Jean-Loup Vithien-Gerard portrait of Albert Camus. Via Wikimedia Commons.
In the 1947 novel The Plague, his great allegory of the struggle against fascism during the Second World War, French Algerian Nobel laureate Albert Camus wrote, “Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky” (35). As the razing of Gaza continues, we can learn from thinkers like Camus who confronted the realities of terror in his time with resolute commitment to human equality.
Camus’s context was French rule in Algeria, a North African colony and later part of France until its 1962 independence. Conflict erupted between the pieds-noirs, French Algerian citizens of European descent, and Indigenous Arab and Berber populations who, despite their overwhelming majority, were denied political and civil rights. Despite being a colon, or “settler,” Camus’s lifelong anti-colonialist activism confronted systemic injustice and sought a “fair Algeria, where both peoples can and must live in peace and equality.” He stood athwart an Arab nationalist insurgency that targeted and killed many civilians, led by the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), and state counterterror and settler vigilantism. Amid death threats, Camus insisted that nothing strips human beings of their right not to be murdered.
The Camusian argument to follow is that the wrongness of murder is obvious, straightforward, and sets a normative limit on how one may wage or justify resistance to violence or oppression; and that ignoring this is wrong, not least because it hinders shared recognition of responsibility for harms and blocks solidarity in seeking peace with truth and justice.
Against Executioners
The term “executioner” fills Camus’s writings, reflecting his passionate opposition to capital punishment. His revulsion at what he called “the most premeditated of murders” can be felt in his 1942 novel The Stranger, published in Nazi-occupied Paris where he lived and secretly worked as a journalist and editor-in-chief of Combat, a banned Resistance newsmagazine. And it’s central to The Plague, where Tarrou, Camus’s mouthpiece in the fable of resistance against occupation and oppression, declares, “All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences” (236).
I believe that standing against executioners is twofold: we must identify, and avoid identifying with, those who commit or excuse murder. Moreover, we have a special responsibility for wrongful acts we help others do.
We clearly help others harm by materially supporting their efforts. But we also help the harmful when they credibly act in our name or by our authority. If I am in a power-sharing relationship with another, their acts bear my imprint, marking my character. In a way, we act together, which is the basic meaning of “complicity.”
These are plain facts about sharing moral responsibility for what others do. Their truth rests on common sense and experience, not fancy theories. They mean my personal involvement in a crisis has the greatest relevance to what I should say or do about it. Grand narratives and intellectual frameworks deserve a subordinate, defeasible role.
Discourse about Israel/Palestine revolves around concepts like “Zionism,” “apartheid,” and “a nation’s right to exist.” These evoke important realities. In The Plague, Camus has the redoubtable Dr. Rieux, who distrusts sweeping ideals, admit that “when the abstraction is trying to kill you, you have to pay attention to it” (93). But abstractions cannot simply dictate how I should respond to crisis. I must know who I am in relation to it, whether harm is done with my help or in my name.
Against Abstraction
In The Rebel, Camus confronts the tendency to prioritize abstractions over lives. Devotees of stories about historical purity or theories of utopian progress readily find reasons for eliminating real people who appear as obstacles. Venerating ideas risks devaluing individuals. Such “redemptive politics” wears many guises: capitalist imperialism, totalitarian communism, colonialist domination, revolutionary terror. No monopoly exists on this perverse idolatry of the ideal.
Redemptive politics also inspires moral perversions on the far left, as recently illustrated by victim-blaming statements issued by progressive organizations like the Democratic Socialistsof America. Ethically, nothing makes anyone more murderable. Yet blaming terror on its victims is a longstanding moral blind spot on the left. Camus’s contemporaries John-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon theorized that the source of all violence in anticolonial struggles are colonial systems and settler populations, which are therefore “entirely responsible” for it. Some on today’s left inherit these ideas, twisted fictions of agency that reduce human beings to conduits of abstractly described structural forces. This is how an otherwise normal person comes to believe that a grand historical process or myriad institutions, not an angry man aiming a loaded gun at a child he views as a colonizer, is responsible for pulling the trigger.
None of this entails a broad equivalence between far-right demagogues who weaponize antisemitic accusations to justify Israeli atrocities and far-left actors who blame October 7 on its victims. The Camusian lesson is rather that ideology must not be used to justify atrocity any more than to block legitimate resistance to oppression.
“Humanity Isn’t an Idea”
Standing against executioners while keeping abstraction in its place means recognizing our relations to the realities of murder. Two points help: all civilian life matters equally and we are responsible for the destruction of life to which we contribute.
These operations have killed over 33,000 Palestinians, of whom three-quarters are women, children, and elderly. The U.N. Secretary General describes Gaza, one of the most densely populated regions in the world, as a “graveyard for children.” At half of Gaza’s population, children constitute over 13,000 of those so far killed by Israel. This amounts to roughly twelve times as many children slain by Israeli forces as all Israelis killed on October 7. A human-centered ethic means nothing if not solidarity with every child.
This carnage constitutes unjustified killing for two reasons.
Anyone like me, in whose name an ideology or identity is used to justify carnage, must “venture into a no-man’s-land between hostile armies.” The Plague’s Dr. Rieux addresses us too when he reminds his colleague, Rambert, who lapses into abstraction amid crisis, that “Humanity isn’t an idea” (175).
For “A Civilian Truce”
On January 22, 1956, Camus delivered a violently protested speech in Algiers. In a desperate plea to pieds-noirs and Arab nationalists, he begged both to refrain from murder. The foremost reason was “one of simple humanity,” that “no cause justifies the death of the innocent.” He later dispatched over 150 letters to French authorities urging mercy for Arab militants facing execution or imprisonment, some of whom Camus believed had committed atrocities. Some letters spared lives. But Camus’s antiracist appeal for a civilian truce failed. His public voice lapsed into “Sophoclean silence.”
My Sisyphean appeal joins many others’. Jewish Voice for Peace’s declaration, “Not in our name!”, acknowledges a heightened obligation to oppose murder when one’s authority is used to justify it—even illegitimately or indirectly. This is the tragic side of responsibility. When others speak or act on my behalf, they pose, and would answer, the question of who I should be taken to be. They put a choice before me: to define myself or let them do it for me.
Camus understood that withdrawal from a violent world may tempt us but isn’t possible. The effort makes us bystanders, if not strangers, to ourselves. “By our silence or by the stand we take,” he reminds us, “we too shall enter the fray.”
Christian M. Golden is an adjunct professor of philosophy at Georgetown University. He is an ethicist specializing in the impact of identity and difference on relationships of authority, intimacy, and trust. His research explores the normative and psychological dimensions of agency, the character and limits of subjectivity, and the place and value of conflict in human affairs. His latest work examines commitment and citizenship by investigating the nature and scope of virtues like civility, humility, integrity, and justice. He received the 2020 Tropaia Outstanding Faculty Award for Georgetown University’s Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies Program.
Nelson Maldonado Torres speaks to students, staff, and faculty during his visit to Notre Dame’s campus on March 8, 2023. (Photo by Matt Cashore).
Introduction
At a time when decolonization has become a buzzword across the university and wider social discourse—especially under the banner of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)—clarity about what decolonization entails is required. On March 7 and 8 of 2023 Nelson Maldonado-Torres joined Contending Modernities to present a lecture and to sit for an interview to outline his approach to decolonization. Maldonado-Torres carefully distinguished the decolonial project from piecemeal reforms that do little more than chip around the edges of the status-quo, whether from liberal politicians or university leaders. Drawing on his own activist and scholarly work, Maldonado-Torres outlined a decolonial politics and epistemology rooted in a radical notion of love. In conversation with Emmanuel Levinas, Frantz Fanon, and others, he challenged both conservative and liberal posturing that would prioritize law and order (sometimes under the guise of “justice”) that seeks to maintain a status quo that is predicated on the preservation of Whiteness. The result of Maldonado-Torres’ exposition is a radical notion of what decoloniality entails: the reorganization of the university as we know it and the reimagining of what is entailed in radical politics. It is here where religious practices, such as prayer, offer ways of understanding ourselves and relations to others in profoundly revolutionary ways.
Lecture
On March 7, 2023 Maldonado-Torres presented a lecture for the Contending Modernities research initiative titled “Countering the Coloniality of Peace and Justice.” The recording of this lecture, along with timestamps highlighting the various chapters of the lecture, are below.
Interview
Atalia Omer (AO): In your talk and in your work, you are critical of various uses of the terms decolonization and decoloniality in the academy, arguing instead that decolonization entails a careful consideration of abolition and reparations that is typically missing in academic calls for decolonization. So, what is the relation between decolonization and concepts and praxes of abolitions and reparation?
Nelson Maldonado-Torres (NMT): In recent years, different movements/organizations of activists have been making important connections between decolonization and abolition. In the US, for example, decolonization is very much linked to the Indigenous Land Back movement, and abolition has been primarily associated with the abolition of slavery as well as with the abolition of the prison industrial complex. And so there have been increasing efforts to explore the connections and synergies between these concepts and projects. The growing consensus is that abolition is part of the process of decolonization and vice versa. For me, coming from the Caribbean context, the mutual implication of decolonization and abolition is very clear, perhaps most notably, because of their entanglement during the Haitian Revolution. Haiti became independent from France while also abolishing slavery, and so therefore in the Haitian case it was clear that decolonization involves political, aesthetic, spiritual, and epistemic liberation as well as the abolition of slavery and related structures of dehumanization. In short, how I understand decoloniality combines decolonization and abolition, and I trace this back to the Haitian revolution, among similar revolts in what the Zapatistas have referred to as the long night of 500 years. I have described in my work the Haitian revolution as the first major moment of the decolonial turn, and when you take the Haitian revolution as a reference, then, decolonization and abolition are organically connected. It is important today, for a number of reasons, to continue to work in that direction. Haiti is also a very important case because Haiti was made to pay reparations to France because of their losses. So this is the audacity when of course—
AO: When you have the Eiffel Tower!
NMT: When of course, what was due was reparations to the Haitian people, an imperative that remains relevant today. So, clearly in the context of massive forms of colonization, independence is not enough. You need to abolish the institutions that are serving as mechanisms of domination—different forms of domination in your society—and the former colonial powers need to not only pay reparations, but also engage in reparations. It’s kind of a threefold project and demand: decolonization, abolition, reparations as part of decoloniality. By decoloniality I mean both the undoing of coloniality in all its forms and expressions as well as the cultivation of existing and new forms of communality, forms of subjectivity, and forms of sociality that emerge out of the very process of organizing to counter colonization. In the case of the Haitian revolution, it is in the very process of engaging in the revolution, and before that in the process of the formation of what Jean Casimir calls the “counter-plantation system” that provide an anchor of sorts in the unfolding of combative decoloniality.
You need to abolish the institutions that are serving as mechanisms of domination—different forms of domination in your society—and the former colonial powers need to not only pay reparations, but also engage in reparations.
In the counter-plantation system, you find the seeds of a new order, but for that order to happen you need abolition, and you also need reparations. So decolonization cannot work without abolition and it cannot work without reparations. If we take it from there and we think about places like the university, then whenever we talk about decolonization we need to talk about abolition and reparations. If we are not talking about abolition and reparations, then we are not really talking about decolonization. And it is interesting that many of these recent efforts or projects to pay attention to decolonization, they ultimately make decolonization collapse into projects of diversity and inclusion that reject the grammar of reparation. So, we have to be very careful about this academic commodification of decolonization and decoloniality within a liberal grammar that does not admit the question of reparations or that sees it as something completely different from what we are supposed to be asking and doing now.
AO: Perfect! Maybe you can tell us more about why you are thinking specifically about the need to abolish the humanities?
NMT: Abolish the humanities. Yes. As I see it, decoloniality opens up a horizon of multiple imperatives for change, including reparations, different forms of creolization, and abolition. There is no decolonization or decoloniality without engaging in the abolition of the logic of coloniality, which might involve the abolition of whatever it is that one is decolonizing. This prevents us from approaching decolonization as a project that recentralizes practices that need to morph and in some cases disappear in the very process of coming together to combat coloniality. This is at the crux of what the Frantz Fanon Foundation, which I co-chair, has proposed as combative decoloniality.
In that sense, decolonization entails abolition as a necessary step, or as a permanent possibility. Today, more and more in academia, one finds that decolonization tends to collapse into a call for minimal transformation, preserving the position of the scholar as expert, and doing away with the ideas/imperatives of abolition and reparations. At most, these are forms of decoloniality-lite that facilitate a certain commodification of the decolonial in liberal settings. This commodification is at work in calls to decolonize the humanities, when this call serves to recentralize the humanities rather than to consider the potential need for its abolition, and the abolition of the knowledge apparatus that makes the humanities, as an area within the liberal arts and sciences, possible. The humanities are often glorified, conceived as an effective antidote against the prevalence of technocratic and neoliberal imperatives in industrial and post-industrial societies. However, they remain part of what Sadri Khiari and Houria Boutledja have referred to as the immune system of Whiteness, and particularly so, of the White academic field. This means that the space of the humanities invites oppositions to neoliberalism as much as it also foments oppositions to decoloniality and abolition. The humanities open small spaces for scholars of color, but they truly are, first and foremost, a refuge for liberal Whiteness, which is why the humanities often militate against decolonial knowledge formations that resist accommodation within the established 19th century epistemology that dominates in the globalized modern/colonial university. That is why I believe that the time has come to explicitly engage in the effort to abolish them and, through that effort, engage in the process of supporting other ways of conceiving of education and of knowledge creation. We need not despair. The humanities were invented, and so we can invent something else building from everything at our disposal, including the critical analysis and strategic use of concepts and methods fostered in the humanities and the sciences, and recognizing the many spaces that have always already existed beyond the scope of the liberal arts and the humanities. Of these, of particular relevance are those that have participated and/or participate in the struggle against coloniality and for the restoration of the intersubjective bonds that have been severely undermined under the catastrophe of modernity/coloniality. At the core of this activity might be the cultivation of combative decolonial attitudes (rather than liberal and modern/colonial attitudes) that seek to prepare subjects and communities to engage in decolonial and abolitionist struggle. This struggle involves fostering a pluriverse of decolonizing practices and ideas grounded in those practices, with particular attention to those found in decolonial, abolitionist, and similar combative collectives, and facilitate their interaction and mutual enrichment, always respecting and following the lead of the practitioners/thinkers themselves. At stake is the possibility for the damné to emerge as a co-combatant, and not merely as a professional, presumed expert, or scholar. As Sylvia Wynter has warned us, though, humanities scholars would tend to resist this impulse as much or more as scholars of Scholasticism rejected the humanities when they first emerged. The humanities were born in a particular time, institutionalized during a particular time, and grounded on specific philosophies the premises of which have been challenged or changed since then.
AO: We can think specifically about Kant or…
NMT: Yes, we can think of Enlightenment thinkers and figures like Immanuel Kant who served as reference and as inspiration for how to conceive the modern research university. We also need to consider how in the last two centuries other things have happened in the university that were not anticipated for most of its history. For me one of the most important things that has happened is the emergence of Black studies and ethnic studies fields, all of which defy the division of knowledge in terms of the humanities, the sciences, and the social sciences. However, since these forms of “studies” are expected to be incorporated within the established horizon of the liberal arts and sciences—because no other horizon is considered to be possible—they are forced to exist in a context that constantly militates against their decolonial dimensions and that seeks to make them work in the mode of pursuing incessant struggles for recognition and accommodation. At best, the humanities and the social sciences open relative spaces for these areas, while keeping their most combative decolonial dimensions, grounded on movement-based epistemic and aesthetic formations, in check.
AO: But you are not against studying literature?
NMT: Exactly. I’m referring to the humanities as a general framework within which different activities that are sometimes labeled as humanities activities are accommodated. My point is that they are better identified, they are better-affirmed—these activities like thinking, writing, interpretation—when conceived in a different kind of paradigm, not the paradigm of the humanities and social sciences, but a much more plural and dynamic paradigm that is deeply and intrinsically linked with anti-racism and decoloniality.
For me one of the most important things that has happened is the emergence of Black studies and ethnic studies fields, all of which defy the division of knowledge in terms of the humanities, the sciences, and the social sciences.
The humanities have become—and this is the other reason why I think that it is time to firmly proceed with their abolition—not only some stumbling block for other forms of knowledge, but also a refuge for liberal Whiteness, as I already mentioned. They have served as a refuge for liberal Whiteness—focused on the abstract principles of liberty, equality, tolerance, free speech, and more recently diversity and inclusion—in its opposition to conservative Whiteness—focused on the perceived integrity of the nation, based on what is understood as its core—, and neoliberal Whiteness—focused on perceived efficiency in the service of unending growth. In the academy, now more than 50 years after the formation of the first ethnic study programs, it is time for us to demand further transformations and to take away these refuges that liberal Whiteness has created for itself.
Joshua Lupo (JSL): To get back to your discussion of justice during your talk, there you were saying that when the right wing proposes something outrageous that they’re going to do, President Biden responds by saying, “we’re going to stand for justice.” It sounds like there’s a similar idea you are exploring here in the sense that Governor Ron DeSantis says that Florida is going to get rid of African American studies—or even African American history—and only do “American history,” to which the liberal humanist replies, “No, no, no. We need these things.” Then the question is: What exactly are we protecting when we respond to right–wing talking points in this way? What do we want the alternative to be? Is it just that we’re studying Shakespeare for our own personal edification, or is it something more? Do you see those two as linked?
NMT: Yes, certainly. While conservatives embrace the rhetoric of “law and order,” liberals respond with the accent on justice, by which they mean justice as conceived by the modern/colonial liberal nation-state. Similarly, in the context of the struggle for education in the university, you find some sectors that call for justice. They will say that we need to stand up for justice as a topic, as a thematic, in academia. But as I pointed out, the concept of justice has already been mobilized to undermine the claims of anti-racist knowledge formations in the university, so justice-talk has also been compromised and it has always had its limits. Liberals come closer to an actual defense of Black, Indigenous, and ethnic studies when they question the conservative attack on Critical Race Theory, which has become the label to refer to all of these knowledges.
AO: They don’t know what it means.
NMT: Exactly. They don’t know what it means. The Republicans don’t know what it means and they criticize it. And the liberals don’t have any other way to define it, whatever it is. But I think that ultimately, they mean something like diversity and inclusion.
AO: Yeah. I mean, we see it here, too.
JSL: We don’t know what to do, but we need to do something for the public.
NMT: Yes, exactly, the little that exists of CRT has been gained through struggle and pushes so that the liberal system has had to make concessions. But when the liberal system makes concessions, it also doesn’t do so passively; it takes these concepts over and recodifies them, right? So, it opens, appropriates, and then turns what it incorporates into a subset of something else that it controls.
AO: It multiplies and you see it over and over again.
NMT: Exactly. That’s the cycle. And so, ideas like justice, the humanities—I mean we should all be tired of seeing the same project every now and again in the name of justice, the humanities, the humans, and so forth. Ultimately, using those as tools to say, on the one hand that “we are so progressive,” and, on the other, that “everyone should be grateful to us that we are so progressive, benevolent, and you know.” But then what you are really doing is stopping the possibility of further, more radical, anti-racist and decolonial forms of thinking and action. And then you are providing refuge for liberal Whites to counter the other forms of Whiteness, that of conservatives and agents of neo-liberalism, but also counter the pressure that comes from the movements from below. So, the liberal engages in at least two forms of countering at once while appearing benevolent, progressive, and rational. It’s quite a rhetorical trick, and that’s why I think that we should resist confronting right-wing attacks by celebration or endorsements of liberal projects and visions such as what typically takes place in calls to defend the humanities. Because already, time has gone by and we know that we’re going to be singing the same song for the next 100 years. We need to somehow at least tell White liberals: “we know what you are doing and we’re not going to play your game,” right? And we need to enter into the space and reconceptualize the questions. You can enter there and begin to change the pieces, but the liberals don’t want you to change the grammar. They will say: “You need to defend justice and you need to defend the humanities.”
AO: And you need to use the existing grammar.
NMT: Exactly. Ultimately, at the end of the day, this ties to settler colonialism because all of this is a function of baptizing as legitimate the order that has emerged and been built on this land and so on. So, all of that will go without question. You don’t question possession of the land. You don’t question anything else. You take an entire array of matters as presuppositions: calling for the constant defense of the humanities while simultaneously naturalizing a colonial order of things and suppressing decolonial knowledge formations that cannot be possibly encapsulated within the province of the humanities or the liberal arts and sciences.
AO: This is where it also ties to the reparations, because that approach is so myopic and suffers from profound amnesia, right? It doesn’t want to interrogate and engage and own up to its history.
NMT: It is the humanities, and so it is compatible with the individualism that doesn’t recognize the weight of historical responsibility.
AO: Yeah, yeah. Responsibility, which is at the heart of reparation.
NMT: Exactly, yeah because “I was not my grandfather,” “I did not own any slaves,” right? “So why do I need to—”
AO: Right. Right.
NMT: I think it’s not only you, so to speak. It’s a government which you picked that is the one that is responsible to change the entire social setting for you and everyone. But that is something else.
AO: And perhaps at this point, maybe we can turn to a final question. In your work, you interrogate and you are also partly grounded in the critical study of religion. You engage with how the construction of the secular relates to the story of modernity, coloniality, the history of modern coloniality; and you use them and you engage with theological categories and questions of ontology and epistemology. Do you see a role for theology in the vision and the praxis of decoloniality, decolonization? Especially since theology (and specifically Christian theology) was so complicit in modernity, coloniality; what’s its role in abolishing it?
NMT: Well for me, since I was much younger, I resisted the separation between the secular and the religious. For me it was clear that they were mutually implicated, that that line was artificial in multiple ways, that it was a problematic line, and it was foundational in the assertion of philosophy as a secular enterprise. As a young person being introduced to philosophy, I was educated to presuppose the demarcation between the philosophical and the religious, and I should leave everything that was based on “faith” outside. But then when I was reading philosophers and so on, it was clear that they were drawing from some of these categories that came from particular religious traditions. So that was dubious. Also, there were questions—let’s say, metaphysical questions—that go beyond the limits of logical positivism and certain forms of investigation that I think invite the kind of speculation and reflection that sometimes is found in something like theology. And while it is true that theology and religious ideas, Christian and otherwise, have been used to dominate and colonize peoples, they have also been instrumental in resisting colonization, in defying slavery and other forms of domination, right? And, for me in particular, I come from a context where liberation theology had already existed and I was acquainted with it, so I knew that there was more to theology and to religious ideas than their connection with empire, with the nation-state, with powerful institutions.
While it is true that theology and religious ideas, Christian and otherwise, have been used to dominate and colonize peoples, they have also been instrumental in resisting colonization, in defying slavery and other forms of domination.
So I knew that there is not one Christianity, that there are multiple Christianities—and the same thing is true with Islam with other so-called religions. So, I was well prepared to traffic in the exchange between, across, and beyond the secular and the religious, but of course when looking at those so-called theological and religious ideas, particularly paying important attention to the ones that seem to play a role in the struggle for emancipation and liberation. From there, those struggles provided the hermeneutical key, if you wish, about how to then interpret other categories like prayer, for example, and like the gift, or love, which I explore in my writings.
AO: Maybe you can talk about prayer and love. That would be really helpful.
NMT: I began to take love particularly seriously when reading Chela Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed shortly after it was published. In this text, she introduces and develops the concept of decolonial love, which is central in accounting for the richness and complexity of the methodology of the oppressed. At that time, I was also reading Fanon and Levinas very intensely. All of these thinkers combined, persuaded me that there was something to think about with regard to love. And then, in Against War, I presented an interpretation of Fanon as a philosopher of love in that vein, as well as a postsecular philosopher, if you will. Love, in Fanon, has to do with connection and relation. Love makes possible what is impossible from a strictly logical point of view: it accounts for the possibility of building communities of deeply wounded and vulnerable subjects who have been dehumanized. Love is the answer to the question, what is it in the human being that can allow for the possibility of connecting with someone else, particularly with someone else that you have been taught not to value? How does one become an agent of connection and not assimilation, subordination, and self-hate. That is, since many of us have been taught not to value ourselves and not to value people in our communities, how do we overcome that? I think the Fanonian answer is that there is something, that which we call love, some kind of dimension of the human, that would make it possible for us to go beyond that condition of separation and division and get there. And this love can be so powerful that it can bring people together and lead to a process of self- and collective healing. Love can turn destructive and problematic in so many ways, but this does not mean that, in its most basic forms, it seems to be, as Sandoval suggests, something like a force and the very possibility of deep connection. For lack of a better word, decolonial love is about the possibility of connection (and relation) when connection seems completely impossible, because you are supposed to eliminate yourself and you’re supposed to not care about another person. So, when you reach out to another slave and connect, that’s where love appears, or rather, this connection is made possible by virtue of love. Love is the very condition of possibility for this connection to take place. But, you know, this idea of subjects in isolation, in this self-annihilative mood, to reach out to another when the other is not there because the other has also been educated not to look out for you (you don’t know if they are there), that’s where prayer comes in because it’s the attempt at a connection even when the other is not immediately present.
AO: And this is a prayer and also an ethics, the underside of modernity, right?
NMT: Yes. Prayer is about connection, and ethics is a discourse and logic of connection. Both acquire particularly important dimensions in contexts that are premised on separations that sustain dehumanizing hierarchies.
AO: Maybe if you can clarify, what’s the distinction between colonial love and decolonial love?
NMT: What is colonial love? Love that kills us.
AO: Or consumes.
NMT: I mean I think that there can be so many multiple forms of love.
JSL: Or is colonial love, love. Or is it distorted?
AO: Think of missionaries.
NMT: It is paternalism, a very supreme paternalistic love, self-serving love. Paternalistic, but all of that is—
AO: “Saving you! Because God loves you! You know, my God loves you!”
NMT: Yes, exactly. Love as a tool to impose civilization, “because I love you so much that I want you to be civilized.” This is “love” in the service of civilization, of colonization; “love” as a form of imposition. This utterly self-centered “love” also finds expression in the delegitimization of combative movements: it is “love” as a call for an apparent peace that preserves multiple forms of structural violence. But in these cases what we call love is not really love, as Joshua was suggesting, and certainly not decolonial love. Love is about connection, a connection that maintains, respects, and celebrates singularity while calling for the exercise of respons(e)ability. Romantic love, when it is really love, affirms these two dimensions, and so forth with other forms of love. Decolonial love, in particular, takes place when the impulse for connection/relation and respons(e)ability finds expression within and against the hierarchies that sustain dehumanizing hierarchies and differences. Decolonial love accounts principally for the movements from dehumanized selves to dehumanized others, leading to the formation of collectives of the condemned which seek to end the world as we know it. Along with rage, decolonial love inspires opposition to the structures, values, principles, and ideas that sustain coloniality. Decolonial love also allows for the possibility of substantive (as opposed to superficial) coalition building and for the generation and enrichment of relations of conviviality that supersede the social contract of the modern/colonial state.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Anti-colonialist queer feminists demonstration on March 8, 2024 in Paris, France. Photo credit: Jeanne Menjoulet. CC BY 2.0 DEED.
The Muslim community and LGBT community are not separate; we mourn together. I am Muslim, I am queer and I exist.
–Sonj Basha, speaker at a vigil in Seattle following the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016
This [queer Palestinian protest in Haifa in 2019] is the first-ever protest of the queer Palestinian movement, based on the principles of an intersectional struggle between queer-Palestinian struggles and struggles against the occupation… The protest represents a voice calling for liberation without restraints—not of the occupiers, and not of the patriarchy. It’s important to show support for all LGBT Palestinians.
–Rula Khalaileh, organizer with the Palestinian “Women Against Violence” organization
We were a part of the mainstream society before the British criminalised our existence through laws such as the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. Transphobia is a colonial legacy… We will continue our struggle. We aim to raise our voice for our rights so loudly that it reaches those in power and echoes in the chambers of the parliament.
–Hina Baloch, political convener and organizer of the Sindh Moorat march in Pakistan in 2022
There’s nothing new about being trans. Only, we didn’t have the language for it back then… Even here in Kenya, in previous generations they had gay men. They introduced those laws against homosexuality which indicates that it happened, because you can’t put laws on something that’s not existing or unknown… God knows where it comes from. So, whenever I’m preaching the gospel in our community, I tell them to look up to the Lord; he knows why you were created that way; when you get to know yourself, you will get peace.
–Keeya, gay Christian pastor and Ugandan refugee interviewed in 2019 for Adriaan van Klinken and Johanna Stiebert’s Sacred Queer Stories
Dominant discourses globally assert that queerness and transness are White/western impositions in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. They tell us that queer Muslim and Palestinian positionalities are impossible. The stories shared by the activists and ministers quoted above—along with scholarship from queer of color critique and decolonial and postcolonial studies—show these discourses to be a lie. They also challenge the notion that queerness and transness are White/western impositions in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. These stories participate in traditions of critical queer, decolonial, anti-racist, and feminist thought that examine questions of gender and sexuality by considering the relationship among racialization, coloniality, and heteronormativity.
Heteronormativity involves the idealizing and societal privileging of a strict gender binary, “opposite sex” romantic and sexual desires, heterosexual marriages, and the raising of children in nuclear families. It results in cisgender-heterosexual existence occupying default representational and socio-politico-economic spaces in many contexts, and in doing so, upholds compulsory heterosexuality. The term “compulsory heterosexuality” first appeared in lesbian feminist theorist Adrienne Rich’s 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” where it was used to critique the societal forces that push women into heterosexual marriages and constrain them from imagining or pursuing life paths centered around relationships (romantic/sexual or otherwise) with other women.
Expanding upon this foundational work, queer feminist theorist Sara Ahmed writes that compulsory heterosexuality—which she (re)defines as the societal assumption and enforcement of heterosexuality which is “the accumulative effect of the repetition of the narrative of heterosexuality as an ideal coupling” (423)—shapes the ways that bodies orient themselves in space. Repetitions of the heterosexual couple form through music, advertising, wedding traditions, and other cultural productions cause a “heterosexualization” of public spaces. This heterosexualization naturalizes and idealizes heteronormative existence, framing men and women as “opposites” and reinforcing “opposite sex”-oriented desires and life paths. Heteronormativity, then, is sustained through the visible repetition and intergenerational transmission of norms and ways of living that are marked as legitimate. Heteronormative standards of legitimacy reinforce compulsory heterosexuality by associating heterosexual couplings with life, culture, civilization, and the reproduction of familial lineage while marking queerness (divergence from these prescribed pathways involving binary gender norms, desire for one’s “opposite sex,” and participation in familial reproduction) as a failure. While many heterosexual subjects experience comfort and ease “in line” with the desires promoted by a heteronormative society, subjects who fail to “orient” themselves towards idealized sexual objects and accepted life paths are read as queer threats to the social order.
Decolonial feminist scholar María Lugones argues that the heterosexualist patriarchy and the binary, hierarchical, and heteronormative conception of gender upon which it rests are rooted in colonialism. Lugones’s framework draws heavily from decolonial theorist Aníbal Quijano’s understanding of the coloniality of power, which accounts for “modernity” by focusing on the new modes of social classification and domination that emerged as European colonialism expanded and Eurocentered global capitalism developed. Quijano uses the term modernity/ coloniality to emphasize that modernity cannot be thought apart from coloniality or from the hierarchical categories of “race” and notions of “rationality/irrationality” that have provided its structure. By focusing on issues of gender and sexuality, Lugones builds upon Quijano’s work regarding colonialism, capitalism, and racialization and critiques what she calls the colonial/modern gender system. Under this system, White bourgeois men and women have been ordered through biological dimorphism (the idea of “biological sex” as stable, binary, and innate), heterosexualism, and patriarchy, while persons on “the dark side” of the colonial divide have suffered labor exploitation, sexual violence, and dehumanization. Jamaican writer and theorist Sylvia Wynter similarly emphasizes this colonial divide in her decolonial analysis of western colonialism, racialization, and gender categorization: “At the beginning of the modern world, the only women were white and Western. … you had true women on one side, the women of the settler population [in the Caribbean and the Americas], and on the other you had Indianwomen and Negrowomen.” Wynter argues that “from the very origin of the modern world, of the western world system, there were never simply ‘men’ and ‘women’” (174) but that western colonial expansion resulted in the intertwined production of hierarchical categories of race and gender with European Christian/post-Christian “Man” in a position of dominance and superiority.
The colonial/modern gender system presents its ordering of human relations as natural and immutable, and one must go outside of it in order to examine that which it has rendered invisible and unimaginable. Turning to the decolonial scholarship of Oyéronké Oyewumí and Paula Gunn Allen, Lugones writes that many societies recognized intersex and third gender individuals before colonization, that binary/hierarchical gender was used as a western tool of domination over Yoruba societies, and that colonizers attacked gynocracies that had existed within certain Indigenous North American societies. Gender itself is a colonial imposition, she argues, but one might develop decolonial feminism by attending to those “who resist the coloniality of gender from the ‘colonial difference’” (746). In other words, just as “modernity” cannot be thought apart from “coloniality,” “coloniality” cannot be thought apart from the hierarchical categories of “race” and “gender” that developed to justify and maintain structures of Eurocentered power. As writers, artists, and activists examining the intertwined histories of colonialism and heteronormativity have emphasized, however, attention to historical and ongoing modes of thinking about gender and sex which resist and/or go beyond the constraints of the colonial/modern gender system can provide a means of honoring Indigenous knowledges, finding a present-day sense of belonging, and healing from traumas rooted in colonial oppression.
When analyzing and challenging the colonial/modern gender system, however, it is important to avoid reductively aligning heteronormative identities with coloniality and LGBTQ+ identities with decoloniality or anti-oppressive politics. For instance, in her scholarship on homonationalism and pinkwashing, queer theorist Jasbir Puar has discussed the ways that nationalistic liberal politics tenuously incorporate certain queer subjects while constructing Orientalized terrorist others. That is, nations such as the United States have advanced imperialistic agendas and justified international military aggression by contrasting their presumably exceptional inclusion of LGBTQ+ subjects against “Muslim homophobia.” Additionally, Cathy J. Cohen’s work of queer of color critique has challenged both assimilationist LGBTQ+ politics that seek incorporation into dominant societal structures and radical queer politics that assume an overly-simplistic heterosexual/queer binary. By attending intersectionally to race, gender, and class, Cohen writes that not all “heterosexual” subjects benefit equally from heteronormativity (for instance, she notes that women of color who are on welfare “fit into the category of heterosexual but [their] sexual choices are not perceived as normal, moral, or worthy of state support” [26]) and calls for more nuanced and expansive forms of queer analysis that can challenge structures of marginalization and domination.
This educational module attends to questions of coloniality and decoloniality in its exploration of how queerness and gender are navigated across religious, political, and geographic contexts. The essays gathered for this module offer an array of perspectives from Contending Modernities authors and have been grouped into three overarching themes: (1) gender, religion, and politics; (2) heteronormativity, religion, and politics; and (3) decolonial perspectives on gender, sexuality, and religion. These essays analyze the ways that various forms of nationalistic and religious discourses have promoted and reinforced particular norms for gender and sexuality, as well as the ways that non-normative configurations of gender and sexuality have offered means of resisting nationalism and coloniality. The essays provide intersectional approaches that affirm the existence and validity of worlds that resist the colonial/modern gender system’s dictates around gender and sexuality.
Theme 1: Gender, Religion, and Politics
The essays gathered under this theme address the constructed-ness of gender and highlight the ways that women from various religious and political contexts have mobilized to critique religious nationalism, patriarchy, colonialist stereotypes, and state violence. Julia Kowalski’s essay discusses how Muslim women protestors have invoked the language of family and home to counter patriarchal Hindu nationalism in India. Saadia Yacoob’s piece reflects critically and constructively on the role of gender in the classical Islamic ethical tradition and makes proposals for Muslim feminist ethics. Brenna Moore’s post critiques the antifeminist and antigay activism of the global Roman Catholic right and turns to the example of twentieth-century Catholic theologians who resist the right’s theology as a resource for combatting oppression in the present. Lastly, Laura S. Grillo’s post discusses expressions of “female genital power” in West African traditions that push back against “masculinized modernity” and confront the violence of postcolonial nation-states. Together, these essays offer perspectives grounded in a variety of religious traditions, political issues, and geographies. They reveal the constructedness of gender by showing how ideas about gender (and womanhood, in particular) are advanced differently across contexts, as well as the diverse ways that possibilities for resistance and contestation take shape.
Wooden model of a house explaining the Constitution created by activists in Ahmedabad, India. Photo courtesy of RAJEEV KHANNA/TheCitizen.in. Used with permission.
Julia Kowalski argues that the protests that have taken place in the Shaheen Bagh neighborhood of Delhi are not only displays of resistance against the combined effects of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC), but also acts of subversion that challenge stereotypes held by the ruling party in India about Islam, gender, and the family. (For more information about the CAA and NRC, see this post by Susan Ostermann.) As Kowalski notes, many protesters were middle-class, middle-aged-or-older “housewives” who wore hijab. She argues that the protests “are innovative not because of the gendered identity of the protesters, but because of how protesters have mobilized that identity to contest powerful scripts of citizenship, religion, family, and nation.” Muslim women protesters deploy representations of female kinship and home in order to promote a secular, inclusive democracy and to invoke a new language of national belonging—one that does not rely upon “documentary evidence of property ownership and descent from male kin.” In doing so, these women subvert narratives of Muslim women’s oppression by Muslim men (an Islamophobic discourse that has justified British “civilizing” missions in India and continues to justify western imperialism) and narratives of Muslim non-belonging in a presumably “Hindu” nation.
Kowalski’s focus on Muslim women protesters illuminates the ways that invocations of female kinship have provided a means of contesting religious nationalism and patriarchy—specifically, right-wing Hindu nationalism—in India. As deployed by these protesters, the language of family and home troubles the boundaries of public and private/domestic while subverting sexist and Islamophobic representations of Muslim women.
This illustration depicts the ruler Tumanba Khan, an ancestor of Genghis Khan, with his wife and nine sons, interwoven with the texts of Chingiznama, which records this account. Photo Credit: The Met Museum.
This post by Saadia Yacoob is part of a book symposium on Zahra Ayubi’s Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society, which critically engages texts from the classical Islamic ethical tradition and offers constructive proposals for the building of a feminist Islamic ethics. (For a more detailed summary of the book, refer to this introduction to the book symposium.) Considering the applicability of Islamic ethical discourses to women, Yacoob notes that gendered divisions of household labor (which impact both Muslim and non-Muslim women) hinder Muslim women from being able to dedicate time to ritual worship and the acquisition of religious knowledge. Responses by religious scholars that assure women that childcare is itself an act of worship—while perhaps well-intentioned—are not adequate for addressing the exclusion of women (especially mothers) from Islamic ideals of virtuous and ethical living.
Yacoob discusses a tension charted by Ayubi in her examination of texts from the classical Islamic ethical tradition: there is an egalitarian understanding of human creation and the androgynous nafs (soul) that each person possesses, but also an emphasis on “rational capacity in ethical refinement” which “not only gendered the nafs male but also authorized an intellectual hierarchy in which only elite men possessed full rational capacity.” In her response to Ayubi’s work, Yacoob highlights the emphasis on social relationships and interdependence in classical Islamic ethics and suggests that, although one must critique the hierarchical positioning of elite men above women and non-elite men, one might carry the understanding of human interconnectedness forward in feminist ways that promote equality and flourishing. Importantly, both Ayubi and Yacoob critique patriarchal interpretations from classical Islamic ethical discourse while avoiding rejecting the tradition entirely; rather, both scholars imagine possibilities of critically “thinking with this discourse to develop a Muslim feminist ethic that centers the flourishing of all humans.”
Mural at the Hippie Kitchen is based on woodcut by Fritz Eichenberg. Photo credit: Flickr user Laurie Avocado. CC BY 2.0 DEED.
In this post, Brenna Moore discusses the role of Roman Catholicism in right-wing populist movements around the world and points to resources from the Catholic theological tradition that might aid in the development of a resistant, compassionate, leftist social politics. First, Moore writes that although right-wing populism might appear to draw upon a Christian logic of inversion (in which God chooses those who are lowly and reviled, not those in established positions of worldly power), figures who appeal to right-wing populist Catholics—such as Trump—violate this logic of inversion by using an “antiestablishment mockery of the elites” to in fact “[mock] the vulnerable,” including disabled people, Muslims, and women. Turning to an example from another context, Moore notes that right-wing Catholic populists in France tend to protest against gay marriage and liberal gender norms by framing them as an American invasion: “This keeps the antifeminist and antigay activism still seemingly tethered to a respectable anti-elitism and anti-hegemony.”
In response to these false logics of inversion, Moore offers several examples of resistant Catholic theologians of twentieth-century France to show how the insights they’ve contributed might act as resources in undoing the “repulsion that so many white Catholics feel toward Muslim refugees, gay families, the poor, African Americans, and women who control their reproductive lives” and advancing concrete goals such as childcare, access to contraception, combating poverty, and protecting those who are marginalized. Moore demonstrates that the antifeminist and antigay activism of the Catholic right, which draws upon heteronormative notions of gender and sexuality, can be countered by connecting with liberative theological resources from the Catholic tradition.
Makhuwa women in Mozambique. Photo Credit: Steve Evans. CC By 2.0.
This post by Laura S. Grillo is part of a book symposium on Faith in Flux, in which Devaka Premawardhana examines practices of religious conversion among the rural Makhuwa people of northern Mozambique. (For a more detailed summary of the book, refer to this introduction to the book symposium.) In this post, Grillo compares the matricentric mobility, flexibility, and pluralistic disposition of the Makhuwa with her own work on the performance of female genital power in West African traditions. Grillo argues that, although valuable, Faith in Flux does not sufficiently consider Makhuwa matricentricity; therefore, the book fails to “convincingly portray a fluid retention or cyclical movement of return to the “‘Mother’ religions’ that Premawardhana suggests are the essence of local ontology.” Through her critiques, Grillo pushes Premawardhana to question the gendered assumptions of the conceptual apparatus he employs to theorize Makhuwa practices, which seem to centralize male religious culture and “reinforce[] the stereotype of women’s natural profaneness.” Grillo proposes a focus on the ways that various Indigenous African rituals, performances, and matricentric conceptions of gender offer means of resisting postcolonial state violence and policies that reinforce the “external pressures of masculinizing modernity.”
Theme 2: Heteronormativity, Religion, and Politics
The posts included within this theme focus on the salience of heteronormativity, homophobia, and transphobia in contemporary politics and explore the ways that religious notions of gender and sexuality shape such politics. Jason Springs’s essay examines the conservative sexual politics of White evangelical ethnoreligious nationalists in the United States and discusses the interconnected histories of twentieth-century anti-miscegenation laws and present-day heteronormative ideologies. Michael Vicente Pérez’s essay considers the roles of homophobia and Islamophobia in societal responses to the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre and critiques homonationalist framings of the United States that construct Muslims as especially homophobic threats. The essay by Halah Abdelhadi focuses on the growing movement for LGBTQ+ rights in Palestine and argues that there is a need for “a mediating lexicon” that engages religious discourses to combat homophobic violence and the exclusion of queer Palestinians from religious modes of belonging. Ali Altaf Mian’s essay reveals the ways that heteronormative ideologies—particularly the assumption of a gender binary between men and women—reinforce transphobia and have hindered efforts by Muslim leaders to combat discrimination against transgender people in Pakistan. Together, these essays point to the ways that heteronormative ideologies shape religious nationalism and reinforce homophobic and transphobic violence. The essays also advance possibilities for solidarity, allyship, and religious engagement that push back against heteronormativity and its varied interconnections with racism, militarism, and Islamophobia.
Rainbow colors on the White House celebrate the Supreme Court’s decision allowing same-sex marriages in every state of the Union. White House photo. Photo Credit: GPA Photo Archive. Via Flickr.
In the blog series “Zombie Nationalism: Apocalypse, Race, and the Sexual Politics of White Evangelical Christian Nationalism,” Jason Springs introduces the concept of “zombie nationalism” in his analysis of White evangelical political and religious ideology in the United States. This concept describes a persistently recurring and reanimating dynamic, pattern, and logic that explains “the socio-political processes by which White evangelical ethno-religious nationalism has asserted and reasserted itself across recent decades.” Springs contends that this phenomenon is driven not only by religion (modern evangelical theology) and race (as manifested through White ethno-religious nationalism) but also by conservative sexual politics. Springs clarifies that “sexual politics” refers to “the ways that gender norms, operations of power related to sexual identities, and policing of sexuality all function to legitimate and perpetuate ideologies, and are used to advance political agendas.” He argues that it is crucial to attend to the ways that heteronormative ideologies of gender and sexuality both motivate and are reinforced by White evangelical ethno-religious nationalism.
In this post from the series, Jason Springs contends that White Christian evangelicals’ current justification of their opposition to same-sex marriage relies on an extension of the same logic that they had once used to support anti-miscegenation laws. Thus, White evangelical support for Trump is not an isolated reaction against marriage equality, but participates in a longer history of White evangelical sexual politics centered around the so-called “sanctity of marriage.” Here, White Christian nationalism relies upon the upholding of a rigid, heteronormative gender binary in ways rooted in particular notions of Whiteness, Christian theology, and western civilization.
Vigil in support of the victims of the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, Toronto, Canada. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Michael Vicente Pérez’s essay discusses Islamophobia, homophobia, and the cultural politics of fear in the wake of the 2016 mass killing at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Drawing from work by Sara Ahmed and Jasbir Puar, Pérez analyzes the mobilization of an affective politics of fear-as-threat (that is, fear as “an affective link experienced as threats to some group from some group”) in the production of the Muslim as threatening Other following the Orlando massacre. This politics of fear serves to construct LGBTQ+ inclusion as an essential part of American identity—despite the persistence of anti-LGBTQ+ violence in America—and produce Muslim difference in terms of terrorism and hatred. As Pérez further explains, “the narrative incorporation of Orlando’s victims [into the American national body] resignified the murder as an act of terrorism in which the violence of Muslim sexual intolerance not only underscored the moral superiority of America but also proved the necessity of American empire.” In contrast, turning to Sonj Basha’s affirmation of (her own and others’) queer Muslim existence in her speech at a widely attended Seattle vigil following the massacre, Pérez writes that shared grief and mourning can momentarily disrupt the affective unities/divisions created by fear and gesture to “the possibility of a ‘we’ that refuses the politics of fear.”
Whereas Jason Springs’s essay focused on the ways that White evangelical ethno-religious nationalism reinforces and is dependent upon a heteronormative notion of the “sanctity of marriage,” Pérez’s essay alternatively examines the ways that homonationalist framings of the United States as an exceptionally inclusive haven for LGBTQ+ people serve to uphold U.S. militarism and imperialism and reductive, Islamophobic constructions of Muslim people. Thus, while sexual politics in the United States frequently draw upon notions of a gender binary and idealize heteronormative relationships between men and women, Jasbir Puar’s theorization of homonationalism shows that ideas of LGBTQ+ inclusion have also been mobilized towards ethno-religious nationalist ends.
Palestinian flag at Brighton, England Pride celebration. Photo Credit: Flickr User Daniel Hadley. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED.
This piece by Halah Abdelhadi reflects on the movement for LGBTQ+ rights in Palestine. Abdelhadi contextualizes the increased visibility of LGBTQ+ issues among Palestinian citizens of Israel—which have become one of the most controversial political topics in Palestinian society—by discussing the first queer Palestinian protest that occurred in 2019 in response to an act of homophobic violence. She contends that there are three primary positions on LGBTQ+ rights in Palestinian society: pro-queer (held mainly by activists), neutral (held by self-identified “secular progressives”), and antagonistic (the position of those who weaponize religion to justify homophobic violence). Overcoming the homophobia of the antagonistic position, she claims, requires novel interpretations of religious meaning. Given the increased visibility of the queer Palestinian community, Abdelhadi identifies a need for inclusion, the use of precise (rather than vague or neutral) language to denounce homophobic violence, and the building of “a mediating lexicon” that allows for conversations with spiritual and religious leaders to challenge the ways that queer Palestinians have been “alienated from their national and religious modes of belonging to Palestinian society.”
A Pakistani hijra at a protest between two hijra groups from Islamabad and Rawalpindi. Via Wikimedia Commons.
In this piece, Ali Altaf Mian discusses a 2016 endorsement of a fatwa on transgender marriage which takes important steps towards combating discrimination against transgender people in Pakistan, yet nonetheless operates based on heteronormative assumptions. The fatwa, which was endorsed in a statement crafted by the Pakistani clerics of Tanzim-I Ittihad-i Ummat and signed by about fifty other local Muslim jurists and theologians, argued that Islamic law should be interpreted as extending marriage and other rights to transgender people. Importantly, Mian writes, this fatwa and its endorsement condemned discrimination in places of “the home, the street, the graveyard, and the brothel—where members of the hijra [transgender] community viscerally experience the brunt of a hyper-masculinist and heteronormative social order.”
At the same time, the logic of heteronormativity that supports transphobia still underlies this fatwa, which employs language such as “unambiguous signs of a single-sex” and “bodily signs of both sexes” when describing the bodies for whom certain rights do or do not apply. As Mian reveals, the fatwa continues to impose a gender binary even when acknowledging transgender bodies, and it accords social recognition to trans people in ways dependent on their bodies’ presumed approximation to this gender binary. To truly act as allies in fighting transphobia, he argues, Muslim jurists and theologians should question the ways that culturally constructed notions of maleness and femaleness shape ideas about biology, law, and ethics; study the complexity of human bodies by “cultivating a flexible and creative mode of engagement with local knowledge traditions where [they] will encounter both reifications and disruptions of the gender binary”; and from those encounters, discern when to retain, reconfigure, or renounce traditions “in order to make sense of and to appreciate shifting embodiments of sex, gender, and sexuality in the contemporary world.”
Theme 3: Decolonial Perspectives on Gender, Sexuality, and Religion
This final theme focuses explicitly on the role of colonialism in shaping gender and sexual norms and on efforts to decolonize discourses around gender, sexuality, and religion. The essay by Sa’ed Atshan engages with Adriaan van Klinken’s Kenyan, Christian, Queer and scholarship on other contexts shaped by colonial legacies in order to advance proposals for decolonizing queer studies and addressing Christianity’s relationship to colonialism and sexuality. Ebenezer Obadare also engages van Klinken’s text but emphasizes that the existence of homophobia in Africa cannot be reduced to a colonial or Christian product and argues that van Klinken’s perception of the condition of being queer in Africa is overly optimistic. Ludovic Lado’s essay turns to the construction of gender employed by the state in Côte d’Ivoire in its efforts to combat gender-based inequality and discrimination and shows that the state’s assumption of a male/female binary hinders it from recognizing and addressing violence against the LGBTQ community. Nisa Goksel focuses on resistant movements of Kurdish women in Türkiye and Syria, who—in ways that depart from stereotypical representations of Middle Eastern women—seek a non-colonial modernity. Lastly, Jacqueline Hidalgo discusses the name change of MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán, a U.S. Latine student-led organization) which removed the terms “Chicanx” and “Aztlán,” noting the long histories of contestation within the Chicano movement, particularly around issues of gender, sexuality, race and indigeneity, and decoloniality. Together, these essays provide an explicit engagement with the interconnections among colonialism, religion, gender, and sexuality and offer examples of decolonial theories and movements that have contended with these interconnections across contexts.
Raised fist with “Queer254” bracelet. The rainbow bracelets with the text 254Queer are made by a local Kenyan LGBT group and combines Kenya’s country-code +254 with the word Queer. Photo courtesy of Adriaan van Klinken.
This essay is a part of a book symposium on Adriaan van Klinken’s Kenyan, Christian, Queer: Religion, LGBT Activism, and Arts of Resistance in Africa, which engages works of art and activism to explore the ways that various LGBTQ+ Christians in Kenya reimagine their identities, faith, and lives. (For a more detailed summary of the book, refer to this introduction to the book symposium.) In his essay, Sa’ed Atshan draws on van Klinken’s monograph to think more broadly about what it means to decolonize queer studies. He does so by first comparing and contrasting van Klinken’s work with George Paul Meiu’s recent work on Kenyan sex workers in Ethno-erotic Economies. Both authors address connections between colonialism and religion in Kenya, and both engage the connections between colonialism and sexuality—with van Klinken’s work registering the cognizance “of British colonial homophobia that significantly departed from indigenous Kenyan queer tolerant attitudes.” Whereas van Klinken primarily focuses on queer-identified, middle-class, urban subjects who “can forge solidarity with their queer counterparts in the west,” however, Meiu offers a more in-depth analysis of ethnic categorization and class, as well as a broader conceptualization of queerness that explores the ways that rural, poorer, heterosexual subjects “are mired in racialized/otherized/fetishized relationships with western tourists.”
Next, Atshan reflects on his own work on queerness in Palestine, drawing attention to the importance of engaging multiple colonial and postcolonial venues. He proposes that the decolonization of queer studies be advanced through attention to South-South epistemologies and solidarities. For instance, analytical vantage points from Kenyan contexts might be brought into dialogue with the contexts of other places formerly colonized by the British Empire, such as Palestine, India, and Pakistan. Atshan notes that queer Palestinian Christians, like queer Christians in Kenya, face legacies of British colonial homophobia, and can experience Christianity as both a source of imperial violence and anti-imperial empowerment.
Praying hands with “Queer254” bracelet. The rainbow bracelets with the text 254Queer are made by a local Kenyan LGBT group and combines Kenya’s country-code +254 with the word Queer. Photo courtesy of Adriaan van Klinken.
This piece is also part of a book symposium on Adriaan van Klinken’s Kenyan, Christian, Queer. Ebenezer Obadare writes that van Klinken challenges simplistic narratives of “African homophobia” and of the African continent “lagging behind” the rest of the world (especially the United States) in matters related to gender and sexuality. On the other hand, Obadare emphasizes that Africa should not be imagined as having had complete sexual tolerance prior to European colonization and the influence of American conservative Christianity; rather, homophobia in the continent is “propelled by a wide range of local and external cultural, social, and political forces.”
Obadare highlights the novelty of van Klinken’s emphasis on the positive role of Christianity in the lives of Kenyan queer people; however, he notes that he does not fully share van Klinken’s optimism about the condition of being queer in Africa. He links this skepticism in part to his experience as a Nigerian who has witnessed the homophobia that exists in his own country. He also critiques van Klinken for not focusing enough attention on the Kenyan state. Overall, Obadare commends van Klinken’s groundbreaking approach to queer life in Kenya, but provides an important reminder that colonialism and Christianity are not the only forces that have operated to reinforce homophobia in Africa.
Photo Credit: Global Partnership for Education. 5th grader in class in Mamakoffikro, Côte d’Ivoire, December 2015.
In this essay, Ludovic Lado discusses the uses and limitations of the state construction of gender in Côte d’Ivoire. Lado points to the argument that “in pre-Islamic and pre-Christian Africa, gender differentiation and hierarchies were less rigid and therefore more flexible than those inherited from Islam, Christianity, and colonial legal systems that current gender reforms seek to correct.” He writes that while Africa still has much work to do in combating gender-based injustices, inequalities, and discrimination, many African countries are closing the gender gap faster than western countries.
He writes that although steps have been made to increase women’s literacy rates and empower women economically in Côte d’Ivoire, the framework taken up by Ivorian state gender policy seeks women’s equality with men while failing to consider the LGBTQ community. According to Lado, “heterosexuality remains the norm both institutionally and in collective representation” in Côte d’Ivoire and other African contexts. Regardless of whether or not homosexuality existed (and was met with acceptance) in pre-colonial Africa—a topic that Lado writes is highly debated—LGBTQ Ivorians are marginalized and subjected to violence in the present. In response, Lado suggests that movement away from a male/female binary opposition will allow the Ivorian state construction of gender to acknowledge the specificity of LGBTQ people and address discrimination.
Photo Credit: Nisa Goksel. The Peace Mothers at the 8th of March 2014 (International Women’s Day) demonstration in Diyarbakır.
This piece by Nisa Goksel contributes to studies of women and gender in the Middle East by exploring the resistance movements of Kurdish women. Informed by an awareness of the interrelatedness of modernity and colonialism, Goksel’s framework for the topic challenges monolithic representations of women in the Middle East which assume these women to be the “victims of ‘oppressive’ Middle Eastern men; of colonialism; and/or of religious, traditional, and national powers.” Goksel also challenges the perception of Islam as the key determining factor in Middle Eastern women’s lives, particularly the idea that Islam traps these women in a “yet-to-be-modern” patriarchal existence. Adding the role of recent wars in the Middle East to her analysis, Goksel argues that these wars reveal the connections between modernity and colonialism and have been “crucial to the formation of alternative women’s movements and groups as well as to the alternative imaginations of modernity.”
Next, Goksel elaborates on two examples of alternative Kurdish women’s movements: Peace Mothers pursuing an end to the war between the Turkish state and PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, or Kurdistan Workers’ Party) guerrillas, and Kurdish women resistance fighters in Syria who seek decolonization and a women’s revolution. Goksel argues that while these alternative women’s movements may appear as opposites within a colonialist gaze (one peaceful, and one that uses weapons), they both have the goal of creating a non-colonial modernity that is truly democratic and peaceful. Thus, both movements challenge particular Orientalized, Islamophobic, and sexist representations of women—as did the Muslim women protestors in India discussed by Julia Kowalski—while also resisting colonialism and its legacies.
Art Heals mural in Los Angeles, California. Photo Credit: Author.
This essay by Jacqueline Hidalgo discusses the 2019 decision of student leaders from MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán) U.S. Latin/o/a/x organizations across the country to remove the terms “Chicanx” and “Aztlán” from the organization’s name, arguing that such a move does not erase history, but rather participates in a long history of contestation over those terms. Hidalgo traces the history of MEChA and writes that in the 1960s when students mobilized to resist dominant modern European thought, terms such as “Chicano” and “Aztlán” allowed ethnically Mexican activists to counter the derogatory names that had been forced upon them, claim an ancestral connection to lands that are now considered part of the United States, and “[invoke] both a pre-Columbian past and a future where colonial sufferings have ended.”
Hidalgo notes that not all ethnically Mexican activists had been in agreement about the use of the terms, however, and identifies several lines of contestation that arose. For instance, the use of “Chicano” and “Aztlán” as decolonial terms is complicated by an awareness that the Aztecs and Indigenous Mexica peoples colonized and oppressed a variety of other Indigenous peoples prior to Spanish colonization, and that 1920s Mexican nationalist appeals to mestizaje (from which these terms emerged) valued “mixture” while “oppos[ing] indigenous rights and eras[ing] Mexicans of Asian and African descent.” Additionally, the 1970s Chicano movement frequently centered cisgender heterosexual mestizo men and patriarchal familial language, creating a need for Chicana feminists to create their own organizations and for LGBTQ activists to construct their own visions of queer Chicano/x/a familia in resistance to machismo.
In 2019, student leaders considered the new acronym MEPA (Movimiento Estudiantil Progressive Action) but ultimately decided to adopt the name Mecha (meaning “fuse”) for the organization rather than continue with an acronym-based approach. They also revised the constitution to intentionally center “Black, Indigenous, Queer, Trans, Non-binary, and Femme people.” Hidalgo writes that students’ contemporary efforts to change the name of their collective echo the drive towards self-determination that motivated MEChA’s founders and create space for the movement to continue and transform with future generations.
Conclusion and Discussion Questions
This educational module has assembled works by Contending Modernities contributors and theorists who analyze gender, sexuality, and politics with attention to religion, race, and modernity/coloniality. The three themes have focused on social constructions of gender and womanhood, heteronormativity and sexual politics, and decolonial approaches to gender, sexuality, and religion. The questions below are designed to provoke continued discussions regarding the relationship of religious discourses, nationalism, and colonialism to gender and sexuality and to invite constructive decolonial responses to the colonial/modern gender system.
Intersections of Religion, Gender, and Sexuality
How does religion impact the negotiation of gender and queerness? How does the interrelationship among religion, gender, and sexuality vary across contexts? What possibilities exist within different religious discourses (e.g., Catholic, evangelical Christian, Hindu, Muslim, and/or African traditional religious discourses) for heteronormative and non-normative expressions of gender and sexuality to be represented, affirmed, naturalized, or reinforced?
Nationalism and Queerness
In what ways might nationalism relate to sexual politics? How can nationalism affect questions of gender and sexuality, either by prescribing and reinforcing particular gender and sexual norms or by tenuously incorporating other gender and sexual identities (as in homonationalism)? Alternatively, how might the presence of non-normative configurations of gender and queerness resist or disrupt nationalism?
Gender, Colonialism, and the Nation
How might religious nationalism, in particular, draw upon certain configurations of gender and sexuality while disavowing others? How do religious discourses influence the shape that nationalism takes within a particular context, and the ways that particular notions of gender and sexuality are deployed in support of nationalism? How have the histories and ongoing legacies of colonialism—and the impact of colonialism on gender and sexuality—influenced various formations of religious nationalism?
Beyond The Module
What concrete examples—from or beyond the posts assembled for this educational module—could illustrate the impact of colonialism and its legacies on discussions around gender and sexuality? How might a decolonized approach to gender, sexuality, and queerness be constructed?
Trauma and Collective Healing
Trauma is defined as a physiological and emotional response to an imminently dangerous event. Collective trauma “refers to the psychological reactions to a traumatic event that affect an entire society … collective memory persists beyond the lives of the direct survivors of the events, and is remembered by group members that may be far removed from the traumatic events in time and space.” How could a decolonized approach to gender, sexuality, and queerness be a catalyst for collective trauma healing?
Bibliography and Further Reading
Ahmed, Sara. “Queer Feelings.” In The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, 422-441. Edited by Donald E. Hall and Annamarie Jagose, with Andrea Bebell and Susan Potter. New York, NY: Routledge, 2013.
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986/1992.
Baloch, Shah Meer. “‘We Deserve to Be Treated Equally’: Pakistan’s Trans Community Steps Out of the Shadows.” The Guardian, November 20, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/20/pakistan-trans-community-steps-out-of-shadows.
Cohen, Cathy J. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3, no. 4 (1997): 437-465.
Elnaiem, Mohammed. “The ‘Deviant’ African Genders That Colonialism Condemned.” JSTOR Daily. April 29, 2021. https://daily.jstor.org/the-deviant-african-genders-that-colonialism-condemned/.
Escobar, Trinidad. “Decolonizing Queerness in the Philippines.” The Nib. November 15, 2019. https://thenib.com/decolonizing-queerness-in-the-philippines/
Hirschberger, Gilad. “Collective Trauma and the Social Construction of Meaning.” Frontiers in Psychology 9 (August 2018). doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01441.
Lugones, María. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypatia 22, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 186-209.
Ngu, Kai. “In Search of Queer Ancestors: Pauline Park, Myles Markham, and Xoài Pham on the Queer Historical Figures across Asia That Have Inspired in Them a Sense of Belonging.” The Margins. Asian American Writers’ Workshop. December 4, 2019. https://aaww.org/queer-ancestors-sarah-ngu/.
Puar, Jasbir K. “Rethinking Homonationalism.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, no. 2 (May 2013): 336-339.
Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Tenth Anniversary Expanded Edition). Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.
Van Klinken, Adriaan, and Johanna Stiebert, with Brian Sebyala and Fredrick Hudson. Sacred Queer Stories: Ugandan LGBTQ+ Refugee Lives and the Bible. Suffolk, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2021.
Wynter, Sylvia. “The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter.” By David Scott. Small Axe 8 (September 2000): 119-207. ISSN 0799-0537.
Ziv, Oren. “Queer Palestinian Community Holds ‘Historic’ Protest against LGBT Violence.” +972 Magazine, August 2, 2019. https://www.972mag.com/queer-palestinian-protest-lgbt-violence/.
Victoria Basug Slabinski is a PhD student in religious studies at the University of Virginia, with a graduate certificate in American studies. Her work draws Christian theology into conversation with decolonial thought and explores constructive Filipino American theologies, focusing especially on questions of memory, ancestrality, narrative, and aesthetics. Her research interests include decolonial and postcolonial thought, Christian liberation theologies and eschatology, gender and sexuality studies, and constructive readings of literature and the arts.
Nicola is a graduate of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame, with a degree in Governance and Policy, and a Minor in peace studies. Nicola’s focus in the program was on human rights, trauma informed conflict resolution, and peace-tech. Professionally, Nicola has over 8 years of experience working in development and emergency settings, specifically on social and human protection, development, and diversity and inclusion work. Nicola have actively contributed to humanitarian efforts addressing the Syrian refugee crisis, collaborating with multiple humanitarian organizations in the SWANA region. Nicola’s expertise encompasses gender equity, social inclusion, child and youth development, human rights, livelihood programming, and mental health support. Nicola's work focuses on shaping inclusive and equitable global mental health and diversity and inclusion policies and programs.
Palestinians march among the ruins of buildings in October 2023 following the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
Positionality
I have served as Imam of Claremont Main Road Mosque, located in Cape Town, South Africa, for close to four decades. In this capacity, I have and continue to play a leading role in the vibrant interfaith solidarity movement against apartheid. In the wake of the assassination of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in May 2022, we established a South African Interfaith Forum for Palestinian Solidarity, which is made up of anti-apartheid Christian leaders, South African Jews for a Free Palestine, Muslims, Hindus, people of other faiths, and people who are not religious. Since the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent Israeli bombing of the Gaza Strip, this interfaith group has been playing a leading role in the grassroots Palestinian solidarity protests that these events elicited. One of the inspirational interfaith solidarity events is a weekly Friday evening Shabbos for Gaza services which is convened by the South African Jews for a Free Palestine. On Friday December 8, 2023, the Claremont Main Road Mosque hosted one of these Shabbat services, which also coincided with the second of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. The strong interfaith dimension of the South African Palestine Solidarity movement counters the false narrative that seeks to frame the anti-colonial struggle of the Palestinians into a “religious conflict” between Muslims and Jews. Moreover, it is my considered view that the bold move by the South African government to charge Israel with the crime of Genocide in its war on Gaza at the International Court of Justice was not prompted by a cabinet decision on its own, but rather came in response to the unprecedented South African Palestine Solidarity movement that has emerged at the grassroots and civil society level. These reflections on Ramadan and Eid in Gaza arise amidst this background of grassroots organizing and solidarity with Palestinians facing daily and relentless violence.
Ramadan Amidst Famine
The gruesome consequences of what the International Criminal Court of Justice, on January 26, 2024, described as a plausible case of Genocide unfolding in the Gaza Strip are defiling the devotion, compassion, and serenity that are the hallmarks of the sacred month of Ramadan. Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar and holds great religious significance and spiritual benefits for Muslims worldwide. It is a time of fasting—i.e., abstaining from food, drink, and sexual intimacy—from dawn to sunset. Fasting during daylight hours is accompanied by intensified prayer, alms giving, and self-reflection. One of the purposes of the Muslim fast is to experience how it feels to be hungry and thirsty, and thus gain an appreciation for the needs of the poor.
Observing these sublime virtues of Ramadan in 2024 has been challenging for the war-ravaged Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. Since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, and the taking of over 200 Israeli hostages, the Israeli army has been relentlessly bombing the Gaza Strip. The result of its campaign has been, at the time of this writing. the killing of over 32,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and the injuring of over 70,000 others. The dire plight of the people of Gaza is ironically being mercilessly exacerbated during Ramadan (aka the month of rahma i.e., mercy) by more than five months of severe restrictions on the free flow of humanitarian aid to the area by Israel’s military. The Israeli blockade has led to serious shortages of food, medical, and other essential supplies. As a result, many families in Gaza are currently struggling to access an adequate and nutritious diet, leading to severe malnutrition and food insecurity.
The dire plight of the people of Gaza is ironically being mercilessly exacerbated during Ramadan (aka the month of rahma, i.e., mercy) by more than five months of severe restrictions on the free flow of humanitarian aid to the area by Israel’s military.
A few days before Ramadan began, at sunset on Sunday March 10, 2024, the Palestinian Ministry of Health estimated that thus far more than 20 people, mostly children and elderly persons, have died of malnutrition and dehydration in Gaza. A United Nations agency for children (UNICEF) report, also released at the onset of Ramadan in early March 2024, found that famine is reaching devasting levels in the Gaza Strip due to the wide-reaching impacts of the five-month-old war. Nutrition screenings conducted by UNICEF have found that 28 percent of children under 2 years old living in shelters and refugee camps in Khan Younis suffer from acute malnutrition, and more than 10 percent have severe wasting.
Ironically, even Israel’s closest ally, the United States of America, acknowledged prior to Ramadan that the humanitarian situation faced by the people of Gaza was catastrophic. As a result of its feeble attempts to persuade the Israeli regime to conform to international humanitarian Law, just days before Ramadan the US joined a few other countries in resorting to air dropping aid over the sky of Gaza. Tragically a US humanitarian aid airdrop killed 5 people in Gaza after a parachute failed to open up. Further, the food drops do not change the fact that bombs sold by the US to Israel are also falling down from the sky.
As famine continues to stalk the Gaza Strip, the US is now planning to deliver humanitarian aid via a sea route by constructing a temporary pier on the shores of northern Gaza. Aid groups, however, argue that the airdrops and sea shipments are far less efficient than trucks in delivering the massive amounts of food and essentials desperately needed by the suffering people of Gaza.
A report released by Forensic Architecture revealed that the Israeli military has repeatedly abused the humanitarian measures of evacuation orders, “safe routes,” and “safe zones,” and failed to comply with the laws governing their application within a wartime context. According to the report “these patterns of systematic violence and destruction have forced Palestinian civilians from one unsafe area to the next, confirming the conclusion echoed across civiliantestimonies, media reports, and assessments by theUN and other humanitarian aid organizations, that ‘there is no safe place in Gaza.’”
Notwithstanding their precarious reality, Gazans are finding some solace, comfort, and spiritual sustenance in observing Ramadan as best they can under the circumstances. Media reports reveal that many Gazans are commencing and completing their daylight hour fasts with lemon soup, canned foods, and some are even forced to break their fast with grass. After breaking their fast at sunset, every evening, despite almost all mosques having been destroyed by Israeli bombing, many Gazans continue to perform special Ramadan prayers known as tarawih, the prayer of rests, in open air congregations. One of these open-air congregational prayers is taking place outside the ruins of a mosque in Rafah that has been bombed. This nightly congregational prayer meeting has encouraged a great sense of solidarity amongst the suffering Gazans.
Layla al-Qadr and the Final 10 Days of Ramadan
During the last ten days of Ramadan, Muslims are encouraged to dedicate themselves completely to God. Throughout these most sacred days, conscientious believers increase their spiritual devotions in anticipation of layla al-qadr, i.e., the most important night of the year. On this night Muslims believe that their sacred scripture, the Qur’an, was revealed. Some may even choose to go into a spiritual retreat (i’tikaf), where they will emulate the example of prophet Muhammad, who dedicated the last third of Ramadan to spending all of his days fasting and his nights in seclusion performing prayers and supplications. In addition to these intensified dedications, Palestinians have also added a special religio-cultural tradition of praying the final jumu`ah congregational service and bidding farewell to Ramadan in al-Masjid al-Aqsa, the third holiest place of worship in Islam. This year the final jumu`ah service occurs on Friday April 5, 2024.
Notwithstanding their precarious reality, Gazans are finding some solace, comfort, and spiritual sustenance in observing Ramadan as best they can under the circumstances
Because of the increased number of Muslim devotions at the al-Aqsa mosque during the last 10 days of Ramadan it has been a long-standing policy to restrict Jewish visitation to the holy site during these days due to “security concerns.” This Ramadan, however, because of the ongoing war on Gaza, the situation at al-Masjid al-Aqsa is going to be particularly tense. We have already heard calls from Jewish extremists groups, led by the Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, urging Jews to visit the holy site during the last 10 days of Ramadan. Such a scenario will inflame the already volatile situation in Jerusalem and the West Bank and will no doubt negatively impact the festival of the ending of the fasting month of Ramadan known as Eid al-Fitr.
Eid al-Fitr Amidst Famine
All predictions are that the 2024 Eid al-Fitr festival in the Gaza Strip, which is anticipated to occur on Wednesday April 10, will be a scaled down event compared to that of previous years. Eid al-Fitr in Gaza, this year, will be taking place under the shadow of daily Israeli bombing and slow death caused by famine and starvation. It will be difficult if not impossible for many Gazans to discharge the end of Ramadan alms given their dire plight. They will without a doubt share whatever meagre belongings they do have with each other to mark the blessed occasion of Eid al-Fitr. Even if a ceasefire agreement is reached before the end of Ramadan the lasting effects of the war and the blocking of humanitarian aid will be felt for a long time to come. Despite the challenges posed by Gaza’s precarious situation, the people of Gaza will come together to celebrate Eid al-Fitr with resilience and solidarity. They will exchange Eid greetings and find much needed joy and comfort in their shared traditions and faith commitment, albeit in a more subdued manner.
A. Rashied Omar is associate teaching professor of Islamic studies and peacebuilding in the Keough School’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He also is a fellow of the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion. In addition to being a university-based researcher and teacher, Omar serves as imam (religious minister) at the Claremont Main Road Mosque in Cape Town, South Africa, and a trustee of the Institute for the Healing of Memories in South Africa
Hunger cloth from the Misereor humanitarian aid community in Wernberg Monastery, Villach Land district, Carinthia, Austria, EU. Via Wikimedia Commons.
I never met Enrique Dussel. Although he shared many spaces with my godmother and father, both Mexican academics themselves, I have no memory of ever meeting him as a child. I once heard him give a public lecture, and, like most Mexican citizens, I followed his activities in national leftist politics from a distance. Moreover, as a thinker and theologian, I am removed from the first generation of liberation theologians and philosophers, who were the teachers of my teachers, and I am a student of their students. Despite this proximal distance, I do not think I speak in hyperbole when I say that the death of Dussel, an important figure in this first generation, represents a major moment for students of Latin American thought. His death marks the end of one era, although the next has already long begun. In this post, I reflect on how the continual reception of his work is shaping and will shape Latin American liberation theologies (LATL) in light of the decolonial turn.
In some ways, el giro decolonial (the decolonial turn) as later articulated by Nelson Maldonado-Torres, was an inevitability for LATL scholars writing in the middle of the last century. From its very inception, the thinkers, activists, and ecclesial and civic agents who shaped LATL worked to shift the epistemological centers of theology. In naming “the poor” as privileged subjects and emphasizing anew the practical dimensions of Christian theology, the very method of doing theology began to be transformed. The so-called “eruption of the poor” also led to prototypical theories on the history of coloniality/modernity. Early critiques of structures that created a dependency of impoverished countries on wealthier countries, often but not always vis-à-vis Marx, positioned them to critique globalizing economic structures.
However, if el giro decolonial does indeed consist of changing directions, not all liberation theologians followed their turn signals. While some have argued that LATL have formed integral parts of decolonial thought, still other Latin American (especially feminist) theologians and thinkers have critiqued earlier liberation theologies for their inability or unwillingness to problematize Eurocentrism in meaningful ways. These intricate (and, I will mention, necessary) debates among followers or inheritors of decolonial thought and LATL notwithstanding, Dussel’s legacy and influence in LATL can be seen most clearly in those that generally follow the “decolonial turn.” In the following two sections, I will focus on two ways that the methods and epistemologies of LATL scholars and activists both have and will continue to benefit from engagement with Dussel’s work. These are necessarily reductive, both together and individually. The first focus is on the importance of history in the context of praxis and the second is on how Dussel’s conception of the “Other” opens LALT to further epistemic frameworks.
The Turn to History
At a talk given at the Boston University School of Theology in 2019, Dussel, speaking in English, said that the claim that America was “discovered” is an “ethical mistake.” He followed up with “I will not say historical, I will say ethical.” Dussel’s transdisciplinary thinking was on full display here as he weaved together historical analysis and philosophical thought. Speaking to a group of students and faculty of theology, Dussel made the further claim that Eurocentric thinking has skewed our view of Christianity itself. The Christianity of the colonists, Dussel argued, was a double inversion of an original messianic Christianity (an argument he writes out fully in an article in Decolonial Christianities: Latinx and Latin American Perspectives). In Dussel, theologians find a voice that insists that we inspect unquestioned historical analyses not only as a matter of exactitude but of ethics. He provides us with tools to problematize Eurocentric accounts of religion/secularism broadly, Christianity more specifically, and most fundamentally, the entire discipline of theology. He wrote, “it will be necessary to redo theology as a whole” (42).
The “redoing of theology” started in LATL early on when its practitioners began situating praxis—that is, practice that is enacted because of theory or theology—within history. Ignacio Ellacuría, a Salvadoran liberation theologian, elaborated on what he referred to as “historical reality,” where history marked the fundamental possibility of salvation. Ellacuría sought to undo stubborn dichotomies, such as nature vs. grace, and bring the Kingdom of God back into theology as a central part of eschatology. Praxis took place in this historical reality, as each person chose to either bring about or work against the Reign of God (80). Dussel, who is sometimes referred to as the “Hegel of Coyoacán” because of his impossibly large thinking, explored multiple disciplines in this search for an understanding of “historical reality,” although he kept, for the most part, the divisions of labor separate.
In Dussel, theologians find a voice that insists that we inspect unquestioned historical analyses not only as a matter of exactitude but of ethics.
Theologian Peter C. Phan argues that it is this ability to extend beyond theology to understand the reality of the world that united liberation theologies in carrying out the critical reflection of historical praxis. The move to transdisciplinary studies has not gone uncontested within theology broadly speaking, but it has largely been defended by LATL thinkers who see in the social sciences tools for rethinking Christian theological concepts. In other words, their aim was not to just say new things about such concepts but to reformulate the dialogue around them (i.e., sin, salvation, divine transcendence).
In a volume entitled Decolonizing Liberation Theology, Nicolás Panotto explains, “The theme of history is fundamental within LALT, especially as a scenario for rethinking divine revelation and the liberating dimension of faith.” He argues for a historicism that moves from a hallowed out, homogenizing history towards a fuller history of marginality and heterogeneity. He continues:
… the divine as a universality that traverses and comes from history implies a questioning of any idolatrous practice that attempts to absolutize a particular image of the theological, even in the name of a particular model or form of liberation and emancipation. This is not achieved through a singular form, but through the deconstruction of the epistemic boundaries that enable the mobility of every practice, body, knowledge, and politics. (231)
Salvation found in this history of alterity, rather than homogeneity, unsettles normative claims of theology. It pushes against the European epistemic hegemony that is pervasive in theological thinking. To rethink history is to reconsider where it is that God communicates Godself, reconsider where the Divine has communicated to human beings. That is, to rethink history may indeed be to reconsider theology altogether.
Dussel’s modeling of historical recovery as a means of theological discovery does just that: it does theology anew by doing history anew. Decolonizing history means uncovering marginality throughout history. Doing so is an act of recovering traditions within Tradition and is an exposing of the paradox of pluriverses with a universal God. To understand how it is that praxis takes place in history in a decolonial key, therefore, LATL can begin to ask “What history, and who is telling it?” Following Dussel’s lead, we recognize that this is not only a historical question, but also an ethical one. The ethical concern of incorporating the pushing of epistemic boundaries leads us to the next section, which focuses on the openness to epistemological frameworks by the category of “Other.”
The “Other” and the Expansion of Epistemological Frameworks in Theology
Despite claims to the contrary, decolonial theologians are not shy or insistent against using European thinkers. This is a sentiment that underestimates the constructive nature of decolonial thought and one that risks further diminishing the creative and fruitful work of many thinkers and activists who found camaraderie in the projects of those for whom Europe (as the center of power, rather than merely geographical region) was a hostile home. Dussel’s use of French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish descent Emmanuel Levinas, who was “a victim of the Jewish holocaust in the heart of Modernity” (125) is one such example. Dussel wrote a lot about his encounter with Levinas, both about Levinas’s writings and personal interactions. When Dussel asked Levinas during a gathering at Louvain about the Indigenous people slaughtered in the Americas, “Aren’t they the other you’re speaking about?” Levinas answered, “That’s something for you to think about.”
Dussel’s subsequent appropriation of Levinas was fundamental to his theorizing on the construction of modernity. For LATL, one vital result of this encounter between Dussel and Levinas was the idea of the Other as epiphany of an incomprehensible exteriority (123). Dussel used Levinas’s understanding of the “asymmetrical problem” of the encounter between colonizer and colonized to go beyond colonial logic. Instead of the savage Other of the colonial imagination, the face of the Other in Levinas and Dussel becomes the face of an ethical revelation, thus the epiphany. In order for this to be the case, the Other has to be truly other. Dussel points out that the face-to-face exposure can happen between multiple levels of relationship, but the ethical demand happens at its strongest in the case where the Other is truly outside of myself, unable to be placed within an “us” (145). The widow is beyond the wife, the orphan beyond the child, the foreigner beyond the known, the poor beyond equality. Dussel argues therefore for an unwavering politicization of Other, which comes from this infinite exterritoriality by means of being truly other, outside of us. To love, be benevolent towards, be in relationship with Other in their totality is to love, be benevolent towards, and be in relationship with their alterity. This is why Dussel refers to this as the logic of alterity (la lógica de la alteridad).
While “the poor” represented one such politicized Other in the LATL vocabulary, the Dusselian category of the “Other” is a category of colonial alterity much better equipped to leave behind economic determinism. Dussel’s articulation of the Other aids LATL in moving forward with an open disposition towards a variety of epistemological frameworks because it opens it up to an alterity that refuses rigidity in the categories of analysis it deploys. In a different book chapter than the one cited above that, in part, responds to a focus essay written by Dussel himself, Panotto argues for “an internal critique of [LATL’s] own methodological axes” to be able to accommodate the “inclusion of alternative worldviews, and in deep deconstruction of the notion of God from the locus of divine otherness that makes visible the historical fissures inscribed within its diversity” (232).
While “the poor” represented one such politicized Other in the LATL vocabulary, the Dusselian category of the “Other” is a category of colonial alterity much better equipped to leave behind economic determinism.
In Ada Maria Isasi-Díaz and the mujerista theology she founded, we begin to see the pay-offs of an extended category of “Other.” She wrote in one of her final published works before her premature death, “If we claim to be about unveiling and enabling subjugated knowledges, definitely a liberation and decolonial move, then we have to enter into the world where that knowledge is produced, for there is no knowledge without ‘encountering’ the reality we claim to know” (55). These “subjugated knowledges” are unleashed through the logic of alterity that Dussel proposed, face-to-face with the Other, whose exteriority is wholly transcendent and whose reality places ethical demands on my reality. There is a constant need, then, to expand the epistemological horizons of LATL to configure a robust epistemological shift. More than new content, LATL provides new ways of thinking beyond colonial matrices—“an Otherwise-knowledge,”as Panotto refers to it (219).
Dussel, as an early contributor to LATL and liberation philosophies, will have a long and extensive reception. His work gives those of us living and thinking in the light of the earliest communities of ecclesial, civil, and academic agents of LATL tools to extend our thoughts through to the decolonial turn. His category of Other and his transdisciplinary understanding of what it means to practice theology allow us to further complexify and enrich our theological method.
Amirah Orozco is a PhD student in the Theology Department at the University of Notre Dame with a subdiscipline of Systematic Theology and a minor in Gender Studies. She is originally from the Border between El Paso, Texas and Juárez, Chihuahua. She comes to academic theology through questions of liberation and emancipation of the poor and marginalized. She is most interested in feminist as well as decolonial theologies. Her doctoral research at Notre Dame will focus on feminist movements in the Catholic Church and how they relate to other social movements.
“King Billy’s on the Wall” mural in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Photo Credit: Flickr User aa440. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED
The Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland—more commonly known as the Orange Order—describes itself as “a membership organisation…committed to the protection of the principles of the Protestant Reformation and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which enshrined civil and religious liberty for all.” Yet, the history of the Order raises questions about such commitments as it was, at various times, seen to advocate a political union with Britain that denied Irish Catholics civil, religious, and political liberties. The Orange Order has historically struggled to align its stated “liberal” values with its desire to protect the idea of a “Protestant Britain.”
These contradictions are not often acknowledged by members of the Order who continue to view the organization in an almost entirely positive light and as representing a truer form of liberty that it believes stands in stark contrast to the “sectarian” politics of their Other—the Catholic, nationalist population. The development of the peace process in Northern Ireland, however, has served to once again shine a light on the Order and generated an internal debate as to how it should respond to growing criticisms from both within and without. Some within the institution, pointing to a declining membership amid controversies associated with parading disputes, have subsequently called for a new direction that better reflects wider social and political realities. Although efforts have been made to this effect, progress has been minimal due to a failure to overcome fears and suspicions of the Other; a failure largely explained by the fact that the narratives and traditions of the Institution continue to emphasize the perceived threat posed by the Catholic/nationalist population.
As such, the Orange Order is a useful case study for understanding how groups struggle to overcome long established processes of othering that reinforce the divisions from a turbulent past at a time when new and alternative futures are being sought.
“Othering” through “Constructed Perceptions of Reality”
In the words of Anthony J. Marsella, culture “influences and impacts conflicts and their resolution” (652). At the heart of his argument is the need to better understand “the power of culture” in constructing what he describes as an in-group’s “perceptions of reality” which “shape and construct our realities (i.e., they contribute to our world views, perceptions, orientations) and with this ideas, morals, and preferences” (657).
Two key outcomes of this process are crucial: (1) the constructed “perception of self as self-righteous, moral, justified, and ‘good’ by virtue of religion, history, identity”; (2) the perception of the Other as being “evil, dangerous, threatening” and therefore a “danger to national or group survival, identity [and] well-being” (653). Furthermore, these constructed realities provide an in-group with a degree of certainty about themselves and, as such, there will be a “reluctance” to “tolerate challenges to these realities” (653).
The Orange Order and Othering
The processes described above are evident across the history and evolution of the Orange Order which was founded in 1795 amid the increased sectarian tensions brought about by growing demands for social and political reform in Ireland, and a broader international crisis stemming from the upheaval of the French Revolution.
That international crisis had convinced many in the British political establishment that there was a pragmatic need to placate Irish Catholics as a means of preventing potential alliances with revolutionary France. The reforms being sought, however, were anathema for many in the Irish Protestant community who believed they went against everything that the Reformation stood for. In the short term the British (Protestant) state would be providing funds to support the education of Irish Catholic clergy via a newly established seminary at Maynooth, but more symbolically the state would essentially be providing a degree of legitimacy to Catholicism. Consequently, many Irish Protestants believed the proposed measures would threaten the social, political, and economic order they had fought hard to establish over the previous two centuries. Religion and politics in Ireland could not be separated.
King William III mural in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Photo Credit: Flickr user Jay Galvin. CC BY 2.0. DEED
Within the Protestant community the linkage between religion and politics was fed by negative popular representations of what the Catholic Church sought to achieve. In his history of the Order, Richard Niven (a member of the Orange) writing in the late nineteenth century, described the belief of members that “ever since the Reformation Protestants have been the subjects of persecution, and more particularly in our own land have been held up to every species of contempt” by “their bitter foe,” Catholicism, which sought a political “ascendancy.” The Orange Order, however, stood firm against this and was “the only organisation that has ever been able to cope successfully with Popery; not by secret conspiracy, but by open opposition and telling arguments” (3).
Popular written histories of the Institution, such as that by Niven and that by Michael Dewar, John Brown and Samuel Long, present long and detailed chronologies of persecution by their Catholic Other. Particular moments of Irish history are put forward as evidence of the constant threat Protestants have faced and continue to live with—from the rebellion and massacres of 1641 to the Williamite Wars of 1689-91; and from the 1798 rebellion, through the Easter Rising of 1916 down to the most recent conflict in Northern Ireland.
This selective use of the past entirely ignores historical complexities, and the narrative of the Orange becomes confined to a simplistic “Good vs Bad” form. Members of the Order are socialized in the history through a popularized retelling that is not confined to books and pamphlets that many members may never read, but which is depicted visually on the banners that adorn their gathering halls and are carried on parades. Similarly, these key moments are memorialized in songs that are central to important social events such as the traditional July 12th celebrations. Through such mechanisms members of the Order construct a reality about both the righteousness of the in-group and the ever-present threat posed by the Other.
“Othering” and Conflict Transformation
Perhaps unsurprisingly these processes of othering have raised questions about the Orange Order within the context of Northern Ireland’s peace process, which has sought a reconciliation between the communities in conflict. Critics of the Order argue that it is, by its very nature, a sectarian organization incapable of change or of playing a positive role in the search for stability. But is this necessarily the case? Is it possible for the Orange to reimagine itself in a manner that allows it to protect its core principles but at the same time become a force for political, cultural, and religious reconciliation?
Members of the Order tend to believe that it has never been a block to progressing peace but rather that it is merely misunderstood by wider society. To this end, the Orange has prioritized efforts to reach out across the political divide to form better understandings of what they claim the Institution is and stands for. This has, in the main, focused on educational initiatives with members of the Order often visiting Catholic schools to give presentations and engage with students.
The Portadown District Loyal Orange Lodge return from the “Demonstration Field” along the Hamiltonsbawn Road in Armagh during the County Armagh the July 12th parades in 2009. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Yet, some members (and former members) of the Order have argued that these efforts are insufficient and that more needs to be done to confront the realities of a rising sectarianism within. The Rev. Brian Kennaway, in particular, has argued that the core values of the Order have been betrayed by elements of its own rank and file and that this has led to a decline in membership and public standing across the wider Protestant community. He maintains that the Orange needs to acknowledge a growing gulf between what the Institution claims to be and the practice of its members, with a particular requirement for the rank and file to better reflect the “Qualifications” for membership they signed up to. Kennaway, in his book on the subject, maintains that “far from being a sectarian, controversial and divisive body, the Order, properly reformed, could be a force for good and reconciliation in Northern Ireland’s deeply divided society” (xiii). He argues that the “Qualifications of an Orangeman,” which state that members “should strenuously oppose the fatal errors and doctrines of the Church of Rome” (4–5), should not be “judged to be any more ‘anti-Catholic’ than the doctrinal standards of the three main Protestant Churches in Ireland” (5), and points to the fact that the “Basis of the Loyal Orange Institution of Ireland” stresses that it should not “admit into its brotherhood persons whom an intolerant spirit leads to persecute, injure, or upbraid any man on account of his religious beliefs” (6). Kennaway maintains that the Order has become detached from such principles and that this has been to the detriment of the Institution. He argues that if the Orange is to have a future it needs better leadership capable of upholding what he has described as the “traditional and authentic values of Orangeism” (264).
Although this points to the possibility for reform by simply adhering to its own established principles, it must also be questioned as to the extent to which the Order has ever successfully lived up to these values as is stated by Kennaway. The fears of the Catholic Other have historically ensured that such values have, in the main, remained aspirational rather than practical. This leads to the further question: Has the peace process created an opening for the Orange to become the organization it claims to be?
One thing is increasingly clear, the fears generated by the processes of othering will not be overcome if the latter remains embedded in the traditions and the historical narratives people live by. For meaningful reconciliation in a post-conflict society, there is a need to engage more critically with history and the representation of that history—to acknowledge that our own roles in that story have not always been “glorious.” There is a need to better understand different interpretations and explore how conflicting narratives might be better reconciled or understood. If, however, groups such as the Orange continue to simply do what has always been done, how can alternative futures unfold?
Cathal McManus is a lecturer in the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work (SSESW) and Queen’s University Belfast and a Fellow of the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice. He is interested in processes of Othering and how these contribute to the development and maintenance of social divisions and conflict. Related to this he is interested in identity formation and nationalism. His work has been published in journals such as Nations and Nationalism, Terrorism and Political Violence, and Ethnopolitics.
Picture of books in Spanish written by Enrique Dussel. Image via Wikimedia Commons
We might be approaching a time when we will speak of the first generation of liberation theologians and philosophers as ancestors. Since the late-1960s, theologians and philosophers in this tradition have created pathways for a radical rethinking of theology and religious studies, for the theological critique of modernity and of capitalism, and for theorizing the liberative power that religious communities can exercise. This generation is passing on, leaving an irreplaceable void in liberationist and decolonial thinking and activism. On November 5, 2023, the Argentine Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel passed away, joining a cloud of ancestral witnesses that will continue to demand from the living that we do not let go of the call to liberation. Undoubtably, the commitment to liberation is the signature trait of Dussel’s intellectual and political work. It informed a double gesture that integrates the political demand to stand in solidarity with the oppressed as well as a form of epistemic solidarity that integrates non-hegemonic ways of knowing for the sake of decolonization.
Ever since Dussel’s passing, I have been reflecting on how impossible it is to overstate the force of his claim in The Invention of the Americas that there could not have been a Cartesian I think, therefore I am, without Hernán Cortés’ I conquer, therefore I am. Who could forget that remarkable preface and its strong delineation of modernity? “Modernity dawned in 1492 and with it the myth of a special kind of sacrificial violence which eventually eclipsed whatever was non-European” (12). There is not descubrimiento (discovery) without encubrimiento (effacement, covering over). Dussel shaped generations of thinkers whose starting point was this framing of modernity as a sacrificial project. For theologians like myself, Dussel contributed to the inception of liberation theology through his books on the history of Latin American Christianity, which emphasized the passage from colonial Christianity to a Christianity of liberation. And Dussel should also be situated as a key figure in the development of the theological critique of capitalism alongside figures like Franz Hinkelammert, who also passed away in 2023.
Dussel’s commitment to provincializing European philosophy as well as to establishing the grounds for a Latin American philosophy of liberation date back to some of his earliest texts. In his 1968 lectures on philosophical anthropology, for example, Dussel framed his project by juxtaposing Heidegger’s concept of “ontological forgetting” with the axis of colonial modernity. Dussel understood that an open task for philosophy was to identify the historical situations and cultural patterns that have been forgotten—more like erased—by colonial epistemologies (194). These forgotten fragments, as it were, form the substance of Dussel’s initial articulation of a philosophy of liberation. According to Alejandro A. Vallega and Ramón Grosfoguel, Dussel finds in Heidegger’s “appropriative de-struction of the history of Western philosophy elements that will be useful for the destruction of Western colonialist systems of oppression” (11).
Dussel understood that an open task for philosophy was to identify the historical situations and cultural patterns that have been forgotten—more like erased—by colonial epistemologies.
Early on as well, Dussel encountered Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, a work that caused in him a “subversive disorientation” and led him to question “all that he [had] learned thus far” (7). Levinas instigated Dussel to consider the dimension of exteriority and the fundamental category of the “Other.” These are concepts that Dussel quickly appropriated to theorize a passage beyond the logic of colonial modernity. While “disorientating,” Dussel’s encounter with Levinas confirmed to him something he had intuited during the time he spent in Israel, between 1959 and 1961. And that is: that the Hebrew tradition may be said to present an alternative view of humanity, one that affirms the historicity of the human subject and that places a special emphasis on justice, the moral agency of the oppressed, and the political imperative of liberation. This type of commitment, formulated in Dussel’s 1969 book, El humanismo semita, remained with him throughout his career. Dussel concluded his response to Levinas by situating the Levinasian call to the face of the other in the context of the colonial conquering ego. Dussel pushed for a historicization and a politization of the Other, naming it in its historical enfleshment as a “Native American, an African, or an Asian” (8).
It is possible to say Dussel’s incipient efforts in decolonization were marked by his investigations of existentialist philosophy and phenomenology, his knowledge of the history of Latin America, his encounter with Levinas, and his participating in the formulation of Latin American liberation philosophy and theology. A defining element of his thought would be added later on.
San Miguel de Tucumán, July 8, 2015 – Within the framework of the “National and Latin American Forum for a New Independence” that took place at the San Martín Theater, the panel “The Return of Politics” was held with the presence by Ricardo Forster, Jorge Alemán, Enrique Dussel, Horacio González, and Roberto Caballero. Image Credit: Romina Santarelli / Ministry of Culture of the Nation.
In 1975, Dussel was forced to leave his native Argentina after receiving death threats from the military junta that ruled the country. He sought refuge in Mexico, where he remained for the rest of his life. Dussel tells that his move introduced him to an intellectual circle with deep ties to Marxism. That marked an important passage in Dussel’s trajectory that eventually led him to a deep exploration of the Marx archives. The result of that research were four books, published between 1985 and 1993. Dussel’s reception of Marx was marked by his previous political and philosophical commitments to liberation and to the category of the Other. According to Eduardo Mendieta, Dussel read Marx’s Capital as an ethical book based on a radical critique of capitalism as a system that creates wealth at the expense of human suffering and exploitation (8–9). These claims are made explicit in Dussel’s final book on Marx, The Theological Metaphors of Marx (whose English translation will be published for the first time soon). In it, Dussel refers to Capital as a theological work that sought to expose the historical and material bases of an idolatrous system of accumulation and exploitation, a true demonic system that deifies injustice (175). For Dussel, Marx was an “implicit theologian” who put theological metaphors to use in the task of exposing capitalist exploitation (131).[1]
The path I have sketched in Dussel’s thought suggests a necessary alliance, what I’m inclined to call an epistemic solidarity between decoloniality, the critique of capitalism, and theology. That is to say, Dussel’s commitment to liberation is what guided him in the path of decoloniality but he walked this path precisely because he understood the task of decolonization under a certain theological register. That register was a certain allegiance to the image of a liberator God, a God with whom one stands “more or less as a comrade,” to cite an intriguing formulation once given by Paulo Freire. Enlisting God as such a comrade, Dussel interrupted the “holy alliance” (Marx) between the religious establishment and coloniality. But he also pushed for a renewed understanding of religion as an active force in the shaping of a world beyond colonialism. Dussel’s work in theology and religious studies embodies the task of decolonization by building upon the suppressed histories and ways of knowing of colonized communities and their spiritualities. Epistemic solidarity, as Dussel modeled so well in his writings, integrates multiple forms of suppressed knowledge for the sake of justice and liberation.
These are tasks that remain open for those of us who have learned so much from Dussel’s texts and teaching. There is therefore grief for his passing. As the grief for, and the farewells to, the first generation of liberation theologians and philosophers continue to meet us, the living will need to develop strategies to enlist these ancestors as sources for our efforts in the direction of decolonization. The task of mourning, always labor intensive, is now open for newer generations to whom the project of decolonial thought and of Latin American liberation philosophy and theology has always been associated with Dussel’s name.
[1] I explore this claim as well as Dussel’s intellectual trajectory leading up to his encounter with Marx in an upcoming essay, “The Haunting of Liberation: Derrida and Dussel, Three Decades Later,” under review with the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.
Filipe Maia is Assistant Professor of Theology at Boston University School of Theology. He is co-chair of the Liberation Theologies Unit at the American Academy of Religion and co-convener of the World Parish webinar, a gathering of Wesleyan and Methodist scholars and leaders committed to the decolonization of the tradition. He is the author of Trading Futures: a Theological Critique of Financialized Capitalism and co-editor of Methodism and American Empire.
Secretary-General António Guterres (center) meets with a delegation of North American Rabbis. UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe. Used with permission.
On January 25, 2023, I, along with 9 other rabbis, representing another 265 rabbis from around the globe and every imaginable denomination, met with Secretary General António Guterres at the United Nations headquarters. You might think that we went to tell him what most Jews are presumed to believe, namely that the UN has it out for Israel and always treats the Jewish state unfairly. Nothing could have been farther from our minds. Rather, we went to thank him and the UN’s agencies for courageously calling out Israel for the humanitarian crimes they are committing in Gaza and to promote our cause: Ceasefire Now!
For me it was a powerful moment on a long journey. When I was a fourth grader in Brooklyn in the 1950s, my beloved teacher, Evelyn Farrar, taught us about the United Nations. We memorized the lyrics to “United Nations on the March,” because the idea of “a hymn to a new world at birth,” a “free new world” achieved by diplomacy, encapsulated her hopes and dreams for what the United Nations could be. We visited the sacred site of the UN Headquarters itself and learned about the peacemaking accomplished by the Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjöld. Her lessons worked: as a child I fervently believed that the UN could bring about a world without war.
When I was in high school, I returned to the UN. On June 5, 1967, I joined other young Jews in a rally to encourage the US to help Israel just as the ’67 war between Israel and the neighboring Arab nations of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan was beginning. The new Secretary General, U Thant, had just withdrawn UN peacekeeping forces from Gaza and the Sinai at Egypt’s demand, and American Jews were worried about Israel’s safety. Attending that rally led me to spend time in Israel two years later and soon thereafter to become one of the first women ordained as a rabbi.
Dag Hammarskjöld outside the UN building in 1953. Via Wikimedia Commons.
In the fifty-seven years since my last trip to the UN, I have struggled to come to terms with the results of the ’67 war. In spite of what I believed in my youth, I see now that it led to Israel’s continuous occupation of Palestinian lands and unwillingness to grant Palestinians freedom in the land they share. But I never imagined that the current crisis would lead me back to the United Nations, hoping, once again, that they could help bring about an end to war.
As an active member of Rabbis for Ceasefire, I am honored to have been part of the delegation that met with the current Secretary General, António Guterres to discuss the terrible destruction Hamas wrought on October 7, 2023 as well as the unfathomably disproportionate destruction that Israel has committed in response.
Our meeting took place a few days after the Secretary General’s bold speech at the opening of a summit of the G77+China that met in Uganda. In that speech, he condemned Israel’s “unprecedented” and “wholesale” destruction of Gaza that has claimed the lives of 152 UN staff members among the 27,000 dead. The Secretary General pointed to the daily dangers survivors endure, not only bombs and bullets but damaged roads, communication blackouts, disease, and famine. He called the conflict “a threat to global peace and security” that must come to an end. That speech was a resounding echo of what the 275 Rabbis for Ceasefire are demanding: Ceasefire Now.
We met with him both to thank him for his courageous words and to find out how we could help add a Jewish moral voice to the UN’s efforts: to stop the threat to global peace and security, end the current attacks that are destroying Gaza and its inhabitants, and hold Israel accountable.
His answer was clear: continue to work for a reconciliation between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. Help them understand that for the security of all they must learn to live together in peace. Keep up your efforts, he recommended. Likewise, he promised us that he would work toward a ceasefire and, to the best of his ability, carry out the provisional judgments of the International Court of Justice that, although they fell short of demanding an end to hostilities, recognized the critical need to end Israel’s assault on Gaza’s civilian population, cultural institutions, and infrastructure and allow humanitarian aid to enter unimpeded.
Our conversation moved us beyond words, for this Secretary General follows in the path set by Hammarskjöld and the other men who preceded him as rodfei shalom, seekers of peace. A deeply faithful Catholic himself, he clearly understood the importance of the religious faith that brought us to work for justice in Israel/Palestine. We left feeling seen and heard by him; believing that he would, with grace and humility, continue to work toward our common goal of a lasting peace.
His answer was clear: continue to work for a reconciliation between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. Help them understand that for the security of all they must learn to live together in peace.
We closed by offering him the ancient priestly blessing in the book of Numbers: “May the Holy One bless and protect you. May the Holy One shine upon you and be gracious to you. May you feel empowered to work for peace, shalom.” A hush fell over the room, and some of us found ourselves close to tears. The Secretary General told us that he’d sleep better having met us today. And we knew we would as well.
Little did we know that the day following the ICJ ruling, which will result in a long investigation of South Africa’s charges of genocide against Israel, Israel would react by claiming that 12 of the 13,000 UN workers for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) took part in the October 7, 2023 massacre. The UNRWA leadership responded swiftly and decisively, condemning the acts, firing nine of the workers (two are dead and one yet to be identified), and beginning an investigation into the claims. Despite this resolution and with no regard for the impassioned plea of the Secretary General, the US and many of its allies have temporarily suspended funding UNRWA. When funds run out at the end of February, the humanitarian crisis that exists in Gaza that was the focus of the Court’s mandate will become even more devastating. UNRWA is the only agency that makes medicine, food, and shelter available to the 1.5 million displaced residents of Gaza. The tragedy worsens and worsens.
We left the meeting with new hopes and now new fears, so we continue to pray: that the leaders of our country understand the gift that is the United Nations and its Secretary General. That they and their allies restore the funding to UNRWA and not become responsible for more death. That they heed the words of all of us who demand a permanent ceasefire now. That they stop using their veto to keep the UN Security Council from doing what it was created to do, as I learned in that song so many years ago, to bring into being “a new world at birth.” A world, as the song also says, “where our children (and all children) shall live proud and free.” And may it be so.
‘Peace For All’ sculpture by Derek A. Fitz Simons, Aghalane, Co. Fermanagh, erected 1999. Located at the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, at the south side of the Senator George Mitchell Peace Bridge. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Almost everyone who studies religion, conflict, and peace has tried to understand Northern Ireland, so I was thrilled by the invitation from colleagues at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security, and Justice to attend a workshop in Belfast.
I approached our shared task—to analyze “religious turbulence” and imagine “alternative futures”—as a historian of US religion associated with Peace Studies who has ancestors on both sides of the island’s troubled sectarian past. While more branches of my family tree include Catholics from the south, the Tweed branch descends from Protestants who were part of the seventeenth-century Scottish Plantation, settling on farmland in County Antrim and attending Presbyterian churches. While my direct ancestors left for America in 1848, during the Famine, those who stayed in the north went on to take sides during the Home-Rule debate, the Partition, and the Troubles. In other words, I have ancestral ties to the colonial past my Irish Catholic relatives lament and to the twentieth-century Troubles almost everyone laments, including those in my ancestor’s Presbyterian congregation who signed the 1974 “Witness for Peace” statement and who welcomed me warmly when I visited the day before the Belfast workshop.
I had not planned to visit those relatives or ponder my family history when I began preparing for our scholarly collaboration, but Northern Ireland religious leaders and US Peace Studies specialists reminded me that personal disclosures can help. Clergy in the north have recommended including “personal narrative in public discussions,” and Peace Studies specialists have said those hoping to cultivate the moral imagination required for “constructive social change in settings of deep-rooted conflict” must overcome the academic impulse to “eliminate the personal.”[1]
I tried to overcome that impulse as I considered what I might contribute as an outsider with distant ties to combatants on both sides of the sectarian conflict. I decided it might help if I took a step back and reflected on the most useful analytic frames, guiding metaphors, and interpretive terms for the analysis of religion and conflict in post-Brexit Northern Ireland. In particular, considering my research on the US and engaging scholarship about the island, I wondered how we might interpret both “specific trigger events” and “longer-term context,” or what others have called “short-term shocks” (Famine, Partition, and Brexit) and “long-term trends” (colonialism, urbanization, and industrialization)?[2] Almost all international, national, and local peacebuilding documents suggest islanders must confront the legacy of the past as they articulate a shared vision of the future, but polarization often sets in as soon as the stories start.
Maybe new frames, metaphors, and terms can help.
Frames, Metaphors, and Terms
The Peace Wall, Cupar Way, Belfast, Northern Ireland. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Scholars who write about the island have made helpful proposals. Brendan Murtagh has compared post-partition Belfast to political zones like Cold War Berlin and the Korean DMZ and argued the city is best understood as a “border landscape.” Others describe post-Reformation Irish religious space as a “theological palimpsest” and chronicle how the devout have inscribed competing notions of religious authenticity and collective belonging on the landscape.[3] Some highlight residential and activity segregation, suggesting that Belfast’s distinct communities can be understood as “ethnic enclosures,” or, analyzing local perceptions, they note that the barriers, flags, and murals that mark bounded space produce “landscapes of menace” and “landscapes of exclusion” (see, for example, F. W. Boal and Madeline Leonard). An ecocritic imagined the “Eden of the future” by foregrounding Belfast’s river-systems and figuring the city as a “riparian zone,” a transition area between fully terrestrial and fully aquatic systems (see Katherine M. Huber on this point). That analogical language is suggestive since just as riparian zones are prone to flooding, Belfast’s landscape has been the site of periodic deluges of sectarian hostility, and, as Ciaran Carson suggested in Belfast Confetti, the Farset, the city’s hidden river, follows “the line of the Peace-Line, this thirty-foot-high wall of graffiticized corrugated iron” (49).
The Comparative Gaze
While these interpretive vocabularies illumine some aspects of the conflict, I think terminology from the natural sciences, especially niche theory and sustainability studies, might help to reframe the conversation about the island by highlighting lifeway transitions, eco-cultural niches, and sustainability crises. That’s the approach I take as I analyze the history of religion in the lands that became America, where religion both escalated and eased crises of sustainability.[4] It inspired both status-reinforcing devotion and popular revitalization movements in stressed cornfield cultures between 1100 and 1350, when weather changed, crops failed, devotees clashed, and violence spiked. During the colonial exchange of biota, competing religious empires triggered demographic decimation, environmental stress, social inequality, and psychic trauma between 1565 and 1776 as settlers displaced Native Peoples and introduced the slave plantation. An urban industrial crisis intensified between 1873 and 1920, when fossil-fuel dependency increased pollution, and income inequality and health disparity in crowded northern cities signaled a wider decline in well-being. The global environmental effects of industrialization and urbanization peaked during the 1950s “Great Acceleration,” the onset of the time when human intervention in natural systems became predominant. The abrupt rise in carbon dioxide, methane, and ice-bound nitrates in polar ice levels signaled significant and long-term global ecological damage. That damage, in turn, threatened dramatic social and economic disruptions, from climate migrations to food scarcity, and presented new challenges to religious communities, which struggled to respond to deepening economic inequalities and mounting cultural polarization.
Descendants of the thirteenth-century cornfield cultures eventually confronted their difficulties, but the unresolved Colonial and Industrial Era crises were passed on to future generations. Americans now face the legacy of those social problems, including racial and economic inequality, while they also confront the unprecedented challenges of a global environmental crisis.
Reimagining the Island’s Past and Future
Can this framework help to reimagine the island of Ireland’s past as a series of resolved and unresolved sustainability crises? There was a medieval crisis as the climate-induced Great Famine (1315-1322) and the microorganism-caused Black Death (1347-1351) stressed farming and grazing niches in the fourteenth century. Were there lasting legacies of those crises that would shape the later sectarian conflict? Can we talk about a colonial crisis on the island? If so, when did it start and end? Was there a colonial exchange of biota, and a breaking of ancestral traditions, including spiritual practices focused on sacred sites, as with the veneration at holy wells? How did the displaced reimagine pilgrimage and recreate devotion in the new stressed niche? Was there an inequitable planation niche, as there was in the US South, and was it sacralized by a form of planter piety? If so, how did local revitalization movements use spiritual resources to challenge it? Specialists (for example here and here) have highlighted industrial Belfast, but does it also help to talk about an industrial crisis on the island, or at least in its northeastern corner, between about 1870 and 1920? Simon Purdue has documented ecological degradation in urban Belfast and demonstrated a decline in well-being, economic stability, and food security among mill workers. Most relevant for understanding the later conflict, Industrial Era employers constructed housing that would become the scene of post-1969 sectarian conflict, as Colm Heatley has argued.[5] During the Troubles, fatalities occurred disproportionately in the poorer, religiously segregated, working-class neighborhoods that had formed as grimy industrial niches. To what extent, then, can we see later religious conflict as the product of an unresolved colonial crisis and the legacy of an unresolved industrial crisis?
Demolition of Ewart’s mill in 1990. Belfast, Northern Ireland. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Does this analytic frame and interpretive vocabulary help? I’m not sure. But using sustainability and well-being has practical advantages because those terms have informed local and global thinking about possible futures. Similar language appears, for instance, not just in the UN Sustainable Development Goals but in The Belfast Agenda, the City Council’s vision for 2035. As I learned when I tried out the idea with my relatives in that North Antrim congregation, reframing those aims as the conditions for transgenerational sustainability and avoiding any mention of Protestant unionists and Catholic nationalists might open some participants to reimagining the troubled past as a series of shared sustainability crises and to envisioning future-focused deliberations as collective efforts to repair Belfast’s socially and ecologically stressed eco-cultural niche.
[3] Anna Gritching, “Introduction: Social Ecologies and Borderlands,” in The Social Ecology of Border Landscapes, 2, 5, 9; Gregory, et al., Troubled Geographies, 1.
[4] Thomas A. Tweed, Religion in the Lands That Became America: From the Ice Age to the Information Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming).
Walls of Derry, Derry/Londonderry, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Near New Gate Bastion: Mural of the main characters from the TV show Derry Girls. Via Wikimedia Commons.
What can we learn from the hit show, Derry Girls? (If you have not seen this, run off and start watching now!) Derry Girls is an Emmy-winning comedic coming-of-age series set in Northern Ireland. The show follows spirited teenagers navigating adolescence amidst a backdrop of political conflict. The show is set in the 1990s, before the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement that brought an “official” end to the Troubles. Today, Northern Ireland experiences a fragile peace. Yet, many themes behind the comedy still hold true for teens in Northern Ireland today.
Like the show, adolescents in Northern Ireland navigate history, culture, and the complex interplay between tradition and modernity. Our research team[1] is currently exploring how these teens learn and share their “truths,” which often are polarized by ethno-religious identity (Catholic/Protestant). We argue that a holistic approach is needed to study how polarized information is transmitted through traditional, structurally embedded narratives and systems that intersect with new information sources and modern values. We discuss novel methods that can begin to embrace these complexities, as now more than ever, information (and misinformation) are readily available literally at teens’ fingertips.
There is a large field of research in developmental psychology focussed on how young people learn information from others. We know that young people exhibit epistemic vigilance; that is, they are motivated to seek reliable information and bridge gaps in their knowledge. However, young people (like all people) also exhibit biases in their information seeking and sharing. As early as infancy, children prefer to learn from members of their own social or cultural groups, and take group membership into account when deciding with whom to share information. Children absorb and transmit information that aligns with the values of their community. This important area of study sheds light on the cognitive and social processes involved in children’s early understanding of information reliability at the individual-level.
A figure showing Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Theory of Development. Via Wikimedia Commons.
However, these findings currently lack perspective on how influences outside the individual, such as families, peers, schools, public policies, and cultural values, can combine to create a complex web of biases that shape the narratives young people construct about their communities. The socio-ecological framework (see, for example, Bronfenbrenner 1977) is a way of thinking about how different aspects of young people’s lives, from personal to societal to cultural, influence each other. The framework considers how individuals are shaped by their relationships, communities, and the larger society, as well as how they, in turn, can impact these environments. Using this framework, we can begin to elucidate how the push and pull of traditional post-conflict narratives and societal structures intersect with young people’s modernizing identities and values.
So, what can we learn from Derry Girls?
In episode 1 of season 2, the Derry girls participate in an attempt to mix their Catholic, all-girls school classroom with a classroom from a neighboring school of Protestant boys. A well-meaning but not-so-competent priest attempts to demonstrate overarching humanity through a brainstorming session of similarities across the mixed-background group. But alas, the failed exercise results in a full blackboard of “differences” between Catholics and Protestants, and an empty blackboard of “similarities.”
Re-created blackboard from Derry Girls for National Museums NI by Anna Mcaughtry, prop master on the show. Photo courtesy of Susan Dautel. Used with permission of Hat Trick Productions.
This replica of the now famous blackboard is on display at the Ulster Museum in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The show presented these stereotypes in a light-hearted, comedic way, but unfortunately, stereotypes of Catholic and Protestant identity contribute to polarized narratives still today. To highlight the necessity of investigating the development of polarization and epistemic vigilance within young people’s broader ecological frameworks, we provide two examples from this episode of Derry Girls. These examples demonstrate how societal processes seemingly interact with individual-level social cognitive processes.
Intergroup Competition
One “difference” suggested by the teens on the above blackboard is “Protestants are rich and Catholics are poor.” This common yet polarizing cultural narrative demonstrates the impact of a long history of zero-sum conflict and power dynamics across the island of Ireland. Historic narratives may enter into present day interactions with the “other.” For instance, in this episode Michelle, a Derry girl, says, “…I don’t see why we have to get them [Protestants] a present? I mean they already have all the land, all the jobs, and all the f***in’ rights.” This macro-level narrative of competition is upheld by contested symbols (like the “Free Derry” mural in the backdrop of many scenes in the show) in teens’ local communities, a micro-level influence. Take another micro-level example—when the Derry girls and “their” Protestants get into conflict, the dialogue immediately escalates into a polarizing narrative, e.g. “because all Protestants are the same.” Such intergroup competition across the ecological system may disrupt teens from seeking reliable epistemic cues, further fostering a preference for ingroup information, even when that information is likely unreliable. (How many Protestants actually keep toasters in the cupboard?)
Segregation
“Why is everyone so desperate for them to mix? I think we should keep them separate,” says the headmistress from the Londonderry Boys School in the show. Over 90% of schools are “separate” in Northern Ireland, still today. Some teens attend Catholic Maintained schools and other teens attend state-controlled (often majority Protestant) schools. Our research, so far, finds that not only do young people attend different schools, but they may be taught completely different content in different types of schools. In a sample of secondary schools, 96% of Catholic schools teach a class/module on the history of “The Troubles,” compared to only 46% of state-controlled (often majority Protestant background) schools. In a representative survey of young people, a whopping 33% of teens say they were not taught (or did not know if they were taught) about the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement in school. Religious education is also taught as part of the national school curriculum in Northern Ireland, but varies by school type. Studies of the two dominant school types during the Troubles found that they differed in time spent on religious education, rituals, symbols, and general ethos, but more current investigations are needed. Segregation also goes beyond schools into most layers of society. Teens often live in separate neighborhoods or towns, may attend church (Protestant) versus chapel (Catholic), have different hobbies, and read/watch different media. This separation within young people’s microsystems, i.e. their schools, classrooms, and local communities, can create false consensuses that reinforce ingroup perspectives and hinder the potential for cross-pollination and information sharing across group lines.
What may have changed for today’s teens in Northern Ireland since the 1990’s Derry Girls?
Anti Irish Sea border banner. Sandy Row, March 2021. Via Wikimedia Commons
A pessimist might say, not much. For instance, the “Protestants are British and Catholics are Irish” narrative on the Derry Girls differences blackboard features prominently in macro-level political discourse today. In the aftermath of Brexit, banners featuring polarized narratives around politics and national identity, like these, are frequent. Such macro-level narratives continue to intersect with micro-level structures, such as what young people learn in school and see in their local communities, leading to divided “truths” or knowledge structures at the individual-level.
“A United Ireland is for Everyone” poster via Sinn Fein. CC BY 2.0 DEED.
But thankfully, we are optimists. Now 25 years post the peace agreement, teens in Northern Ireland have been born into relative peace. Teens are motivated to move forward and continue to correct misinformation transmitted by previous generations: “Macaulay Culkin isn’t a Protestant, Ma!” (Erin, Derry Girls season 1, episode 1). Identities are shifting away from traditional dichotomous categories of Catholic and Protestant. Northern Ireland is secularizing—though it is important to note, not to the same extent as the Republic of Ireland or the rest of the United Kingdom. Teens are more likely to report having “no religion” or being “other” religion, as well as report being “neither” Unionist nor Nationalist. Churches, schools, and youth organizations are contributing to peacebuilding efforts through interfaith dialogue, cross-community initiatives, and integrated and shared education. What we still know less about is how and when young people today are motivated and able to seek out and share reliable information across group boundaries and beyond the limits of traditionally divided societal structures.
Call to Action: A Holistic Lens to Inform Effective Interventions
To navigate the intricate web of old and new, and micro- to macro-level influences on the development of polarization and/or epistemic vigilance in young people, we need innovative methodologies. Here are a few ideas that our team is working on (but we’d love to hear yours too, please comment below!):
Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Large Language Models (LLMs) emerge as powerful tools to analyze diverse texts, uncovering recurring themes and sentiments that occur in narratives across micro, meso, and macrosystems. This provides a nuanced understanding of the narratives influencing polarization. For instance, what were the Derry Girls learning about history and religion at Our Lady Immaculate College? Based on our current explorations, we have to assume a different history than their counterparts at the primarily Protestant background school down the road. Our team will use NLP to analyze pedagogical resources to understand polarization in history and religion education across Northern Irish classrooms.
Peer influence is a prominent theme in Derry Girls, pulling at times both towards (e.g., Erin tells her truth, “You can’t marry an Orangeman, Michelle!” Season 1, Episode 5) and away from polarization. Social Network Analysis expands beyond dyadic interactions, exploring naturally occurring social networks within settings like classrooms, local communities, or even more modern-day influences of social media. This approach helps decipher patterns of segregation, intergroup competition, and socialization practices, shedding light on the contextual factors influencing polarized (mis)information.
Diffusion paradigms, or experimental versions of the game of “telephone,” offer a real-time perspective on information transmission, allowing researchers to track how narratives, both polarizing and unifying, spread across groups. This method opens avenues to study the passing of stories and beliefs across peers, or across generations, contributing to our understanding of the perpetuation or amelioration of intergroup conflict.
Religion has influenced the narratives and perspectives of young people in Northern Ireland through community identity and belonging, education, rituals and commemorations, and moral and ethical interpretations of what is “true.” Employing interdisciplinary, mixed-method research is necessary to holistically explore how truth is defined and produced, how it is evaluated and transmitted at different levels of society, and how to increase epistemic vigilance. By synthesizing findings from various disciplines and methodological approaches, research can inform the development of targeted and effective interventions. These interventions, rooted in a deep understanding of the complexities highlighted in Derry Girls, can empower young people to enhance their epistemic vigilance. Ultimately, the goal is to equip young people with the critical thinking skills needed to catalyze positive social change, fostering healthier, more peaceful, and equitable societies, not only within Northern Ireland but also resonating beyond its borders.
[1] Our research team consists of Jocelyn Dautel (Queen’s University Belfast), Bethany Corbett (Ulster University), Kathleen Corriveau (Boston University), Emma Flynn (Warwick University), Eva Grew (Queen’s University Belfast), Mariah Kornbluh (University of Oregon), Caitlin McShane (Queen’s University Belfast), Jennifer Watling Neal (Michigan State University), Lara Wood (Abertay University), Christin Schulz (University of Amsterdam), and Jing Xu (University of Washington Seattle), funded by Templeton World Charity Foundation.
Dr. Jocelyn Dautel is a developmental psychologist researching how young people navigate their social worlds, especially when they are divided. She is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Psychology, Director of the Kids in Context research lab, and Fellow of the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. She leads on global research collaborations, such as Communicating Truth and the Developing Belief Network, researching children’s religious identity and beliefs across 30 field sites with over 50 international research collaborators. Through global education, research, and service, she contributes leadership in debates about unique and universal processes in social cognitive development with an aim towards reducing inequalities and promoting peacebuilding.
Dr. Bethany Corbett is a developmental psychologist and lecturer in the School of Psychology, Ulster University, Northern Ireland. Her research has examined factors contributing towards children's prosocial choices (for example, to help and share), including experiences of minoritization within settings of conflict. Her research informs strategies to reduce inequalities and increase cooperation, from the interpersonal (the formation of positive relationships) through to the macro-level (support for dismantling the status quo). Other research interests include how young people learn about historical - and particularly, contested - information. Understanding these processes contributes to strategies designed to increase young people’s critical thinking skills, and reduce their susceptibility to misinformation
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