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Religion has become a force to be reckoned with in the contemporary global geopolitical landscape and as such demands a reassessment of once predominant understandings of processes of secularisation, as well as the meanings of, and tensions inherent within, secular assumptions and secularist positions. The so-called ‘resurgence’ of religion in the public sphere in recent decades is now a significant area of interdisciplinary scholarship eliciting a complex array of responses, ranging from vehement opposition to the very idea that religious concepts and commitments have a right to expression in political debates, to a reassessment of the origins and implications of divisions between the secular and the religious and their relationship to the nation state. The notion that there is no singular secularism, but rather a plurality of secularisms, and of ‘religion’ as an invention of European modernity and colonial interests are two of many emerging efforts to reconceptualise the meanings of religion and the secular and the entangled relationship between them. The MA Religion in Global Politics offers an opportunity to examine these questions and issues at an advanced level by studying the complex relationships between religion and politics in the histories and contemporary political contexts (both national and international) of the regions of the Asia, Africa and the Middle East. A core objective is to challenge the Eurocentrism of current debates around secularism, secularisation, the nature of the public sphere within modernity, by indicating the plurality and contested nature of conceptions of both religion and the secular when considered in a global framework. The programme is unique: it has a regional focus and disciplinary breadth rarely addressed in similar programmes in the subject area, draws on a wealth of multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives (Law, International Relations and Politics, History, Philosophy, Development, Anthropology, Migration and Diaspora Studies, and Gender Studies, amongst others) and has a rigorous theoretical basis built in, such that students will be familiarised with the current state-of-the-art debates regarding religion in the public sphere, secularisms, postsecularism, and political theology and their relevance to issues of democracy, war, violence, human rights, humanitarianism and development, multiculturalism, nationalism, sectarianism, religious extremism, and free speech amongst others. The range of course options available on the programme is unparalleled, ensuring that students will benefit from a truly interdisciplinary, intellectually rigorous, and regionally focused programme.
2012 •
What is modern China? Many have tried to answer this short yet challenging question. However, most of the time the answers are drawn simplistically based on the images of China’s current economic success. These images present China as “having been, being, and always being” a node of social and cultural interaction. These images, the 2008 Olympics for instance, have flattened China to a single cognitive entity – the twenty-first century China. Modern China presents us with a dual image. One is a society transforming itself through economic development and social revolution. The other is the world’s largest and oldest bureaucratic state, struggling with the multiplicity of problems of economic and political management. To understand China today, we need to understand Chinese history. In this course, we will try to answer the contemporary question, “What is modern China?” from a historical perspective.
This paper will focus on pictorial representations of some marginal groups produced during the Ming and Qing dynasties. Alluding to the wide world of the jianghu (literally “river and lake”), these paintings describe the realm of characters — often associated with the underworld society— who were always in transit, such as wandering beggars, blind musicians, itinerant entertainers and performers, fortune-tellers and so on. From the Ming dynasty onwards, these colourful characters, popularised and romanticised by fiction and novels, started to be treated as an independent theme in pictorial art. In paintings, they are often described in comic or picaresque situations, such as quarrelling or even fighting scenes. This paper explores visual depictions of this particular group and deals with the following questions: What function and meaning did such works have? Are these images plausible portrayals of real-world situations or are they carrying social or political undertones? Through these inquiries, I argue that these works might be seen as painted counterparts to the fictitious world of satirical or grotesque novels. Thus, the painted characters were used as a commentary on society’s (especially the educated elite’s) vices and shortcomings, becoming a subject suitable to express social or even political frustration.
2019 •
This seminar invites you to explore the history of interactions between China and the Islamic world across the greater Indian Ocean region, sometimes called the “maritime Silk Road.” It will focus especially on Muslims living in China itself, who played a particularly important role bridging these diverse spaces and cultures. Temporally and spatially broad, the course covers the 1,400 years since the rise of the Tang Dynasty to the east and Islamic societies to the west. For most of those fourteen centuries, China and the Islamic world boasted the largest cities on earth, such as Chang’an, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Beijing, Cairo, and Constantinople. Before European expansion, flows of people, goods, and ideas between those urban foci accounted for the majority of the world’s economic activity and some of its richest cultural achievements. Those complex exchanges have left some of the least understood yet quietly consequential legacies for the more recent era of nationalism, Western geopolitical dominance, and “China’s rise.” This seminar offers multiple ways of understanding Chinese, Islamic, and global history, and illuminates aspects of contemporary Chinese state and society, intra-Asian exchange, and international relations. It will encourage you to think (and think again) about both interconnectedness and difference in the context of greater Asia. It will demand that you look beyond the framework of the nation-state, but will also ask you to contemplate how nationalisms have shaped understandings of the pre-national past. It will invite you, furthermore, to consider whether our basic definitions of “China” and “Islam” adequately account for the connected histories we will discuss. Specific themes will include community formation, material exchange, texts and transculturation, art and architecture, religious thought and practice, border-crossing and mobility, border-making and inequalities, state-building and state-minority relations, the transformations and disruptions of the European colonial era, the transition from dynastic empires to modern nation-states, processes of ethnicization and minoritization, and the “presence of the past.”
Journal of Chinese Religions 31, 229–31.
Catherine Despeux, ed., Bouddhisme et Lettrés dans la Chine Médiévale,2003 •
Understanding Chinese Religions
Understanding Chinese Religions full textTeaching Theology & Religion
The Tao of Textbooks: Taoism in Introductory World Religion Texts2001 •
The Middle Ground Journal
“Teaching World History as Family History; China as a Case in Point”2013 •
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