Reading Religious Texts Comparatively

Here are my questions for those who presented today. Thank you all for being there, and for taking the time and energy to put these fabulous projects together.

ROSY: Your reading of Ezra (ban on intermarriage and divorce decree) as responding to colonial life. What premises of empire / colonialism / coloniality we read and discuss in class may help you articulate that question. Also, as a bilingual / bicultural text, how could premises of comparative theology combined with post- or decolonial thought may help you chisel that argument? Loved that you consider Ezra and Nehemiah as a model of the Bible forcing readers to read comparatively. There is something there!

MARY ANN: Your reading of the WPA collection through the lens of social ethics begins with Walter Benjamin, straddles to Zora Neale Hurston, and seeks to find ways to read this historical text as a source of remembrance. It seeks to relativize the whiteness of the interviewers and to better see these narratives not as a source of universal truth, but as a text that renders history as unknowable (based on readings of Benjamin, Derrida, Butler, etc.). Would Glissant, Biko, or Mbembe help you perhaps negotiate the ‘source of remembrance’ with the ‘history as unknowable’ premises?

SHIVA: Your reading of the qawwali as oral history is very promising. Your plan to explore the basic premise of these texts as history because texts transmitted orally can be deemed as such irrespectively of where they come from is ambitious and quite original. I wonder who grants historical authority to these texts? Who is supposed to, and how do different genres, such as hamd, na’at, manqabat, marsiya, ghazal (my favorite), kafi, or munajaat may help understand the transfer text/script > performer > performance > audience > devotion? How to negotiate narratology and literary theory with performance theory and religious theory?

SAM: You are reading Foucault’s What is an Author?” and Derrida’s Archive Fever to add to the blogposts of this semester. These two texts, again, vary substantially between their versions in French, as lectures, as articles or chapters of books, and as a self-standing book in the case of Derrida’s; despite all these variations, they share a preoccupation with questions of authority and origin. The first deploys legality and legal discourse, while the second deploys history (loosely understood) and spatiality / location as a referential axes to tease out these questions. They both touch upon authority as a symbolic power, as a source of domain. How do you see this helping you articulate an argument in your own work?

ARIEL: Your three-stage project reviews Audrey Lord’s cancer writings as experiments that question a genealogy of the flesh well established in African American Studies and Black Studies. You move that to a second stage, seeking other genealogies. You do not renege on the premise of black women carrying lots of weight, but you seek other interpretations in the company of Rivera’s poetics of the flesh, Copland’s enfleshing freedom, and other scholars that will help you build that argument. You leave the third stage, Lord’s cancer writings as response to death and dying, to a future with a book. In this second stage, where I see your final project for this class take shape, is there room for oral history or traditions to play a part in reading Lord’s text? What role or roles may orality play in womanist body of thought?

CHRISTINA: Your reading of Danticat’s account of four generations of women and girls between Haiti and the United States, between childhood and adulthood, between colony and empire, and between virginity and womanhood asks if this maternal-filial history of flesh and motherly love, and the happening and telling of testing, can represent any healing dimensions, and a response to Winter’s premise of black women’s flesh mocked. As you incorporate Rivera’s poetics of the flesh, is there room to explore the gender-bending dimensions of motherly penetration of the daughters’ body? Thinking of Mark Jordan’s hunting the sacred, and of a kind of performance of female masculinity to tease out the healing in the mother’s body invasion of the daughter’s and the possible healing properties of that act. Also, the tradition of Celestinas counted on testing virginity for economic survival of the matchmaker; she even mended broken hymens. I wonder also about catharsis (long talk with Shiva about catharsis not being the purification of the single tragic character on stage, performing, but the actual purification of the whole social fabric, Page Dubois, “On Catharsis”) and about the sacrificial dimensions of the body of the daughter, crossroads of exile and redemption.

FABULOUS PRESENTATIONS, EVERYONE. I hope you will post lots of questions, comments, bibliographical suggestions, and so on. See you next week. Hang in there, you’re doing great!

This, our last week of assigned readings, we consider the quality of ‘transcendental’ in the politics, economics, culture, and personal dynamics of coloniality.

We kicked off with a set of working definitions of empire, colonies, imperial and colonial subjects, expansions and settlements, colonialism, coloniality, and postcolonial and decolonial thought.

With Biko’s black consciousness we revisited disidentifications, and passing; with Mbembe’s necropolitics we remembered biopower, communities, and sovereignty; with Maldonado Torres and Ndlovu’s advocating for decolonial thought we considered and reconsidered race, earth, hierarchies, and history; and with Sánchez, we revisited Boyle Heights, District Six, and Waikoloa Beach alongside Andalusi studies and comparativism, to better relate to tolerance, convivencia, multiculturalism, and danger.

We acknowledged that the time and space in which we find ourselves make it extremely hard for us to think of bringing our final projects to fruition. Hence, we are going to reconvene next Tuesday to discuss possibilities and our various venturings into reading and writing.

In the meantime, please post your reflection on this week’s discussion on transcendental coloniality. By 5pm on Saturday, if you can.

Our discussion of coloniality considered terms such as medicine, family, flesh, opacity, spirit, indigeneity, empire, Itongo, nomadism, disenfranchisement, property, multiple trauma, religion, slavery, transparency, and colonialism.

Please, write a reflection on coloniality, especially as it relates to reading religious texts comparatively. If you can, please post this reflection by 5pm on Saturday March 28.

This week we discussed Moten’s idea of the uncommons and Warren’s arguments on ontological terror. The key learning objective was to establish the centrality of blackness in reading religious texts, to shift the marginality of blackness when reading religious texts.  With the readings, we engaged means and ways of belief, relationality, the need to destroy the category of Being, anihilation, faith, science, metaphysics, fugitivity, imagery, pessimism, terror, hope, spirit, emancipation, creativity, containerization, and worldviews, among others, in order to understand the importance of both that centrality, and the urgency of that shift.

By Sunday evening, please post your brief comment on this week’s readings and discussion.

What are sacred spaces? Sacred places? How do they correspond with geography, politics, mapping, history, myth, distance, materiality, origin, ephemera? How is a sacred space constituted in the transit or translation of a self, a subject, an individual, into a community? What role does community play in the material part of the sacred? What role does belief play in the constitution of rituals and, with it, of the hierophanic?

In composing your reflection, make sure you note how the chapter you read intertwines with premises established by MacDonald’s “Introduction” and Nancy’s chapter.   To keep this from putting undue pressure on your reading and writing for this coming week, this post does not have a regular deadline; you can post it the last day of Spring Break, March 11.

This week we traded readings, angles, and arguments about the bridge (standing, broken, going) between religion and literature. We considered terms such as mimesis, reproduction, and mechanicisms; gender, bias, and dyads; evolution, humility, the sublime and ambiguity; solitude and theories and interpretations of antiquity; hell, purgatory, and paradise; children’s literature and the sacred; performance and interpretation of sacred texts; the Renaissance and comparativisms; authority, the archon, phalós and logós; searches and anxieties of origins; infinite horizontal reproduction; roots, ginger, holograms, virtuality, and rhyzomes; and religious and literary canonicity, among others.

By Saturday, please review your notes on the essay/chapter that you had assigned, and write a reflection threading those notes with our class discussion. If you were absent, please imagine that threading.

This week we engaged in discussion nine very different readings that represented nature in myriad ways: as a place, as background, as a type/style/way of doing things, as decor, as animalia, as animality, as pleasure, as a founding sign for legal arguments, and so on.

Discussion in class was guided by five questions relating to various definitions of nature, animalia/animality, marriage, sex, sexuality, gender, and theory, among others.

For your reflection, please choose one or two of those questions and post a comment, question, refutation, or argument that rehearses possible answers to that/those question/s. Yes, you can post a question as a possible way to answer the original question. By Saturday at five, please.

This week we began developing working definitions of key terms for our critical toolbox this semester: ritual, text, belief, and ethnographies. We teased out meanings for them in singular and in plural; we rehearsed ways to understand the correspondences between them. We also inquired about their relation to flesh, bodies, Relation, myth, fiction, magic, divinity, humanity, diaspora, the prefix trans-, pilgrimage, identity, and migration, among others. We wondered how they contribute to the composition and interpretation of religiosity.

By Sunday at 5, please share your reflection on the larger scope of our discussion this week, or a question you had pending about a term or discussion, or a response to a question we posed and you remained pondering.

This week we focused on seeking to establish a foundation on comparative theologies.  In the company of Francis Clooney and David Chidester, we teased out semantic, historical, theoretical, and ideological maps that join and separate comparative theologies from reading religious texts comparatively.  We began threading the myriad lines positioning comparativisms with empire, religion, and colonialities.

By Saturday at 5pm, please post your reflection on this matter. Consult with your notes, with your pillow, with your classmates, and with me if you need to, in order to find a thread that you can grasp to share with us your ideas, questions, or concerns regarding comparative theologies. No pressure to write massively, share your thoughts; if you post a lengthy blurb, that works, too, but do not feel pressured to spend loads of time with this. Flow along, we have many more weeks coming up. Happy blogging!