Critical Theory - UC Berkeley

Why does contemporary antiracism devolve into identity politics and white guilt, each of which leaves standing structures and systems destructive to minoritized life? Why does antiracism marginalize Asian Americans, those already marginalized by racism? Can religion, and Christianity in particular, play a constructive role in anti-racism’s democratic future? Developing themes from his recent book, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2021), Baylor’s Jonathan Tran offers a wide-ranging discussion of some of our most pressing questions.

Jonathan Tran is Professor of Philosophical Theology and George W. Baines Chair of Religion in the Department of Religion at Baylor University. Professor Tran joined Baylor’s Religion Department in 2006 after completing his graduate studies in theology and ethics at Duke University. His research examines the theological and political implications of human life in language. His most recent book is Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2021).

Presented by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion and co-sponsored by the Othering and Belonging Institute, the Asian American Research Center, and the Graduate Theological Union.

Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism | Jonathan Tran | 2/10/22

Why does a country with religious liberty enmeshed in its legal and social structures produce such overt prejudice and discrimination against Muslims? Sahar Aziz’s groundbreaking book demonstrates how race and religion intersect to create what she calls the Racial Muslim. Comparing discrimination against immigrant Muslims with the prejudicial treatment of Jews, Catholics, Mormons, and African American Muslims during the twentieth century, Aziz explores the gap between America’s aspiration for and fulfillment of religious freedom. With America’s demographics rapidly changing from a majority white Protestant nation to a multiracial, multi religious society, this book is an indispensable read for understanding how our past continues to shape our present—to the detriment of our nation’s future.

Sahar Aziz is Professor of Law, Chancellor’s Social Justice Scholar, and Middle East and Legal Studies Scholar at Rutgers University Law School. Professor Aziz’s scholarship adopts an interdisciplinary approach to examine intersections of national security, race, and civil rights with a focus on the adverse impact of national security laws and policies on racial, ethnic, and religious minorities in the US. Her research also investigates the relationship between authoritarianism, terrorism, and rule of law in the Middle East. She is the founding director of the interdisciplinary Rutgers Center for Security, Race, and Rights (csrr.rutgers.edu) and a faculty affiliate of the African American Studies Department at Rutgers University-Newark. Professor Aziz serves on the Rutgers-Newark Chancellor’s Commission on Diversity and Transformation as well as the editorial board of the Arab Law Quarterly and the International Journal of Middle East Studies. Professor Aziz teaches courses on national security, critical race theory, Islamophobia, evidence, torts, and Middle East law.

Presented by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation, and cosponsored by the Center for Race and Gender, Center on Race, Sexuality and Culture, and Othering and Belonging Institute

The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom | Sahar Aziz | 2/16/22

Looking for ‘politics’ and ‘religion’ in the past, we tend to see reflections of ourselves, of what we unintentionally assume the two spheres of life to be. Taking ‘we’ to be citizens of present-day western democracies, we are deeply familiar with how in the last two centuries ‘politics’ and ‘religion’ have shaped our societies and us. When looking at ancient Greece, an entirely different society, we must make an effort to go though this mirror image, to see and understand what the two spheres of life and the relationship between them were like. ‘Politics’ and ‘religion’ reflect the relationship between human and divine worlds, which in Greece was based on reciprocity, albeit of vastly unequal partners. In this talk, we shall examine how this relationship was embedded in religious-social life and how it worked at the institutional level. Our attempt to get through the looking glass will involve close reading of the evidence, mainly from Athens but also from elsewhere in the Greek world.

Prof. Dr. J.H. (Josine) Blok is Professor Emerita of Ancient History and Classical Civilization at Utrecht University. Her expertise is the history of archaic and classical Greece. Special areas of her interest include the political, religious and social history of ancient Greece in the widest sense. Her present research revolves around the theory and practice of citizenship in the ancient Greek world, especially in classical Athens. She is the author of Citizenship in Classical Athens (Cambridge, 2017), which interprets the Athenian practice of citizenship as inextricably bound up with religious rituals and laws that sought to construct and maintain a particular relationship between the Athenian citizen body and the gods it worshipped. She is also interested in a comparative analysis of ancient Greek citizenship and politics with present-day democracies, notably in the use of sortition in this context. Besides antiquity itself, she is interested in the study of antiquity in later times, especially the nineteenth century. Since 2001, she has served as Chair of the European Network for the Study of Ancient Greek History. She has served as Chair of the Faculty Council of the Faculty of Humanities at Utrecht University since September 1, 2020.

Presented by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation

Through the Looking Glass: Perspectives on the Interaction Between... | Josine Blok | 2/22/22

In 1964, heavyweight boxing champion Cassius Clay announced to the world that he was a member of the Nation of Islam. Renamed Muhammad Ali by the Nation’s leader, the boxer faced a slew of criticism about his chosen faith. The idea that he had been brainwashed was among the most pernicious explanations for his conversion and his subsequent defiance of the draft for the American war in Vietnam. These allegations of mind control—and Ali’s defiant response to them—form a pivotal moment in American conversations about faith, race, and political authenticity.

Rebecca L. Davis is the Miller Family Endowed Early Career Professor of History at the University of Delaware, where she holds a joint appointment in the Department of Women and Gender Studies. A specialist in histories of sexuality, gender, religion, and American culture, she is a recipient of a Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her most recent book is Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions that Changed American Politics from the University of North Carolina Press, 2021. She is at work on a single-volume history of sex in America.

Presented by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion and cosponsored by the Institute of Governmental Studies.

I Know the Truth: Muhammad Ali, Brainwashing, and the Racial Politics... | Rebecca Davis | 3/3/22

A Buddhist Sensibility generates a novel perspective on Tibetan Buddhist history by focusing on aesthetics—encompassing the fields of music, visual arts, poetry, dance, and even the olfactory sense through incense production. Through the case study of this monastic history, Townsend argues that the Buddhist engagement with and cultivation of the senses connects the spheres of religion and the secular.

Mindröling monastery’s founders were Tibetan aristocrats renowned for their Buddhist and worldly expertise and distinctive sensibility. Their reputation attracted laypeople to study the arts and sciences at Mindröling, in preparation for careers as politicians and bureaucrats. At the same time, Mindröling was a haven for Buddhist renunciants and a stage for large-scale public ritual performances designed to solidify the early modern Tibetan polity under the Fifth Dalai Lama. The founders of Mindröling developed a particularly Tibetan Buddhist mode of cosmopolitanism, enabling them to create a complex institution that occupied apparently paradoxical positions vis-à-vis Buddhist cultural production and renunciation at a formative historical moment.

Townsend draws evidence from diverse Tibetan literary genres, including monastic histories, letters, biographies, poetry, and curricula. As she interprets and contextualizes these texts, she poses questions about the senses, materiality, and worldly engagements to develop a cultural history of early modern Tibet. The book invites scholars and students to recognize aesthetics as an essential aspect of Tibetan Buddhism. It also offers non-specialists an alternative to reductive perspectives on Tibet and Buddhism that tend to assume Buddhists wholly reject materiality and worldly life.

Dominique Townsend is Assistant Professor of Buddhist Studies at Bard College. She is the author of A Buddhist Sensibility: Aesthetic Education at Tibet’s Mindröling Monastery (Columbia University Press, 2021). In addition to her academic work, she is also the author of a collection of poems, The Weather & Our Tempers (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2013), and a children’s book about Buddhism, Shantideva: How to Wake Up a Hero (Wisdom Publications, 2015). Her research interests include Tibetan Buddhist aesthetics, poetics, and translation.

Presented by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion and co-sponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and the Department of History.

A Buddhist Sensibility | Dominique Townsend and Stacey Van Vleet | 3/15/22

This lecture investigates democratic approaches to legal formulations in Islam from the perspective of the principle of consensus. Accepted as having probative force in practically all Islamic legal traditions, the principle is often understood in pre-modern and modern literature as a means of establishing positive law by appeal to the customary practices in a region and/or the shared legal opinions of a generation of scholars. As such, it also emerges as a vehicle for establishing and perpetuating normative practices and for narrowing the scope for legal change. The intricacies of theoretical reflections on consensus—as opposed to its practical legal applications—reveal a rather different perspective. In the Islamic legal-theoretical tradition, consensus can be read as an agreement on a shared hypothetical system of argumentation. Inasmuch as each legal tradition within Islam has a consensus on the hypothetical validity of each alternative system as an internally consistent set of propositions, it grants the possibility of multiple modes of legal discourse. This lecture explores certain theories of consensus—often dubbed “compound consensus” in the tradition—as democratic grounds for legal disruption.

Asad Q. Ahmed is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures and the Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on early Islamic social history and post-classical Islamic intellectual history. In the latter area, his investigations relate to the history of logic, philosophy, science, and legal theories in Islam. He is the author of The Religious Elite of the Early Islamic Hijaz, Avicenna’s Deliverance: Logic, and Palimpsests of Themselves: Logic and Commentary in Postclassical Muslim South Asia.

Presented by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation

Consensus and Early Islamic Law | Asad Ahmed | 4/12/22

Voting from the Rooftops: Reflections on Religion and Politics from Mughal India

Abhishek Kaicker is a historian of Persianate South Asia (c. 1200-1900) with expertise in the history of the Mughal empire. He is interested in questions of intellectual history and the history of concepts; early modern global history; religion, politics and the city; and more generally in the continuities between precolonial and postcolonial south Asia. 

His first book, The King the People: Sovereignty and Popular Politics in Mughal Delhi (OUP 2020) shows how ordinary urbanites emerged as assertive political subjects in the Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad (Delhi) over the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is now engaged in two new major research projects: one, a prehistory of the British conquest of Bengal in 1757 from the perspective of the Mughal empire; and another on the transformation of Mughal modes of popular politics into modern modes of communalism in North India under colonial rule in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is also writing a biography of Anand Ram Mukhlis, an eighteenth-century courtier, scribe, essayist, diarist, poet, connoisseur, gourmand, oenophile and inveterate aficionado of all things Delhi. 

Together with Professors Asad Ahmed (Berkeley) and Lawrence McCrea (Cornell), Professor Kaicker is an editor of the Journal of South Asian Intellectual History, a new peer-reviewed venue for emerging conversations on the intellectual history and culture of premodern South Asia.

Abhishek Kaicker earned his PhD from Columbia University and completed his MA at University of British Columbia.

Presented by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation

Voting from the Rooftops: Reflections on Religion and Politics... | Abhishek Kaicker | 4/27/22

Indigenous Catholics and Spanish missionaries in Mexico leveraged different strategies for responding to the catastrophic epidemics that decimated communities over the course of the sixteenth century. Spanish missionaries fashioned themselves as frontline nurses, imagining themselves as saviors of bodies and souls. Indigenous pueblos de Indios did not surrender their health or well-being to Spanish initiative, rather they leveraged colonial religious institutions to support a system of hospitals and clinics under their charter and control. 

Jennifer Scheper Hughes is a historian of religion focusing on Latin American and Latinx religions with special consideration for the spiritual lives of Mexican and Mexican-American Catholics. She teaches courses on colonial Mexico, history of the church in Latin America, Christianity and colonialism, archival and ethnographic methods, and public history, among others.

Professor Hughes’ book, The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas (NYU 2021), considers a crisis in the church that resulted from a catastrophic epidemic that took two million lives. In the aftermath, Spanish missionaries and Indigenous Catholics articulated rival visions for the future of Christianity. Church of the Dead was named one of the top five books on religion for 2021 by Publisher’s Weekly. Professor Hughes’ first book, Biography of a Mexican Crucifix: Lived Religion and Local Faith from the Conquest to the Present (Oxford University Press, 2010), traces the history of a single, sculpted image of Jesus on the cross over five centuries to explore the affective bonds that join devotional communities to vital and agentic objects of material religion.

Her articles have been published in History of Religions, Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief, Nova Religio: A Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Latin American Perspectives, the Journal of Latin American and Latinx Art and Visual Culture, and Religion and the Arts, among others. She is editor of The Routledge Handbook of Material Religion, now in preparation.

With colleagues at UCLA, UCSD, and UCSC, Professor Hughes received a $1 million grant in support of the Critical Mission Studies project which centers California Indian perspectives of the colonial missions and their aftermath.

Her research has been recognized and supported through grants and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the UC Office of the President/UC Humanities Research Institute, the Luce Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Cushwa Center for Catholic Studies at Notre Dame University, and the UCR Center for Ideas and Society.

Before coming to UCR, Professor Hughes worked for the Latino Health Institute (Boston, MA) as an advocate for homeless Latinos with HIV/AIDS, at the Trauma Center for Victims of Violence and Torture in Cape Town as a translator and advocate for Angolan refugees in South Africa, as a hospital chaplain for women suffering loss of their newborns, and with the Liberation Theology base community movement in Pernambuco, Brazil.

Presented by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation and co-sponsored by the Othering & Belonging Institute.

Medicine as Sacrament: Spanish and Indigenous Catholic Responses ... | Jennifer Hughes | 11/8/22

The Pastoral is Political: Abortion Travel and Religious Activism Before Roe v. Wade

Between 1967 and 1973, the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion challenged restrictive abortion laws by organizing a transnational abortion network and shepherding one of the largest medical migrations of the postwar era. This talk explores the religious history of abortion-seeking and abortion travel within and outside of the continental United States. Such journeys politicized travelers and clergy alike as they reckoned with the religious mores, medical prohibitions and laws that prohibited abortion at home and structured it abroad. In the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson decision, understanding this history may help us anticipate the role of religious communities in securing abortion access in the future.

Gillian Frank is a historian of sexuality and religion and a visiting affiliate fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Culture, Society and Religion. He is the author of numerous academic articles on the histories of sexuality, gender and religion (which have appeared in venues like the Journal of the History of Sexuality, American Jewish History, and Gender and History), and public facing scholarship (with bylines in publications including The Washington Post, Time, Jezebel and Slate). He is co-editor of Devotions and Desires: Histories of Sexuality and Religion in the 20th Century United States (UNC Press: 2018). Frank is currently at work on a manuscript called A Sacred Choice: Liberal Religion and the Struggle for Abortion Before Roe v. Wade (forthcoming UNC Press). You can listen to his podcast Sexing History–co-hosted with Lauren Gutterman–which explores how the history of sexuality shapes our present, wherever you stream your shows.

Presented by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation and co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for Jewish Studies.

Abortion Travel and Religious Activism Before Roe v. Wade | Gillian Frank | 10/24/22

In following the moderns in the making of scientific knowledge, STS scholars have shown an interesting discrepancy between what scientists do in practice and what they say they do in theory. Indeed, scientific objectivity has been entirely reconfigured and reinterpreted in very different ways. In continuity with this endeavor, and because the definition of the object goes hand in hand with the definition of the subject, one of my obsessions has been to re-interrogate the definition of the knowing subject. If another definition of scientific objectivity emerges, and if science is socially or collectively and materially made—depending on our conception of the social—what does this do to our classical notion of the knowing subject? What does it do to the most powerful and operative myth of the modern: “the disincorporated brain”? And by extension, what does it do to our notions of the person, the individual genius, the rational actor, the psyche, and or subjectivity, to which this myth is anchored?

Hélène Mialet is a Scholar-in-Residence with The Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley 2013-2014. More information can be found at http://criticaltheory.berkeley.edu.

Introduction: Robert Kaufman, Professor of Comparative Literature and Co-Director of The Program in Critical Theory, UC Berkeley

Respondent: Églantine Colon, Professor of French, UC Berkeley

Politics Beyond the Human: How to Think the Knowing Subject Anew?... | Helene Mialet | 4/2/2014

The opening session of the Neoliberalism + Biopolitics Working Group provides a space for discussion of the lasting insights, limitations, and potential applications of Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79. Linking neoliberalism and biopolitics at both the historical and conceptual level, Foucault’s prescient lecture series lays the groundwork for the working group’s concern with the contemporary management of populations through diverse practices of economization, privatization, and financialization.

Hans Sluga is a Professor of Philosophy and William Callison is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.  More information can be found at criticaltheory.berkeley.edu.

Neoliberalism + Biopolitics | Revisiting Foucault: The Biopolitics... | Hans Sluga | 9/17/14

In this session, we reflect on how norms and practices of neoliberal governmentality are disseminated and transformed across borders. Professors Rofel and Bargu’s extensive studies of China and Turkey respectively, offer new insights into how different forms of neoliberalism transform social and political life in various contexts, while also calling into question the enduring viability of neoliberalism as an analytic frame. We aim collectively to problematize and contest Eurocentric approaches to the study of neoliberalism, while also investigating the role under neoliberalism of NGOs, IGOs, corporations and state institutions. We hope to foster a comparative and interdisciplinary dialogue to reassess both how neoliberalisms function as practices in the contemporary world, and what limitations the overall framework of neoliberalism may pose for the analysis of contemporary transformations of social life. We consider questions concerning the privatization of public goods, international investment and development programs, the dissemination of norms of entrepreneurship, the role of experts in development projects, micro-lending, and the effects of such developments on “public culture,” sexual and gender norms, and kinship structures.

Introduction: William Callison, Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science, UC Berkeley. More information can be found at criticaltheory.berkeley.edu.

Neoliberalism + Biopolitics | Globalizing Neoliberalism(s)? | Julia Elyachar | 10/8/14

In this meeting we discuss the potential uses and limitations of Marxist approaches to the contemporary theorization and study of neoliberal capitalism. While some have described neoliberalism as a modification in the mode of production, entailing new ideological categories and a retrenchment of class power, others have emphasized its non-unified character and its unique forms of governmentality, which have reconfigured relations between the state, economy, and citizen-subjects. This session hopes to engage and think with Marxist traditions by asking which central insights remain essential to account for neoliberal capitalism–from surplus value and capital accumulation to commodification and fetishism–and whether new analytical tools are required to grasp changes in contemporary capitalist power relations. This interdisciplinary dialogue may consider the distinctive elements of neoliberalism such as financialization, human capital, economization, and entrepreneurialism.

Wendy Brown is Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science at the University of California Berkeley, where she is also affiliated with the Department of Rhetoric and interdisciplinary graduate program in Critical Theory. A scholar of historical and contemporary political theory, her most recent books are Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010), The Power of Tolerance (with Rainer Forst, 2013), and Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (2015).

Michael Burawoy has studied industrial workplaces in different parts of the world — Zambia, Chicago, Hungary and Russia — through participant observation. Throughout his career he has engaged with Marxism, seeking to reconstruct it in the light of his research and more broadly in the light of historical challenges of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Colleen Lye is Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley. She is the author of America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945 (Princeton University Press, 2005), a study of the making of “Asiatic racial form” through the interactions of naturalist literature and U.S. policy in an era of U.S. expansion across the Pacific. Currently she is working on a new project on Asian American literary formation after the 1960s and its relationship to the globalization of knowledge economies.

Richard Walker’s research is focused on economic geography, regional development, capitalism and politics, cities and urbanism, resources and environment, California, class and race. Professor Walker’s best known work is in economic geography, especially The Capitalist Imperative: Territory, Technology and Industrial Growth (Blackwell, 1989), with Michael Storper – one of the most cited books in the field.

Introduction: William Callison, Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science, UC Berkeley. More information can be found at criticaltheory.berkeley.edu.

Neoliberalism + Biopolitics | Neoliberalism and Marxist... | Brown, Burawoy, Lye, Walker | 11/12/14

The first full critical biography of Benjamin in any language, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Harvard 2014) is the capstone of a twenty-year collaboration between scholars Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings on Walter Benjamin’s life, work, and critical legacy. The Program in Critical Theory brings them together with Harvard University Press editor Lindsay Waters for a discussion of the book’s implications for Benjamin scholarship. Critical Theory co-director Martin Jay moderates a conversation on the genesis of the project and the possibility of writing a “Benjaminian” biography.

Introduction: Robert Kaufman, Professor of Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley

On Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life | Howard Eiland | 11/4/14

The Christian campaign against secular Communism was a defining phenomenon in Europe’s modern history. Over the last few years, scholars have begun to uncover its many roots—especially in anti-Semitism—and to chart the vast intellectual production and political mobilization it inspired. This talk will add to this burgeoning work by exploring the role of Protestant anti-Catholic polemics in shaping anti-secularism. I will show how crucial anti-Catholic tropes from the late nineteenth century, according to which Catholicism denied free will and enslaved individuals psychologically, resurfaced as a crucial anti-Communist trope in the twentieth century. By tracing this genealogy, I will investigate how intra-religious concepts were utilized to explain allegedly secular movements.

Udi Greeberg is an associate professor of European history at Dartmouth College. He is the author of the prize-winning The Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 2015), as well as many articles on European thought and politics. He has also written for The New Republic, The Nation, Dissent, Boston Review, and other publications.

The Anti-Catholic Origins of Anti-Communism | Udi Greenberg | 2/25/20

The Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI) was established in 2013 by UC Berkeley’s College of Letters and Sciences: Division of Arts and Humanities with a mission to support the programming and development of several dynamic interdisciplinary research units in the humanities and social sciences.

Currently CICI serves The Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, The Program in Critical Theory, and the Digital Humanities at Berkeley, three programs led by a highly diverse community of 200 faculty, advisors, scholars and graduate students from nearly 30 campus departments and schools.

On Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life | Howard Eiland | 11/4/14

The Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry

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