Critical Theory | 2020-2021

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

The Program in Critical Theory & City Lights Books, San Francisco, present a talk by Howard Eiland, “Hamlet as Trauerspiel?”

Origin of the German Trauerspiel was Walter Benjamin’s first full, historically-oriented analysis of modernity. Readers of English knew it until last year under the title The Origin of German Tragic Drama, but in fact the subject is something else: the play of mourning. Howard Eiland’s completely new English translation and introduction (Harvard University Press, 2019), the first to appear since 1977, is closer to the German text and more consistent with Benjamin’s philosophical idiom.

Focusing on the extravagant and historical seventeenth-century theatrical genre of the trauerspiel, precursor of the opera, Benjamin identifies allegory as the constitutive trope of the Baroque and of modernity itself. Allegorical perception bespeaks a world of mutability and equivocation, a melancholy sense of eternal transience without access to the transcendentals of the medieval mystery plays—though no less haunted and bedeviled, and no less susceptible to momentary apotheosis. History as trauerspiel—as shaped by the base machination of schemers—is in Benjamin’s account the condition as well as subject of modern allegory in its inscription of the abyssal, or ever-increasing, apparently incomprehensible, layers of depth, experience, and interpretive questions.

Benjamin’s investigation of the trauerspiel includes German texts and late Renaissance European drama such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Calderón’s Life Is a Dream. The book’s Prologue is one of Benjamin’s most important and difficult pieces of writing. It sets forth his method of indirection and his idea of the “constellation” (which would become crucial to thinkers across several generations of the Frankfurt School, as well to other critics, philosophers, theorists, and artists) as a key means of grasping the world, of constructing dynamic unities from the myriad bits of daily life and historical materials. Thoroughly annotated with a philological and historical introduction and other explanatory and supplementary material, Eilan’s rigorous and elegant new translation brings fresh understanding to a cardinal work by one of the twentieth century’s greatest literary critics.

Eiland’s talk “Hamlet as Trauerspiel?” approaches Benjamin’s interpretation of Hamlet—which deems the play a consummate trauerspiel—as a way into the thorny interior of the trauerspiel book itself.  Benjamin presents the theory of the trauerspiel as containing  “prolegomena” to the interpretation of Shakespearean “tragedy” (Benjamin faults critics for their “loose usage” of the term “tragedy”), and to the interpretation of Hamlet in particular. Eiland examines Benjamin’s claims for decisive historical and formal-stylistic differences between the genres of tragedy and trauerspiel—the former based in pagan myth and cult, the latter in Judeo-Christian history and spectacle; the former embedded in dialogue, the latter in the Dingwelt—and Eiland then briefly traces these distinctions back through the German critical-philological tradition, to Herder and A.W. Schlegel. Eiland focuses, first, on the philosophical-historical “antinomies of allegoresis” that structure the trauerspiel world, and then on Benjamin’s discussion of the enigmatic themes of “fate” and “play.” These issues are all reflected and crystallized in Hamlet‘s death scene, which Benjamin here presents—in its “vehement externality,” its crucial reliance on props and its profusion of corpses, as well as in its hint of apotheosis—as typical of the trauerspiel. All of which leads Benjamin to conclude that Hamlet’s death is definitely not tragic. Eiland takes issue with this last assessment, arguing for the prince as a tragic hero of recognition and remembrance.

Walter Benjamin on William Shakespeare: "Hamlet as Trauerspiel?" | Howard Eiland | 2/10/20

The Program in Critical Theory & City Lights Books, San Francisco, present a panel-and-audience discussion with Howard Eiland: “On Walter Benjamin’s Origin of the German Trauerspiel.”

A panel of UC Berkeley faculty including Catherine Flynn (English; Irish Studies; Critical Theory), Niklaus Largier (German; Comparative Literature; Critical Theory), and Jeffrey Knapp (English; Film and Media) will speak with Eiland about Benjamin’s book, including issues involving Eiland’s new translation of and introduction to the text, as well as those raised by Eiland’s Monday, February 10 talk, “Hamlet as Trauerspiel?”. The panel will then open things up by inviting questions and discussion from the audience.

Howard Eiland taught literature for several decades at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is co-editor, translator, and author in the ongoing Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings series from Harvard University Press.  The many volumes in the series that he’s translated, edited, and/or co-authored include The Arcades Project (2002); Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (2014); and, most recently, the new translation of and introduction to Benjamin’s Origin of the German Trauerspiel (2019).

On Walter Benjamin's Origin of the German Trauerspiel | Howard Eiland | 2/11/20

The Program in Critical Theory & City Lights Books, SF, Present a Seminar/Discussion with Howard Eiland on his recently published book: Notes on Literature, Film, and Jazz (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019).

Howard Eiland’s Notes on Literature, Film, and Jazz (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) is a highly erudite and courageous inquiry into the arts. Weaving through a host of “classic” texts—literary, cinematic, and musical—these notes of a virtouso close reader set up echoes and reflections across signature moments. These “notes” address a dissident force in art while discussing an impressively diverse range of works and ideas in literature, film, and jazz. For instance: Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Jane Austen mix with Dickens and Kafka; Carl Dreyer intersects with Mizoguchi, Bresson, Lynch, and Madden; Eric Dolphy and Cecil Taylor process Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. In a quasi-musical way, Notes interweaves elements within and between works—elements that open onto the unknown in an utterly questioning and self-questioning way. Eiland’s eloquent writing itself exemplifies this “aesthetic,” if it may be called that; the writing is enthralling in its capacity to challenge both the works examined and those who would assess them. Notes focuses on those energies in art that enact image spaces and spatiotemporal alterations in which life is never quite what it seems to be. This extraordinarily original book will interest all concerned with broad implications of developments in literature, film, and jazz.

Eiland will be joined in conversation by two jazz pianists and UC Berkeley literary critics: Michael Lucey (French; Comparative Literature; Program in Women, Gender, and Sexuality; Program in Critical Theory) and Maya Kronfeld (Comparative Literature).

Eiland will read briefly from and discuss the book. For those wishing to attend the seminar/discussion, please email critical_theory@berkeley.edu to receive excerpts from the book.

Howard Eiland taught literature for several decades at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is co-editor, translator, and author in the ongoing Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings series from Harvard University Press. The many volumes in the series that he’s translated, edited, and/or co-authored include The Arcades Project (2002); Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (2014); and, most recently, the new translation of and introduction to Benjamin’s Origin of the German Trauerspiel (2019). Eiland has also worked for decades as a critic writing on literature, film, and jazz; Notes contains a sampling from among the most acute of these critical pieces.

This event is co-sponsored by the Program in Critical Theory and City Lights Booksellers and Publishers.

Notes on Literature, Film, and Jazz | Howard Eiland | 2/12/20

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's Origin of the German Trauerspiel | Howard Eiland | 2/11/20

The Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry

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