A conversation with Sergio Beltrán-García and Patricia Eunji Kim. Moderated by Marianne Hirsch.

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to ravage lives and livelihoods (especially of the most precarious, underserved communities) across the world. Traditional modes of mourning and commemoration are dangerous and ill-advised. How then, might communities and individuals grieve their losses? In this conversation, Sergio Beltrán-García (artist and activist) and Patricia Eunji Kim (art historian and curator) discuss the memorials, strategies, and stakes of commemorating the pandemic. If we dare to memorialize the pandemic dead, we must commit to unveiling the systemic inequities that left them so exposed. In other words, a memorial to the pandemic must also confront the very issues of labor, race, gender, and access that both created and exacerbated the conditions of vulnerability.

A panel with Eric Fassin and Maboula Soumahoro. Moderated by Emmanuelle Saada.

In recent months, French President Macron and members of his government as well as several groups of intellectuals and academics have sounded an alarm about the influence of supposed “Islamo-gauchisme” within French universities — a highly controversial term used to accuse left-leaning intellectuals of justifying Islamism and even terrorism. These attacks on an imagined “islamo-leftism” are often paired with a denunciation of post-colonial and decolonial studies, gender and sexuality studies, intersectionality, and studies of race and racism, deemed by critics to be political or ideological rather than scientific, and often maligned as an American import.

Invited panelists in this conversation will provide some political and academic context and offer definitions of the terms and arguments deployed in these attacks. What is really at stake here? How can these arguments be understood in today’s French political landscape? What do they reveal about the deeper transformations underway in the social sciences in France? How are they related to the fast-paced transformation of the role and organization of the University in French society? Why are post-colonial studies, race and gender studies, and “intersectionality” seen as “American imports” threatening the French “republican” model?

A book launch with with Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Sarah Dees, Osman Balkan, and Candace Lukasik. Moderated by Courtney Bender.

At Home and Abroad bridges the divide in the study of American religion, law, and politics between domestic and international, bringing together diverse and distinguished authors from religious studies, law, American studies, sociology, history, and political science to explore interrelations across conceptual and political boundaries. They bring into sharp focus the ideas, people, and institutions that provide links between domestic and foreign religious politics and policies. Contributors break down the categories of domestic and foreign and inquire into how these taxonomies are related to other axes of discrimination, asking questions such as: What and who counts as “home” or “abroad,” how and by whom are these determinations made, and with what consequences?

A lecture by Nusrat Chowdhury (Amherst College).

In this talk, Dr. Chowdhury takes the birth centennial of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding father of independent Bangladesh, as a point of entry in exploring the generative potential of mimicry in contemporary democracies. The repertoire of signs around the figure of Mujib around this historical moment (2021 marking the country’s 50th anniversary of Bangladesh) allows a vantage point from which to understand Bangladeshi political culture that came into sharp focus with the condensation of corporeal and symbolic energies around the replication of the leader’s likeness. The talk centers on the English-language novel, The Black Coat by Neamat Imam (2013), which pivots on the theme of impersonation and ends with the ongoing religious opposition to anthropomorphic reproductions. Chowdhury argues that the compulsion to mimic via statues, photographs, works of art, or reenactment ceremonies carries within it an ambivalent and generative politics. In every act of mimesis there is both a promise and a menace. Modern sovereign power manages this uncertainty through the specular and the spectacular, or what I describe as “monumentalised reproducibility.”

A panel with Susannah Crockford (Ghent University) and Will Sommer (The Daily Beast). Moderated by Elizabeth Castelli (Barnard, Religion).

“Apocalypse Pending: Religion, Politics, and Social Media” explores the growing popularity of conspiracy thinking in our current moment and its place in the history of religious movements, particularly in the US context. It considers how new media technologies have made it possible for the dissemination of such thinking on a scale unimaginable in the past, how the moral panic it generates is impacting social and political life worldwide, and whether there are measures available to control its spread or mitigate its effects.

This third panel in the series will focus on the violent insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6th, including the prominent appeal to ‘new age’ symbolism by such figures as the ‘Q Shaman.

A workshop with Murtala Ibrahim, Brian Larkin, Abdullahi Shehu, Mamadou Diouf, Matthew Engelke, and M. Sani Umar.

This workshop examines the relation between religion and public space focusing on Muslim movements in Northern Nigeria. It approaches the question in three main ways. First it brings to the foreground the many and diverse ways Muslim movements assert their presence over public space and the response by other movements and by the state. Second, it shows – in contradistinction to contemporary arguments – that these issues are not new and that control of public space has long been an aspect of West African religious life: from the masquerade tradition, to the rise of mass Sufi movements in the 1950s, to the emergence of African Independent Churches in the 1960s and 1970s. Finally, while we recognize these actions emerge from deep traditions within religious movements they also reveal a common religious ecology. Different religious movements – often bitter enemies – end up developing practices that borrow from each other even while they are in competition. We seek to draw out the broader nature of this mixed religious ecology.

This is a discussion-based workshop and depends upon participants reading the pre-circulated papers ahead of time.

A panel with Julie Byrne (Hofstra University), Jonathan Calvillo (Boston University), and Mary Anne Case (University of Chicago). Moderated by Katherine Franke (Columbia Law).

The recent appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court generated a good deal of media coverage on her Catholic faith, especially her associations with the Catholic charismatic renewal. Barrett, though, is only one of six justices on the court who identify as Catholic, and as long ago as 2008 the political scientist Barbara Perry referred to the Supreme Court as “the Catholic Court.” Yet what might this mean, and how—if at all—can we trace the influences of Catholicism on judicial reasoning? The aim of this panel is to bring together scholars working across a range of fields—including law, history, critical race theory, and gender studies—to reflect on this question in relation to the Court’s recent past, present, and future.

A conversation with Karla Holloway (Duke), Nyle Fort (Princeton), and Rhon Manigault-Bryant (Williams College). Moderated by Josef Sorett (Columbia, Religion)

Arguments about black death abound. In certain iterations, the long story of black life in the Americas is one defined by the looming prospect of premature, untimely, or even primordial death; from the status of “social death” under the terms of chattel slavery, to the contemporary struggles for life in the face of state (and state-sanctioned) violence unto death. A variety of critics, in this tradition, have observed some variation on the theme of what the poet Claudia Rankine surmised in her 2015 book, Citizen: “the condition of black life is one of mourning.” Yet, as Rankine’s own work suggests, the conditions of black living have been animated by a robust set of artistic, cultural, political, and spiritual performances that speak to an abundance of methods for flourishing, and for affirming the truth of the now iconic hashtag #BlackLivesMatter—before, after, and in the midst of death.

With Isabel Wilkerson, author of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson is the author of the New York Times’ bestseller The Warmth of Other Suns. She will be speaking on her latest book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.

*this event is only open to CU/Barnard affiliates and will not be recorded

A lecture by Pamila Gupta (University of the Witwatersrand).

For this paper, Gupta proposes to take up the concept and physical space of a photographic ‘darkroom’ located in Stone Town, Zanzibar to explore a set of images from the Capital Art Studio (1930-present) collection produced by Ranchhod Oza (1907-1993), and inherited by his son Rohit Oza (1950-). She employs a concept of darkness to read this visual archive differently and propose multiple ‘other lives’ for a set of images. First, by bringing this African photography collection to light, she is taking it out of the ‘dark rooms’ of history in one sense (Hayes 2017) and exposing it for interpretation. Second, she focuses her lens on the Oza physical darkroom located in the back of the studio on Kenyatta Road in Stone Town, where photographs of a range of Zanzibari persons were both developed and printed and that open up the darkroom as a place of photographic complexity and sensorium, and not just mechanical reproduction (Jansen 2018). Third, Gupta develops darkness as a form of beauty in certain images of sky, water and skin from this archive that showcase Zanzibar’s position as an Indian Ocean island and port city whilst under rule by the Omani Sultanate (1698-1964) and British Protectorate (1890-1963). Fourth, she conceptualizes the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964 as a time of visual darkness, which temporarily restricted photographic practices operating in Stone Town under the new Afro-Shirazi political party. Throughout her analysis, Gupta uses a framing of ‘darkness’ to interrogate photography as an aesthetic practice deeply immersed in materialities and metaphors of dark and light, black and white, and as integral to Zanzibar’s oceanic islandness.

A panel with Karla Rothstein (Columbia GSAPP) and John Bruce (Parsons School of Design). Moderated by Maggie Jones (The New York Times Magazine).

Join us for an evening with Karla Rothstein (Columbia GSAPP) and John Bruce (Parsons School of Design) as they discuss their respective projects on how we may care for the dead and the dying. As an architect, Karla Rothstein has been at the forefront of efforts to transform the ways in which we commemorate and place the dead, especially given constraints of space in urban cemeteries and environmental costs of cremation. Through his work as a film maker, John Bruce documents the power of human connections with the dying, who are all too often marginalized from the wider currents of everyday social life. Together, their work raises urgent questions about how to understand life in proximity to death—questions of design, which are just as much questions of dignity and care.

A panel with Sarah Posner (author and journalist) and Kathleen Stewart (UT, Austin). Moderated by Courtney Bender (Columbia, Religion).

As the historian Richard Hofstadter famously pointed out more than half a century ago, conspiracy thinking or “the paranoid style” runs deep in the American political psyche. With an eclectic religious population (many of whose ancestors fled persecution in Europe for their beliefs: Puritans, Quakers, Anabaptists, Huguenots, Catholics, Jews), the United States may be exceptional in its political DNA—a combination of religious fervor and persecutory fear that, while generally latent, sporadically erupts in the body politic. The right-wing fear of social welfare policies as godless and unholy is one current manifestation of this particular political psychology. Another is the increasing online presence of apocalyptic religious sects, of which QAnon is an articulation.

“Apocalypse Pending: Religion, Politics, and Social Media” explores the growing popularity of conspiracy thinking in our current moment and its place in the history of millenarian movements, particularly in the US context. It considers how new media technologies have made it possible for the dissemination of such thinking on a scale unimaginable in the past, how the moral panic it generates is impacting social and political life worldwide, and whether there are measures available to control its spread or mitigate its effects.

A conversation with Mohamad Amer Meziane and Etienne Balibar. Moderated by Nadia Abu El-Haj.

2020 has already been marked by two major, historical events: COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter. This dialogue is an attempt to determine how political philosophy might help us think about them. In particular, it will probe how the unfolding crisis might force us to rethink our concepts of violence and the political. The pandemic is now inseparable from the question of the state and of the forms of violence it deploys. Does this signal a ‘return’ of the state to the center of politics, or simply its unmasking? How are we to think about violence both before and after the pandemic? How do empire and colonialism still structure the present? To what extent is Islamophobia part of systemic racism and practices of surveillance? How does Islamophobia overlap with anti-Blackness both in Europe and the United States? How do 9/11 and the War on Terror still determine the reactions of nation-states to the pandemic and are these reactions reducible to a generalized state of exception? And, finally, is 2020 the beginning of a new historical time?

A panel with Joan Donovan (Harvard) and Brandy Zadrozny (NBC News). Moderated by Matthew L. Jones (Columbia, History).

As the historian Richard Hofstadter famously pointed out more than half a century ago, conspiracy thinking or “the paranoid style” runs deep in the American political psyche. With an eclectic religious population (many of whose ancestors fled persecution in Europe for their beliefs: Puritans, Quakers, Anabaptists, Huguenots, Catholics, Jews), the United States may be exceptional in its political DNA—a combination of religious fervor and persecutory fear that, while generally latent, sporadically erupts in the body politic. The right-wing fear of social welfare policies as godless and unholy is one current manifestation of this particular political psychology. Another is the increasing online presence of apocalyptic religious sects, of which QAnon is an articulation.

A lecture by Derek Peterson (University of Michigan).

In what ways—under the eight year dictatorship of Idi Amin—was religion made public? Amin came to power in 1971 at a conjuncture in the history of technology: the new broadcasting capacities of radio allowed him to govern as a dictator, to set the pace of public life, to obliged everyone to march to the same tempo. Religion had to be reoriented. The space for dissident forms of Christianity and Islam was radically narrowed; pentecostals, Bahais, Adventists and other nonconformists were imprisoned, their property was seized, and their religious lives were foreclosed. At the same time new standards of religious conduct—particularly the notion of ‘African Traditional Religion’—were given substance in scholarship and in public culture. It was part of a process by which political life was evacuated of competition and loyalties were centred around the president.

A lecture by Amitav Ghosh.

In the West, no matter whether in economics, science or indeed, fiction, climate change is almost always imagined in relation to the future. In the global South the imagining of climate change is markedly different. This talk will examine some of the differences between the two perspectives.

The event recording will be available on our Youtube channel for seven days after the event.

A conversation with Joshua Dubler, Vincent Lloyd, Rev. Lynice Pinkard, and Kempis “Ghani” Songster. Moderated by Kendall Thomas.

Changes in the American religious landscape enabled the rise of mass incarceration. Religious ideas and practices also offer a key for ending mass incarceration. Activists-scholars Joshua Dubler and Vincent Lloyd advance these bold claims in their new book Break Every Yoke, which weaves religion into the stories about race, politics, and economics that conventionally account for America's grotesque prison expansion of the last half century. By foregrounding the role of religion in the way political elites, religious institutions, and incarcerated activists talk about incarceration, Break Every Yoke is an effort to stretch the American moral imagination and contribute resources toward envisioning alternative ways of doing justice.

Dubler and Lloyd will join us to discuss their work in relation to the Black Lives Matter movement and the ongoing protests. They will be in conversation with pastor, writer, and activist Lynice Pinkard, and Kempis “Ghani” Songster, a former juvenile lifer and founder of the advocacy group The Redemption Project.