Join us for a two-day virtual conference, featuring scholars of Africana Studies, Religious Studies, Anthropology, History, Sociology, Law, and Politics, who will share their expertise on religion and democracy on the African continent. The event will feature a keynote address by Mahmood Mamdani, the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University and author of the book, Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities, (Harvard University Press, 2020), and result in the publication of an edited volume to be made freely available next year.
Registration
The conference will be hosted on Zoom; attendees must register separately for each session. Click on the orange ‘Zoom Registration’ buttons or linked session titles below to register and to learn more about the sessions and speakers.
(Note: the above button redirects to the Zoom registration page for the first conference session, “Historical Formations of Religion and Democracy.”)
All sessions will be recorded and made available on the Religion, Race & Democracy Lab’s Vimeo channel.
Schedule of Events
Saturday, May 7: Looking Back
9–11 AM EST
Historical Formations of Religion and Democracy
11:30 AM–1:30 PM EST
African Religious Movements & Democracies
2–4 PM EST
Keynote Lecture: Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities
Sunday, May 8: Looking Forward
10 am–12 PM EST
Contemporary Conflicts, the State, and Religion in Africa
1–4 pm EST
New Theories and the Future of Religion and Democracy in Africa (followed by Closing Remarks)
Intellectual Focus
The modern categories of “democracy” and “religion” both took shape through processes in which the continent of Africa and its people often served as constitutive others—foils against which these modern Euro-American concepts were defined. Thus conceptualization was used to justify the exclusion of Africans and African-descended peoples and their traditions from democratic processes of governance and the legal and academic categories of “religion” well into the 21st century. All the while, the imperial conquest and exploitation of the African continent and its people was deemed vital to the maintenance of European democracy at home and its spread abroad.
Scholars such as Daniel Dubuisson, David Chidester, and Jacob Olupona have shown how indigenous African traditions were originally excluded from the modern category of “religion,” then gradually included as “primitive” varieties of religion, and later, “minor” or “indigenous” varieties of “religion” in the World Religions paradigm. Similarly, African traditions also sit at the boundaries of the legal category of “religion” in the Americas, Europe, and the African continent itself. For example, only one of Nigeria’s 36 states recognizes “African traditional religion” as an official religion alongside Islam and Christianity and the Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye vs. Hialeah is a landmark religious freedom case studied by nearly all U.S. law students.
Given these historical and colonial legacies, scholars of Africa and African traditions are uniquely suited to understand not only the “underside” of democracy, religion, and their interactions and imbrications in processes of racialization and imperialism, but also to develop new or highlight under-appreciated theoretical and methodological approaches to understanding the complex relationships between “religion” and “democracy.” Because African traditions of governance, politics, and religious practice have long exceeded and/or been excluded from the categories of “religion” and “democracy,” the continent is not only important place to think about these issues, but also to think from in order to understand the entangled history of religion and democracy and their possible futures.
