Association for the Study of Religion in Southern Africa – 45th ASRSA Conference

As we draft this call for paper, the world feels divided along social and religious lines long feared. The conflict over Palestinian land continues to threaten not just stability in the Middle East, but also contests over sovereignty in many parts of the world. In France, Germany and the USA students and university faculty find that their support for Palestinian sovereignty invited harsh institutional and physical consequences as police crack down on protests. In Southern Africa, the appeals have provoked fierce but welcome public debates, and we wish to see this conference engage critically with questions of religion, power and sovereignty/ hegemony that emerge from this historical moment.

In his 2007 book Exterminate all The Brutes, Sven Lindqvist argues that the colonising project was not simply driven by a desire to discipline and dominate, but ultimately to exterminate. Similar sentiments related to domination have been expressed by others such as Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak, Rigoberta Menchu, and more recently by Sara Ahmed in their various efforts to make sense of the persistence of othering and the impulse to dominate and to erase/ negate the humanity of the other. Scholars of religion such as Anthony Reddy (2010), Farid Esack (1997), Mitri Raheb (2020) and Steven Friedman (2023) have sought to examine questions of hegemony and religion in different historical moments, and in this tradition we invite contributions to this longer set of activist and scholarly conversations about the multiple ways that religion, power and sovereignty are entangled in postcolonial context, both on the African continent and elsewhere.

We hope to curate a blend of critical and activist reflections, and it is against this backdrop, that the 45th ASRSA conference calls for papers and panels that address the convergences, fractures and new vectors for understanding the interrelationship between religion, power and sovereignty/ hegemony as it is presents in this historical moment, globally, and from our perspectives in Southern Africa.