IS THE POST-COLONIAL POST-SECULAR?

A Call for Papers

Conference in Syracuse, NY

September 20-21, 2013

Across the humanities, critical scholarship on the secular / secularism / secularization has recently ballooned. Scholars of history, anthropology, political theory, and religion have begun revisiting questions of enchantment and disenchantment, political theology, blasphemy, religious freedom, and much more. Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age in particular has garnered wide attention, but Taylor’s narrative focuses on the disenchantment of modern Christian Europe. Before and after A Secular Age, scholars have probed the boundaries of the secular beyond Christian Europe, and beyond the confines of intellectual history.

Some have asserted that the ideologies of secularism and colonialism are deeply intertwined. Others have asserted that post-colonial religiosity remains a symptom of colonial control of reason and affect. Still others have pointed to neo-liberalism as the shared basis of contemporary racial, religious, and post-colonial regimes.

We invite proposals that probe the question, “Is the Post-Colonial Post-Secular?” Projects may employ methods of history, literary criticism, theoretical reflection, ethnography, or cultural studies. We are interested in projects from a variety of regions and periods, for example contemporary Africa, the early U.S., or nineteenth century Haiti.

Please send 300 word abstracts, or questions, to: Owais Khan (mokhan01@syr.edu) and Vincent Lloyd (vwlloyd@syr.edu).

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS:

Gauri Viswanathan (Columbia, English) http://english.columbia.edu/people/profile/412

Barnor Hesse (Northwestern, African American Studies)
http://www.afam.northwestern.edu/people/barnor-hesse.html

Pamela Klassen (Toronto, Religion)
http://www.religion.utoronto.ca/people/faculty/pamela-klassen/

Uday Mehta (CUNY, Political Science) http://www.cuny.edu/about/people/faculty/bios.html?profName=udaysinghmehta&profile=0

Matthew Engelke (LSE, Anthropology)
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/anthropology/people/engelke.aspx

Gyanendra Pandey (Emory, History)
http://history.emory.edu/home/people/faculty/pandey.htm

Ludger Viefhues-Bailey (Philosophy, Le Moyne)
http://www.viefhues-bailey.org/vbweb/

Facebook Event: https://www.facebook.com/events/550826278275193/

This symposium is sponsored by the Syracuse University Religion Department in cooperation with Le Moyne College.

The Ecclesiological Investigations Network’s 2013 International Gathering will meet in Serbia, at a pertinent time when the presumed 1700th anniversary of the Edict of Milan will be marked. This was a historical moment that embraces and epitomizes so many issues, challenges and tensions concerning where the peoples and faiths of the world dwell in common, and what divides them. This will therefore take forward many of the conversations and collaborations begun last year at the Assisi 2012 gathering.

The conference will explore a wide range of issues and historical as well as pertinent questions concerning religion, authority and the state, east-west relations, inter-faith and ecumenical questions. Issues of secularising forces and developments, as well as considerations of post- and neo-secular societies will also feature. Processes and avenues of dialogue will feature prominently throughout.

• We welcome and invite submissions for short paper presentations (20 minutes duration – deadline = February 1) on the following themes and issues in particular, although the organizing committee are happy to consider other topics as well:

• Faith communities vis-a-vis the wider social, cultural and political contexts in which they live; religious freedom, religion and pluralist societies; church and state; church governance and civil governance; Religion, Authority and the State after 9/11;

• Christianity East and West; Orthodox Ecclesiologies; Political Theology – especially in the 21st Century; Public Theology – especially in the 21st Century; origins and present-day realities of non-conformism; dissent, religious and secular;

• Islamic-State relations; Muslims minority and majority communities; Israel and the Palestine: boundaries of faith and identity; religion and ‘peace’; religion and world affairs; religion, race, ethnicity and the state;

• Feminist and womanist perceptions of religious and secular authority and power; religion and post-colonialism; religion and neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism; fundamentalism in the service of the state; atheistic fundamentalism; religion in the Soviet Union; perceptions of embodiment – personal, corporate, societal, religious;

• Paganization of Christianity; Church teaching Authority – is there an ecumenical future?; Ecumenical Bodies and the Temptations of Empire; Christendom revisited; world-renouncing ecclesiologies throughout history and today’; secularization revisited; State-enforced secularism; pivotal figures in religion-state relations; the cold war and faith communities;

• Church and State in the main ecumenical dialogues; World Council of Churches discourse and documents on religion, authority and the state, on justice and peace, on thematic discussions of faith and order pertinent to the conference theme;

• Catholic Social Thought on Church and State, International Relations, Religious Freedom and Pluralistic Societies; Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Freedom and pastoral constitution on the Church in the Modern World;

• Tracks of diplomacy; dialogue between faith communities and the wider society; conflict resolution and religion – resources, obstacles, methods and initiatives;

• We invite proposals for short paper sessions. Papers will be 15 minutes in duration. Group and joint proposals, as well as proposals for sessions and themes are welcome (max 3 papers per session). Papers, posters and presentations will be acceptable in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.

Instructions for submitting your proposal:

• Please submit your proposal via this online form

• Please do not submit proposals by email as they cannot be accepted this way.

• Complete the title of your paper in the space provided online and then paste into the main body of the online form an abstract of no more than 300 words, followed by a short biographical summary of no more than 200 words. Proposals that exceed the word limit will not be accepted or considered.

• Participants will be notified about acceptance of papers within six weeks of submission.

• Obviously an acceptance of a paper proposal does not guarantee participation which is dependent upon completion of registration!

Deadline for paper proposals submission = FEBRUARY 1

On October 16-19, 2014, Loyola University Chicago ( http://luc.edu/ )
will hold a major conference marking the bicentennial of the Restoration of the Society of Jesus in 1814. The conference aims at locating works–of both restored Jesuits and their colleagues from women’s religious orders–within the specific experiential context of building an American nation. The stories of these men and women provide studies in what Thomas Tweed has termed Crossing and Dwelling (
http://jesuitrestoration2014.tumblr.com/post/38057724147/from-a-review-by-michael-ferber-available
) (2006): refugees from European exclusions; transatlantic immigrants; multilingual and transnational identities; settlers in ethnic urban cores; boundary-dwellers in frontier peripheries.

A call for papers will be forthcoming later in Fall 2013. In order to
give examples of new historiographical approaches the conference hopes to foster, a Tumblr has been set up:
http://jesuitrestoration2014.tumblr.com/. Scholars are invited to post reports of research in progress, forthcoming dissertations, archival possibilities, and other emerging resources.

Approaches being sought include:

- emotions
- ethnicity
- frontier
- gender
- immigration
- intellectual
- libraries/book history
- lived religion
- material religion
- migration
- space
- sports
- trauma
- urban

For more information, please visit the conference website at
http://blogs.lib.luc.edu/jesuitrestoration2014/

2013 Graduate Conference CFP

Sound Politics: Critically Listening to Local and Global Soundscapes (Radical History Review, Number 121)
Call for Proposals, due March 15, 2013

The history of sound is saturated with political meaning and significance. Military and political authorities have historically mobilized sonic techniques and technologies in aggressive and violent confrontations with perceived enemies and foreign threats. Musicians, singers, activists, youth groups, and demonstrators have expressed their dissent, not only in words, but in sonic expressions and articulations, which complement, amplify, and ultimately exceed discursive modes of communication and which create solidarities, mark opposition, and manifest resistance. Meanwhile, the state has expanded its claims to regulate and discipline sound and noise in the name of public health, social order, and communal welfare. Of course, the politics of sound are not limited to the audible; silence also operates as a tool of social discipline, political repression, and cultural homogenization in the hands of political elites and authorities, while among political activists and organizers, moments of silence can serve as powerful acts of memory, recognition, and critical reflection.

Sound and its modulations are a primary, if understudied, tool of communication and expression, forging relationships and inspiring collective action across spatial boundaries. Aside from communicative content, the very form of sound itself can be disruptive, since it can transgress borders, barricades, and blockades. So, too, can sound, in the form of sound cannons or sirens, be deployed to maintain order, to police, to punish and torture. The same set of sounds can be heard differently according to the listeners’ particular contexts and social positions. Thus, a political march’s noise can be, for participants, inspiring and empowering. For its critics, it might be called savage, revolutionary, or wild. Labeling certain sounds as noise or particular neighborhoods as noisy often serves as an implicit or explicit signifier of differences and distinctions based on race, ethnicity, gender, and class. Indeed, sound can act as a sensual and visceral marker of such distinctions. In turn, noise abatement campaigns, whether driven informally within a community or formally by the state, produce and reinforce hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion, power and privilege. And within the field of sonic politics, important insights, arguments, and debates around deafness and disability have emerged to destabilize the privilege and assumptions of the hearing population, inherently calling into question some basic assumptions in the emerging academic field of “sound studies.”

This thematic issue of Radical History Review invites scholars working on all historical periods to imagine the political implications of the audial, the aural, hearing and listening, as well as of silence and deafness. Our original intervention in this burgeoning intellectual arena centers on thinking about the politics of sound in its trans-regional, trans-national, and “glocal” (global/local) contexts. How have audial technologies and creative techniques of sound production, reproduction, and recording generated opportunities for the expression of dissent, critique, and resistance? What are the politics of noise? Of laughter? Of music? Of speech, deafness, and voice? Of silence? Does sound’s ephemeral quality limit its uses as political expression, or does sound’s movement across confined and demarcated physical spaces and conventional borders make it distinctively useful for articulating and projecting political opposition? How has sound censorship controlled or limited dissent? How have sound, and its representations, become part of social contestations over the public sphere? How have differences and hierarchies of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and class been constituted sonically? And to what extent can we think critically and historically about such questions in contexts that emphasize the trans-national and cross-cultural dimensions of sound and soundscapes?

Possible themes we would like to explore in this volume include the following:

• Technologies of sound production, reproduction, transmission, and recording.
• Sound and noise as spatial, social, and political transgression.
• The politics of music, song, and voice.
• Deafness and the politics of disability.
• Colonial, anti-colonial, colonized, and colonizing sounds and soundscapes.
• Sound’s appropriations, confusions, or challenges in cross-cultural or trans-national contexts.
• Historical changes in defining and regulating noise.
• Sound and difference, otherness, and solidarity (e.g., race, religion, gender, class).
• The sonic boundaries, limits, and transgressions of the human/non-human divide.
• The contrasting soundscapes of urban/rural/wilderness or pre-industrial/industrial/post-industrial spaces.
• The storage and archiving of sound for use by academics and activists.

The RHR seeks scholarly, monographic research articles, but we also encourage such non-traditional contributions as photo essays, film and book review essays, interviews, brief interventions, “conversations” between scholars and/or activists, and teaching notes and annotated course syllabi for our Teaching Radical History section. Given the specific theme of this issue, we are also interested in multimedia contributions that can take advantage of our format as a print journal but which might also include sound clips for presentation on the RHR website.

Procedures for submission of articles: At this time we are requesting abstracts that are no longer than 400 words; these are due by March 15, 2013 and should be submitted electronically as an attachment to contactrhr@gmail.com with “Issue 121 submission” in the subject line. By April 15, 2013, authors will be notified whether they should submit a full version of their article to undergo the peer review process. The due date for completed drafts of articles is September 1, 2013. An invitation to submit a full article does not guarantee publication; publication depends on the peer review process and the overall shape the journal issue will take.

Please send any images as low-resolution digital files embedded in a Word document along with the text. If chosen for publication, you will need to send high-resolution image files (jpg or tif files at a minimum of 300 dpi), and secure written permission to reprint all images. Authors must also secure permissions for sound clips that they may wish to include with their articles.

Those articles selected for publication after the peer review process will be included in issue 121 of Radical History Review, scheduled to appear in Winter/January 2015.

For preliminary e-mail inquiries, please include “Issue 121” in the subject line.

Abstract Deadline: March 15, 2013
contactrhr@gmail.com

Notice from http://chnm.gmu.edu/rhr/calls.htm#121

The History Graduate Student Association at Purdue University invites
submissions for its biennial conference, to be held at the Purdue
University campus in West Lafayette, Indiana on March 30, 2013.

This year’s theme is “Crooked Lines: Connection and Conflict in History,
Past and Present.” Narratives are often portrayed as deceptively linear,
which clouds the connections between the past and present, and the variety
of paths they follow. Exploring the divergences and convergences of
traditional timelines and narratives allows us to broaden our understanding
of the past. Crooked lines appear illustrating conflicts and connections
across temporal, spatial, and ideological divisions and provide a richer
understanding of the human experience. The Purdue History Graduate Student
Association welcomes papers from multiple perspectives and disciplines that
explore the crooked lines of history.

The conference will also feature a keynote address by Dr. Kristin Hoganson,
Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The
HGSA invites submissions from graduate students of all levels and areas of
interest. Please visit the conference website (linked below) for the full
Call for Papers and to find additional information and updates as the
conference draws nearer. Please send all panels and paper abstracts to
HGSApurdueconference@gmail.com by January 7, 2013.

The conference website can be found at: *
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/history/graduate/hgsa/conference/index.html

“Scotland,  Ulster, and America: Ties That Bind?”
Seventh  Scotch-Irish Identity Symposium
York,  South Carolina June 6-7, 2013.
in  conjunction with the Clover Scottish Games and Scotch-Irish  Festival
Clover,  South Carolina June 7-8, 2013

Scots  migrated to the Irish province of Ulster in large numbers during the  seventeenth  century and later.  Ulster Scots  began migrating to America in the  eighteenth century where they were known as Scotch-Irish.  We Americans tend to see that traffic as all one way - Ayrshire to Antrim to South Carolina - and lock it into a pre-1800 time frame.

Cultural  exchanges of many kinds have linked Scotland, Ulster, and America  over four  centuries and continue today.  Presbyterianism gave many a  common identity.  Until 1849 Ulster Scots looked to  Scottish universities to  educate their ministers, doctors, lawyers, and  educators, including many who later migrated to America.  Scottish and Irish music crossed the  Atlantic and American gospel songs and bluegrass traveled to Ulster. The rebirth  of an Ulster Scots identity has focused on the Scots language and Highland Games and bagpipe contests, while Americans renew their Scotch-Irish heritage with  Kirkin’ o’ the Tartan and Scottish dancing.

The  Seventh Scotch-Irish Identity Symposium will explore ways in which Scotland,  Ulster, and America have influenced one another down to the present time.  We invite papers investigating the links  among these three that persist or persisted at one time in such areas as  language, migration and settlement, commerce and business, religion and  religious history, music, literature, fraternal orders, heritage tourism, family  history and genealogy.

We  ask that you read the requirements for Symposium presentations in the statement  on Goals and Standards on the Scotch-Irish Society’s website _http://www.scotch-irishsocietyusa.org/_ (http://www.scotch-irishsocietyusa.org/).  Please  direct any questions to Michael  Scoggins at  micscoggins@chmuseums.org  or to Dr.  Richard K. MacMaster at  _rmacmast@ufl.edu

Abstracts  (approximately 250 – 300  words), together with a brief C.V., should be sent to conference organizer  Michael Scoggins as file attachments (Microsoft Word preferred) as soon as  possible, but no later than January 31,  2013. Authors will be informed by February  15, 2013 if  their abstracts have been accepted. Texts for accepted presentations will be due  on or before March  15, 2013.

The  Symposium will include a reception in the Jane Bratton Spratt Room at the  McCelvey Center, 212 East Jefferson Street, York, SC on Thursday evening,  June  6, 2013, from 7:00-9:00 PM.  The symposium proper will take place in the Lowry Family Theater at the McCelvey  Center from 8:00 AM-5:00 PM on Friday, June 7, 2013.

This  year the symposium is being held in conjunction with the annual Clover Scottish Games and Scotch-Irish  Festival, which takes place in nearby Clover, SC, on June 7 and 8. Symposium attendees are welcome to attend  both the reception for the Clover Scotch-Irish festival and the festival itself.  There is no charge for either event. The Festival reception will be held at  the Greater Clover Chamber of Commerce, 118 Bethel Street, Clover, SC, from  7:00-9:00 PM on Friday, June 7, and the festival itself will take place at the  Clover Memorial Stadium on Saturday, June 8, from 9:00 AM-4:00 PM. The exact  schedule for the festival has not been set yet, but festival activities  typically include Scottish athletic competitions, piping and drum exhibitions,  Celtic music, step dancing, genealogy and clan tents, border collie demonstrations, local vendors, children’s activities, and of course food!

Further details will be made available on the Scotch-Irish Society website as  plans are finalized.

NABPR Region at Large