Race/Religion/War: A Symposium

This symposium at UC Berkeley will explore the uses of race and religion to establish war as a strategy of political power, and the uses of war to stabilize the epistemologies of race and religion as intimately linked organizing categories of social life.

This two-day symposium at UC Berkeley will explore the uses of race and religion to establish war as a strategy of political power, and conversely the uses of war to stabilize the epistemologies of race and religion as intimately linked organizing categories of social life—what we might call the “race/religion/war” nexus.

This inquiry finds its proximate cause in the racialization of Islam that has animated the contemporary U.S. led “war on terror,” as well as its doppelgangers in places like London, the Parisian Banlieues, Chechnya, Palestine, Darfur, Kashmir, and the Huiger regions of China. Our aim, however, will be to consider how the race/religion/war nexus coheres in the present precisely because of a set of much longer historico-theoretical processes. That is, multiple overlapping genealogies mutually determine our political present: from the medieval religious wars of the Crusades to the formation of race in the conquest of the Americas; from the birth of the modern state-system in its deployment of antisemitism to the racializing rubrics of development in the capitalist world system; from the colonial wars of high imperialism to the significance of third world proxy wars for the purportedly secular rivalry of the Cold War.

The symposium will animate potential convergences in current scholarship on the longue durée of the race/religion/war nexus in what have been discrepant, if deeply interrelated, knowledge projects.