Volume 51, 2023 Decolonization and the Study of Religion

EN :

Developed through the Decolonization and the Study of Religion Workshop Series, this paper will explore some concerns about decolonizing pedagogy in theory, practice, and the classroom. Weaving insights from a set of important thinkers in the field – like Achille Mbembe, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck and Ruben A. Gaztambide-Fernandez, Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh, Anabal Quijano, and Paulette Regan – the aim of the paper is to introduce some questions for pedagogues to think about in relation to the question of decolonizing pedagogies and to some of the discussions had at the workshop. The paper explores topics and discussions about structural critiques of the university, material versus epistemic analyses of decolonization, learning and unlearning as a central method in decolonization, the importance of how to make space for African and Indigenous Traditional Knowledges, and thinking about how to unpack power relations in the classroom and curriculum. The paper is more concerned with opening dialogue and making space for insights than an attempt to answer definitively questions of decolonization and pedagogy.

EN :

This paper will propose that Gloria Anzaldúa’s “spiritual activism,” as a praxis wrought through the confluence of the spiritual and the political, could also be a model for embarking upon the study of religion differently. Walter Mignolo emphasizes that to understand what it means to decolonize requires specificity, through “looking at other W questions: Who is doing it, where, why, and how?” I shall suggest that spiritual activism as a decolonial framework demands that scholars of religion ask themselves, in turn, what they believe.

EN :

The confluence of decolonization and the Anglo-American study of religion has generally followed a mode of critical self-reflection which aims to illuminate, problematize, and undo the field’s colonial contours. While crucial to decolonial processes within the academy, less appreciated or understood are the ways in which decolonial language has been invoked across a far broader social landscape, often indexing a range of political commitments and aspirations that depart considerably from more conventional decolonial frameworks. More often than not, such articulations are either rejected as fraudulent or cast off as mischaracterization of more noble decolonial projects. Using Jewish and Zionist communal discourses as a case study, this essay instead proposes to take seriously these articulations through a deeper inquiry into its undergirding religious, historical, and theological logics. In thinking through such orthogonal transformations of putatively decolonial claims, we may thereby arrive at a more capacious theoretical model that can organize divergent (and often contradictory) modes of decolonial interpretation by a range of social actors.

EN :

This paper is a methodological reflection on my time as a graduate student studying Indian Residential Schools through archival sources. I broadly survey relevant secondary studies to access the current state of the field and to chart prospective avenues for future scholarly engagement. I suggest that, for religionists, the frameworks of church history and mission history can be selectively utilized to examine the history of residential schooling. I argue that the ‘Indian Residential School’ (or IRS) terminology creates a narrowed understanding of colonialism and assimilative education by disregarding other modes of schooling deployed in Indigenous communities: the day schools and mission schools, but also hospitals, convents, and other church-operated institutions. Largely dating to the pre-Confederation period, mission schools especially fade from view when studies focus on the national model of the IRS launched in 1879 and expanded in 1884. In many regional contexts, mission schools of the colonial era laid the literal and conceptual groundwork for the later launching of the IRS system.

By studying the works and the records of specific church bodies, religionists might elucidate with greater clarity the evolving differences, synchronicities, or collaborations of ideologies, policies, and practices among members of church and state over several centuries. Attending to pre-Confederation, colonial history also lends a transnational scope to a topic that is often framed in the context of national history, i.e., ‘Canada’s residential school system’. A global perspective on colonial education could assist historians of religion to assess the legacies of church, empire, and imperialism on Canada’s national model of residential schooling.