’s Ink.
Malory Nye is also the author of the books Religion the Basics (2008) and There Shall be an Independent Scotland (2015). He is currently working on a new edition of the Religion the Basics book, together with a new book on Race and Religion, which will be published by Bloomsbury Academic.
