Confounding Religious-Racial Categories: African-Asian Encounters in Everyday Life

Panel Convenor(s)

• SS

  Shobana Shankar

  Stony Brook University, United States

Panel Chair(s)

• SS

  Shobana Shankar

  Stony Brook University, United States

Panel Discussant(s)

• TK

  Taushif Kara

  King's College London, United Kingdom

Presenter(s)

• BS

  Benjamin Soares

  University of Florida, United States
• DZ

  Deng Zheyuan

  Shanghai Normal University, China
• AK

  Anneeth Kaur Hundle

  University of California, Irvine, United States
• MI

  Musa Ibrahim

  Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana

Religion is not commonly examined in African-Asian interactions, in large part because secularist Western biases in scholarship and policy interests foreground economic and political interests. Yet religion plays a crucial role in the daily lives of Africans and Asians, who, coming from vast diverse regions, have long navigated religious difference, coexistence, and contestations. This panel explores how, in African-Asian comparative and cross-regional studies, religion has been a vital sphere of boundary making and unmaking, self and communal reorientations, and cross-cultural creation.

Covering different African-Asian geographies, the papers center lived experiences in religiously heterogenous spaces wherein encounters with others are quotidian, ongoing, contested at times and at others convivial and productive; these encounters challenge any sense of an idealized or unchanging religious tradition or community separate from others. In so doing, the papers highlight how Africa-Asia religious dynamics reveal dynamic negotiations of difference, belonging and exclusion, and cultural expression and identification. They also show how religious ideas and practices have been invigorated or reactivated in many areas of life outside formal ritual life, including migration and resettlement, interracial marriage and family life, political movements for independence and sovereignty after European colonization, sociality and aesthetics, business, and media such as film-making. The panelists foreground new field-based research and highlight fresh methodological approaches to the study of religions and religiosity across regions which scholars have too often treated as different and divergent from one another, in part because of implicit assumptions about racial and civilizational differences.

Presentations:

• 14:00 - 15:45 GMT

  Thinking about Lived Islam: The View from West Africa and South India
  

  Presenter: Benjamin Soares – University of Florida
• 14:00 - 15:45 GMT

  Chinese Muslims and Religious Encounters in Dakar's "Chinatown"
  

  Presenter: Deng Zheyuan – Shanghai Normal University
• 14:00 - 15:45 GMT

  African Sikhs: Africa and Africans in the Making of African and South Asian Minority Identity
  

  Presenter: Anneeth Kaur Hundle – University of California, Irvine
• 14:00 - 15:45 GMT

  Riyadha: Where Islam meets Kung-Fu at Sokoto Cinema – “It's like halal meets high-kick!"
  

  Presenter: Musa Ibrahim – Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology