Confounded Identities: A Meditation on Race, Feminism, and Religious Studies in Times of White Supremacy

This article addresses the pervasiveness of white supremacy in American identity-thinking. Challenging the use of identity to structure unity platforms in academia, I advocate for Black-transnational feminist-queer strategies that demand coalition-based politics oriented around a transformative radi...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Beliso-De Jesús, Aisha M. (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Oxford University Press [2018]
In: Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Year: 2018, Volume: 86, Issue: 2, Pages: 307-340
Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains:B USA / Identity politics / Whites / Hegemony / Science of Religion / Feminism
RelBib Classification:AA Study of religion
KBQ North America
ZC Politics in general
Online Access: Presumably Free Access
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Summary:This article addresses the pervasiveness of white supremacy in American identity-thinking. Challenging the use of identity to structure unity platforms in academia, I advocate for Black-transnational feminist-queer strategies that demand coalition-based politics oriented around a transformative radical potential. Religious studies is used as an interdisciplinary case study to understand the problem of academic identity-thinking, where I show first, how white privilege is maintained in the “scholar-practitioner” divide, and second, how white supremacy is naturalized in identity-thinking. Eschewing relative or comparative approaches that reify identity-based logics, I move towards analytic and technical approaches that are productive of an activist-oriented decolonial stance. This gesture draws on the relationality, conflict, tension, power, and politics of studying racialized religious and spiritual subjects with an unapologetically transformative agenda.
ISSN:1477-4585
Contains:Enthalten in: American Academy of Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1093/jaarel/lfx085