Religion and Broken Solidarities

Description

The contributors to this original volume provide a new and nuanced approach to studying how discourses of religion shape public domains in sites of political contestation and “broken solidarities.”

Our public discourse is saturated with intractable debates about religion, race, gender, and nationalism. Examples range from Muslim women and headscarves to Palestine/Israel and to global anti-Black racism, along with other pertinent issues. We need fresh thinking to navigate the questions that these debates raise for social justice and solidarity across lines of difference. In Religion and Broken Solidarities, the contributors provide powerful reflections and wisdom to guide how we can approach these questions with deep ethical commitments, intersectional sensibilities, and intellectual rigor.

Religion and Broken Solidarities traces the role of religious discourse in unrealized moments of solidarity between marginalized groups who ostensibly share similar aims. Religion, the contributors contend, cannot be separated from national, racial, gendered, and other ways of belonging. These modes of belonging make it difficult for different minoritized groups to see how their struggles might benefit from engagement with one another. The four chapters, which interpret historical and contemporary events with a sharp and critical lens, examine accusations of antisemitism and anti-Muslim racism in the Women’s March in Washington, DC; the failure of feminists in Iran and Turkey to realize a common cause because of nationalist discourse concerning religiosity and secularity; Black Catholics seeking to overcome the problems of modernity in the West; and the disjunction between the Palestinian and Mizrahi cause in Palestine/Israel. Together these analyses show that overcoming constraints to solidarity requires alternative imaginaries to that of the modern nation-state.

Contributors: Atalia Omer, Joshua Lupo, Perin E. Gürel, Juliane Hammer, Ruth Carmi, Brenna Moore, and Melani McAlister.

Solidarity is not solid. If we could paint it, it would be striated and seamed, remarkably aged and ragged, but with bits of hopeful new growth—winding wildly in spirals or staggering in one direction only to switch sharply to another.

As I write this, the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah is terrorized by Jewish settlers who are brazenly evicting Palestinians from their homes. Again. And Hamas is lobbing rockets into Israel, while Israel targets and kills Palestinians in Gaza. An editorial in the Washington Post by Noura Erakat and Mariam Barghouti describes the situation as what it is—“the ongoing process that seeks to remove Palestinian natives and replace them with Jewish-Zionists.” The anniversary of the Nakba is just around the corner, they say. With the Biden administration and/or the usual American policy approach in mind, Erakat and Barghouti end with a call: “We do not need more empty both sides-isms, we need solidarity to overcome apartheid.”

The expectation or longing for solidarity is a cry for justice against a universe determinedly insensitive to our demands. When we think of solidarity, maybe we think of a line of people, hooked arm-in-arm, facing down the police. Or a woman’s refusal to cross a picket line at the factory gates. The Black Power fists of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics. Maybe something as simple and brave as standing in front of a bulldozer aimed at destroying Palestinian homes—and paying with your life. All of these are impassioned visions, offering a performance of moral clarity and a willingness to take a stand.

But solidarity is more than an ideological/intellectual statement; it is infused with feeling. Those on the political Left often dream of it, as outcome and object. Drawing on Sara Ahmed, I think of solidarity as being as much an emotion as an action, not that the two could be easily separated. As an emotion, solidarity connects, it is social, operating through exchange: “[I]t is through emotions, or how we respond to objects and others, that surfaces or boundaries are made: the “I” and “we” are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others.” Thus emotions, for Ahmed, do not arise from inside the person and move outward (like we think of love or anger), nor start from outside and move in (like a wave of feeling in a crowd), but circulate, through signs, between bodies. We are impressed upon by a situation, a person, an object, and in this way we turn toward or away from it. “Affect is what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects.”

The contributors to this book show clearly just how difficult solidarity is, how sticky an object, freighted with expectations and histories. Objects shimmering with affect can lead us to lean in or turn away. They can orient us variously. As Omer and Lupo comment in the introduction, this book includes examples of people who, in multiple situations, are “unable to participate in an intersectional vision of emancipation that transcend national boundaries.” The limits of that imagination are shaped by the hegemonic frameworks of state powers, racial hegemonies, religious divides, and modernist projects. If solidarity is our designed object, the desired good around which the book is oriented, then the disappointed hope that it will solidify is what marks the tenor of the project. We see in these chapters a kind of call for new affective objects, networks rewired to allow for larger, more expansive connections. Omer and Carmi call for marginalized Israelis to find solidarity with each other and/or Palestinians; Hammer’s analysis shows how American women organizing against Trump failed to move beyond the forms of silencing of pro-Palestinian speech that shaped the Women’s March of 2017; Gürel unpacks why Iranian and Turkish Muslim women could not find solidarity in the face of a global system that made Iranian women’s offers of support seem toxic to a devout Turkish politician. These are instances of analyzing ideology, its imbrication in religion and ideas about religion. But they necessarily imagine what could have been otherwise.

Introduction by Atalia Omer and Joshua Lupo

1. Broken Solidarities: Transnational Feminism, Islam, and “the Master’s House” by Perin Gürel

2. The Women’s March: A Reflection on Feminist Solidarity, Intersectional Critique, and Muslim Women’s Activism by Juliane Hammer

3. Transgressive Geography and Litmus Test Solidarity by Atalia Omer and Ruth Carmi

4. “To Confound White Christians”: Thinking with Claude McKay about Race, Catholic Enchantment, and Secularism by Brenna Moore

5. Seeing Solidarity by Melani McAlister

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Philosophie et théologie
• Religión
• Turquía
• Irán
• Musulmán
• Israel
• Palestinian
• Mizrahi Jews
• State
• Politics
• Muslim
• Catholic
• Christianity
• Palestine
• Muslim ben al-Hajjaj
• Islam
• Turkey
• Mizrahi
• Discrimination
• Iran

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 décembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268203849
• Langue: English

Extrait

RELIGION AND BROKEN SOLIDARITIES
CONTENDING MODERNITIES
Series editors: Ebrahim Moosa, Atalia Omer, and Scott Appleby
As a collaboration between the Contending Modernities initiative and the University of Notre Dame Press, the Contending Modernities series seeks, through publications engaging multiple disciplines, to generate new knowledge and greater understanding of the ways in which religious traditions and secular actors encounter and engage each other in the modern world. Books in this series may include monographs, co-authored volumes, and tightly themed edited collections.
The series will include works that frame such encounters through the lens of “modernity.” The range of themes treated in the series might include war, peace, human rights, nationalism, refugees and migrants, development practice, pluralism, religious literacy, political theology, ethics, multi- and intercultural dynamics, sexual politics, gender justice, and postcolonial and decolonial studies.
RELIGION AND BROKEN SOLIDARITIES
Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism
Edited by
ATALIA OMER
and
JOSHUA LUPO
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
Copyright © 2022 by the University of Notre Dame
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022945957
ISBN: 978-0-268-20385-6 (Hardback)
ISBN: 978-0-268-20386-3 (Paperback)
ISBN: 978-0-268-20387-0 (WebPDF)
ISBN: 978-0-268-20384-9 (Epub)
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
CONTENTS Introduction ATALIA OMER AND JOSHUA LUPO CHAPTER 1. Broken Solidarities: Transnational Feminism, Islam, and “the Master’s House” PERIN GÜREL CHAPTER 2. The Women’s March: A Reflection on Feminist Solidarity, Intersectional Critique, and Muslim Women’s Activism JULIANE HAMMER CHAPTER 3. Transgressive Geography and Litmus Test Solidarity ATALIA OMER AND RUTH CARMI CHAPTER 4. “To Confound White Christians”: Thinking with Claude McKay about Race, Catholic Enchantment, and Secularism BRENNA MOORE CHAPTER 5. Seeing Solidarity MELANI McALISTER List of Contributors Index
Introduction
ATALIA OMER AND JOSHUA LUPO
S ETTING THE S CENE
This book reflects one of the many lines of questions and conversations generated by Contending Modernities’ interdisciplinary working group focused on expanding inquiry into religion, modernity, and the secular. A few of us met initially in Chicago on June 5–6, 2018, and then again with some additional interlocutors at the University of Notre Dame the following year. Other voices were added along the way to expand the discussion, both geographically and conceptually. This concentrated effort to expand and open up theoretical avenues in the study of religion and modernity signals a turn in Contending Modernities’ focus. In its earlier iterations, it focused on collecting empirical evidence to intervene in the study of global migration and cosmopolitanism in various urban centers in the global North. It also focused on illuminating new dimensions in the study of authority, community, and identity in sub-Saharan Africa and Indonesia. We approached these foci in deeply pluralistic and contextualist ways. As such, they brought to the foreground the traumatic experiences that followed from the colonialist intellectual, cultural, religious, and political ideologies of modernity. During these earlier stages, Contending Modernities also examined philosophical and theological accounts of modernity focused on issues in science and bioethics, as well as issues related to how we understand the human person. With our global network, diverse in its disciplinary approach, we now ask: To what degree can the massive scope of this research initiative and our accumulated findings—the labor of many researchers—also speak back to and enrich the sometimes tired and often self-replicating scholarly theoretical conversations on religion and modernity?
To reflect on this question, we invited a group of scholars to participate in a Theory Working Group. While many of these scholars were new to the Contending Modernities research initiative, some were old friends who were willing to pause for a moment to ask fresh questions about the findings generated by their previous research. One of our charges was to think in intersectional ways about “religion” as a modern category of analysis whose very disarticulation from global patterns of racialization and domination constitutes a colonial and myopic conceptual maneuver, one that distracts us from investigating its social and political expressions. This volume, in particular, shows the limits of analyzing “religion” in abstraction from specific nationalist discourses—which are made up of both semiotic and symbolic constraints—and the importance of analyzing religion’s constitutive relation to social stratification and racialization as they produce and are reproduced by nationalist discourse. When one “abstracts” religion from these latter contexts, religion’s role in demobilizing or mobilizing transnational solidarities focused on a social justice transformative agenda is obscured. Such an intersectional analysis is important for demonstrating the fallacy of the “clash of civilizations” rhetoric as well as ethically troubling forms of transnational coalition building, such as the one that coalesced around the US-led global “war on terror.” While the approach taken by the contributors to this volume is no doubt critical, the aim is nonetheless to open up emancipatory possibilities via critique.
T HE A BSENT BUT P RESENT
Religion and Broken Solidarities , one of three volumes that emerged from the working group, traces how modernity’s political infrastructures and discourses have contributed to histories of sometimes ephemeral, fragmentary, and often unrealized solidarities. The book highlights especially the role or lack of a role of religious discourse in those ephemeral, fragmentary, and unrealized moments. If another volume in this series, Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (forthcoming) traces the co-constitutive nature of religion, nationalism, and race, this volume traces how varying groups and individuals have tried and have struggled to move beyond them. The contributors also identify where national boundaries operate myopically to block people’s capacity to see how their struggles are interlinked. For example, as Perin Gürel demonstrates in her analysis of an episode of what she calls a “broken” South-South transnational solidarity between Muslim women in Turkey and Iran, it is those structures and ideological discursive formations associated with secular modernity (in this case liberal thought) and not “religion” (as some might expect) that often deflate and demobilize transnational solidarity. The “west,” even though physically absent, is still the ideological culprit (via political liberalism) preventing enhanced and productive Muslim-Muslim transnational (feminist) links. In relation to her case study, Gürel writes, “Muslim women’s transnational political activism was curtailed by the very rationale of liberal thought and its attendant constructions, including choice, democracy, and human rights.” Gürel scrutinizes the highly publicized case of Merve Kavakçi, an elected representative of a reformist Islamist party in Turkey, who, in 1999, was attacked by members of the laïc establishment for wearing a head covering in Parliament. Even when faced with this overt secularist denial and repression of her religious piety, Kavakçi, however, refused visible and tangible expressions of solidarity from Iranian Muslim women. Gürel, therefore, concludes that the culprits of this missed opportunity to form transnational Muslim-Muslim solidarity are the specific configurations and histories of state control of religion and religious agency—including the agency of Muslim women—which in turn have been shaped by secular and religious political settlements. Orientalist tropes depicting the wearing of the headscarf as a supposedly slippery slope that would turn Istanbul into Tehran circulated and filled Turkey’s public discourse and led Kavakçi to refuse the calls of support from Iranian women.
Gürel shows that even in the absence of White feminists—and their colonialist and paternalistic concerns with benevolence—their secular hegemonic vision of how progress and emancipation should look is still present, lurking in the background. By dissecting the misfires of South-South solidarity, she also illuminates the missing dimensions necessary for transnational feminist theories to overcome the obstacles to North-South solidarity. In particular, Gürel highlights how the very discursive formations of the west, which in addition to being present in the European Court of Human Rights’ support of the Turkish ban on veiling, are also visible in the modernist and secularist structures that shape the political and social contexts in which the Turkish representative declined the “Iranian sisters’” call to solidarity. The focus on broken or unrealized transnational Turkish-Iranian solidarity brings into sharp relief, therefore, the role of the institutions and social mechanisms of the nation-state in shaping and reconfiguring modern religion. Religion here is understood as being co-constituted along national lines. Absent is an essentialist and/ or universalist approach to theorizing religion as apolitical, both of which have historically been implicated in colonialist practices. While such an approach is on the wane in the academic study of religion, its influence can still be seen in political discourse, especially in the international humanitarian sphere. 1 Gürel’s chapter reminds us again why such an approach must be