Publications

Ed. Katrine Smiet, Radboud University Press.

For the Witch Hunts, Race, & the Persecution of Women, Antiquity to the 21st Century conference. Collaborations with: MONITORacism magazine; SAGAS, University of Florence; International Centre on Racism (ICR), Edge Hill University, UK.

Co-author: Nyanchama Okemwa. Special Issue of Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies on the Intersection of Race in Religion in African Political Communities. Co-edited with Josias Tembo.

Patricia Schor and Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar. Forthcoming. Religions (Race–Religion Constellations: Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Antiblackness). ISSN 2077-1444.

Exploring the Entanglement of Race and Religion in Africa. Co-author: Josias Tembo. Special Issue of Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies on the Intersection of Race in Religion in African Political Communities. Co-edited with Josias Tembo.

In 2008, the Dutch Party for the Animals submitted a proposal to ban religious slaughter without prior stunning. The proposal was widely supported in the Lower House but finally rejected in the Upper House in 2012, mainly on the grounds of religious freedom. Academia was keen to study the polemic, but no research has attempted to study the controversy through a lens of racialization. This is remarkable, given the well-documented increase in Islamophobia and the political use of racism since (at least) the turn of the millennium in The Netherlands (and the geopolitical “West” at large). In this article, I demonstrate that a racializing dynamic is actually part and parcel of the Dutch controversy. I apply a reflexive thematic analysis to study archival material from the Dutch Parliamentarian debate and show that the dispute foremost references Islamic slaughter. Appeals to civilization, accusations of barbarism, dystopian warnings against Islamization, and invocations of Judeo-Christianity are discursive elements that feature in the debate and have racializing ramifications for Muslims. By unmasking this racializing dynamic, I offer a means to empirically explore the ways in which taxonomies of religion and race intersect with and through the politicization of animal ethics. When considering religious slaughter it is essential, I ultimately maintain, to observe the violence caused by socially constructed racial and species differences. Only if we hold both in serious regard do we have a chance to begin to imagine ourselves in relation to others differently and move towards more just futures—for humans and non-humans alike.

In this article, I argue that a trans-Atlantic account of the constellations of race and religion demands that we understand racist thinking to be constituted by complex conceptual formations and relations. The failure to identify the conceptual complexity and interactive relations in racist thinking has led to universalist and exclusionary definitions of racist thinking and limited conceptions of the constellations of race and religion. Because the supposed universal definitions of racist thinking are formulated from particular regions of the trans-Atlantic, it has led to the masking and rejection of other formations of racist thinking from other regions of the trans-Atlantic. To avoid this, this article proposes a Trans-Atlantic Interactive and Relational Approach (TAIRA) that can help us to continue unmasking and understanding the trans-Atlantic connections between race and religion.

For ‘A Tribute to Charles Mills’, Spinoza Symposium.

Scholarship on religious inequality in Europe has focused mainly on the position of religious minorities, primarily Jews and Muslims. Investigations into Islamophobia, antisemitism, and other forms of discrimination and oppression, however, are merely one side of the coin. This article draws attention to Christian privilege as a different, but related phenomenon. It understands ‘privilege’ to be part of the study of hegemony, as the asymmetrical counterpart of structural oppression. The article situates Christian privilege within secular Christian hegemony in Western Europe and explores its relation to racial and religious exclusion. It identifies three different types of Christian privilege and outlines a framework for normatively evaluating them.

The growing influence of Latin American decolonial thought has animated several African scholars in Africa, especially South Africa. As a result of this influence, numerous articles have been published calling for the decolonization, through the decolonial turn, not only of university curricula but also of the processes of knowledge production. But there has been silence on the impact of decolonial theory on African postcolonial theory. With the decolonial call for the decolonization of postcolonial theory and its influence on African scholarship, what is the position of African postcolonial theory in these decolonial interventions? With a focus on African postcolonial theory, this article interrogates Ramón Grosfoguel’s call to decolonize postcolonial theory, thereby establishing a critical epistemological dialogue between decolonial theory and African postcolonial theory.

In recent years, the vast and expansive oeuvre of cultural critic and theorist Sylvia Wynter has received enthusiastic response from a seemingly ever-increasing group of scholars. Drawing from and contributing to this great interest in Wynter’s writings, this essay further elucidates and build upon one of her often referenced concepts: “demonic ground.” Despite Wynter’s use of the terrestrial term “ground,” I argue that the concept is fundamentally oceanic. I then build on this insight and the work of Fred Moten, Alexander Weheliye and others to coin “demonic ocean” as an alternative vantage point of Black study. The article brings together scholarship in religious studies, Black studies, and the blue humanities.

In the past decade, animal and antiracist politics are on the rise in the Netherlands and Belgium. Both integrate feminism into their political practice, albeit in divergent ways. Nevertheless, their core concerns are generally viewed as antithetical on a conceptual, normative, and politically practical level. This paper explores the extent to which feminist, antiracist, and animal concerns are (in)commensurable. Coupling the ecofeminist analysis of dualism developed by Val Plumwood with recent developments in black studies advanced by Claire Jean Kim and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, processes of animalisation and dehumanisation are scrutinised. It is demonstrated that the onto-epistemological categories of gender, race, and animality connect on the level of being subjected to the logic of domination exemplary of Western thought (1), and on the level of being the abject yet constitutive Others of the normative category of ‘the human’ (2). Subsequently, to build bridges between feminist, antiracist, and animal advocacy movements, it is argued that animal advocates need to critically question the assumption of ‘human privilege’ and stop using slavery analogies, while feminists and antiracists should aspire to divest from human supremacy. A new approach to collective liberation in the Low Countries is needed, one that acknowledges the interconnectedness of gender, race, and animality alike.

Ed. Maria Robaszkiewicz. Hannah Arendt: Challenges of Plurality. Springer

While there may be fewer nation-states across the globe, the logic that led to the creation of the nation-state remains ever present. According to Arendt, the nation-state is, from its start ‘faulty’. I begin by inquiring why this is the case according to Arendt. Next, I turn to my recent work in conceptual history on the intersection of the categories of race and religion in Europe. My contention is that race and religion are co-constructed categories and potentially exclusionary. The role of the race-religion constellation, I contend, has been masked in the creation of the Westphalian nation-state, and only when made visible, can we truly understand the ‘faulty start’ of the nation-state. I develop this in section two and then return to Arendt who, in my view, was unable to recognise this because of the illusion and lure of ‘secularism’ and her unacknowledged Jewish exceptionalism. Arendt affirms the secular myth which relies on a problematic binary between religion/secular, a binary that is used to justify assimilation, racism and dehumanisation – past and present. It is this blind spot, which is widely shared today in academic and political circles, that prevented Arendt from seeing the constitutive relationship between the race-religion-state which not only produces ‘the refugee’ but constructs ‘the other’. In this vein, this blind spot sustains state/structural Christian power and privilege. To demonstrate this, I return to Origins as well as her essay We Refugees. I argue that this blind spot must be rectified if we are to understand and challenge the ongoing denial of plurality and the exclusion of difference from the nationstate, as well as the different faces of contemporary racism.

Until recently, race was largely overlooked and obscured in the field of (Western) esotericism. This essay makes a case for the significance of engaging race by presenting research on racialized spirits and the racialized nature of UFO abduction accounts. Available to all through Open-Access (see link)

In the Special Issue of the Journal Political Theology on Jean Bodin’s and the Sovereignty of Exclusion. Co-edited with James Renton. Issue 6, Volume 21, 2020. 475-478.

As we write, the demand for justice of Black Lives Matter rings in the ears of the academy: pull down the statues, decolonize the canon! Seemingly against that grain, especially for scholars of racism, we are nonetheless publishing this collection of articles on one of the towering figures of white privileged male Western thought: Jean Bodin (1529/1530– 1596), the French philosopher, jurist, historian, economist, whose definition of sovereignty as the power of the State was one of the defining contributions to political thought in occi- dental Europe in the midst of its bloody civil wars, and the beginnings of colonialism over- seas. How can our publication be justified at this moment?

Justine Bakker, “Covid-19 and Environmental Racism in Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley’.” For CounterPoint: Navigating Knowledge. May 13, 2020.

In this contribution, Topolski argues that the erasure and denial of Europe’s race–religion constellation can help us understand how it has been possible to resurrect the divisive, exclusionary and problematic myth of a ‘Judaeo-Christian’ tradition in Europe. While this term can be, and has been, used in diverse and contradictory ways in the past few decades, Topolski is most interested in how it masks Islamophobia. To do this, she turns to Europe’s denied race–religion constellation. She contends that we cannot understand European racism, past or present, without making the race–religion constellation visible, and that its invisibility today is not accidental. Next, Topolski wants to show how the current resurrection of the term ‘Judaeo-Christian’ serves to mask and conceal the race–religion constellation. The focus is thus on the exclusion of religions that have not assimilated to the accepted secularized norms of white Christianity, particularly its Aryan/Protestant form, and how this exclusion is connected to the race–religion constellation. In the final part, Topolski explains how the latter might serve the collapsing European project, as well as struggling nation-states, as a scapegoat mechanism to blame Europe’s Others for problems Europe has itself created. This leads to their further exclusion and a lack of tolerance in terms of practice and rituals (which might be connected). For these reasons, Topolski argues we need to reject the use of the term ‘Judaeo-Christian’ and make visible the hidden race–religion constellation.

Genealogies of ‘Jews’ and ‘Muslims’: Social Imaginaries in the Race–Religion Nexus. A special issue guest-edited by Yolande Jansen and Nasar Meer Volume 54. Issue 1 & 2. 71-90.

Special Issue of the Journal The European Legacy Judith Butler’s Parting Ways or Ways of Cohabitation. Guest Editors: Anya Topolski & Louis Klee. Volume 25, Issue 3. 266-281.

In postcolonial theory and critical race theory, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is (in)famously known for two things – firstly, for his lord–bondsman dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel [1807] 1977), which has been mistranslated as the ‘master–slave dialectic’; and secondly, for the racism expressed in his lectures on the Philosophy of History (Hegel [1837] 2001). The lord–bondsman dialectic as a struggle for spiritual unity of two aspects of a shape of self-consciousness in the Phenomenology has been construed in terms of the struggle of racialised and colonised African subjects in Hegel’s description in the Philosophy of...

Ed. Claartje Bulten, Charlotte Perquin-Deelen & Mijke Sinnighe Damsté. Van der Heijden Instituut Series. Deventer: Wolters Kluwer 2020.

Recent scholarship increasingly defines Islamophobia as a form of racism. The possibility that Islamophobia could also manifest itself as religious or cultural bigotry is generally overlooked. This article argues that although anti-Islam bigotry is intertwined with anti-Muslim racism, the two are conceptually distinct. Making this distinction allows us to better analyze, unmask, and critically assess Islamophobia. The article conceptually explores the similarities and differences between anti-Muslim racism and anti-Islam bigotry.

Justine Bakker, “Offshore: Descending into the Blue Humanities.” For CounterPoint: Navigating Knowledge. November 6, 2019.

Justine Bakker, “Hidden Presence: Race and/in the History, Construct and Study of Western Esotericism” (journal article in Religion, advance online publication July 2019)

The critique of Western metaphysics outlines how the African other has been depicted as not fully human in relation to the western subject’s identity. Hence, on an ontological level, the other or difference has been denied or excluded, which accounts for the violence of the colonial logic of conceptualizing African alterity or difference. The challenge of thinking the postcolonial situation in the African context has mostly been how to think liberating difference and alterity outside the violent colonial paradigm constituted by the creation of race as Blackness, the Black man and the fiction of Africa. Hence the problem may be formulated accordingly in the following question: How may a sense of identity be thought that does not deny the existence of the other or difference as fully human? Restated: How may postcolonial African thought avoid constituting the same logic of race as it aims to overcome the colonial logic of alterity? Accordingly, this essay aims to critically engage with the thought of Achille Mbembe and his attempts to address the question. Even though Mbembe attends to the question of essentialism in African imaginations of otherness in On the Postcolony, he largely remains silent in this work on the ethical question of violent contemporary ways of conceptualizing otherness in African thoughts and sociopolitical practices. Therefore, while taking Mbembe’s social ontology that takes existence of differ- ence and how difference constitutes identity (but largely remaining violent) as a point of departure, this essay will, subsequently, argue that in the Critique of Black Reason, one finds a step toward a postcolonial nonviolent notion of alterity based on the recognition of the in-common existence within one world we share, firstly, by outlining Mbembe’s formulation of a non-essentialist African identity that, in turn, opens the way for what we will call here a postcolonial ontology and, secondly, to outline how this ontology reimagines the relation of the universal and particular making it a postcolonial universal ontology.

Achille Mbembe’s article “African Modes of Self-Writing” (2001), which is a precursor to his book On the Postcolony (2001), challenges essentialist conceptions of African identity and their theoretical and political poverty, and in turn offers a fluid conception of African subjectivities. Reviewing anti-colonial and postcolonial theories of African identity, Mbembe contends that dominant notions of African identity are tropes of Nativism and Afro-radicalism premised on historicist thinking, which lead to a dead-end. He utilises Michel Foucault’s notion of self-styling and argues that, contrary to Nativist and Afro-radicalist notions of African identity— which deny African subjects spaces or sites of autonomous actions that constantly constitute their identities—African subjects in Mbembe’s view are existential works of art forged through the practices of the self. Critique on Mbembe’s “African Modes of Self-Writing” and On the Postcolony has been dominated by the polarities of essentialist and anti-essentialist views of African identity and their socio-political and material consequence. Except for Jewsiewicki (2002), none has interrogated Mbembe’s appropriation of Foucault’s notion of the practice of liberty or self-styling and its theoretical and political consequence on Mbembe’s conception of the socio- political and cultural freedom of the African subjects. It is the aim of this essay to interrogate Mbembe’s narrow appropriation of Foucault’s conception of self-styling and its consequent problematic theorisation of African identity as enacted by practices of the self. By way of introduction, I will contextualise Mbembe’s critique of African modes of imagining African identity, before I analyse his bounded appropriation of Foucault’s notion of self-styling, and conclude by exposing his consequent problematic conception of African practices of freedom.

This article traces the hidden race-religion constellation in Europe. The term “race-religion constellation” refers to the connection or co-constitution of the categories of race and “religion.”

Special issue 'Islamophobia and Surveillance: Genealogies of a Global Order'. Ed. James Renton.