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Race–Religion Constellations: Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Antiblackness
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Race–Religion Constellations: Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Antiblackness

A special issue of Religions (ISSN 2077-1444). This special issue belongs to the section "Religions and Health/Psychology/Social Sciences".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 February 2024) | Viewed by 9519

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Patricia Schor

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
1. Department of Art & Culture, History and Antiquity, Faculty of Humanities, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2. Department of Ethics and Political Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, 6525 HT Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Interests: gendered antiblackness; the afterlife of slavery; coloniality and the articulation of race and space; security and public order; race and religion constellations in Europe and across the Atlantic
Dr. Luis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
1. Faculty of Social and Cultural Sciences, European University Viadrina, Frankfurt Oder, Germany
2. Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Interests: racism; Islamophobia; conspiracy theories; Muslims in Europe; European societies; gender and sexuality

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Critical scholarship on colonialism and medieval and (early) modern Europe has produced new understandings of religion in articulation with race. While distinct from race, religion has performed similar work by means of establishing the boundaries of political communities based on a hierarchical distinction between the human and the subhuman, following Sylvia Wynter (2003). Moreover, religion did not only establish said categories in the distant past. Religion is the precursor of racial distinctions and continues to operate today in a Europe that imagines and narrates itself as secular (Bracke 2011; 2013; Topolski 2018; 2016; Fadil 2016) and non/post-racial (Goldberg 2015; Lentin 2008; El-Tayeb 2008).

Building upon the growing literature exploring the historical, conceptual, and political entanglements between the categories of race and religion, this Special Issue explores the analytical relations and processes of the co-constitution of antisemitism, Islamophobia, and antiblackness in Europe and beyond. It does so by taking into full account the insights generated by the race–religion constellation (Topolski 2018), a novel theoretical approach concerned with the analysis of how the category of religion intersects with and co-constitutes race, as well as how race overlaps with and constitutes categorizations of religion, all these while paying particular attention to the role of Christianity and secularism in said processes. Pioneering scholars on race such as W.E.B. DuBois (1952) and Frantz Fanon (1967) were keenly aware of the relationality between antiblackness and antisemitism and yet, as Neil McMaster (2007) has pointed out, such relation has been scholarly understudied. The same holds true for the relationship between Islamophobia and antiblackness, despite fruitful avenues offered by research on Moors and Morishness. Against this background, this Special Issue aims to build analytical bridges and flesh out the entanglements between these three racial formations.

This Special Issue centers on the historical, conceptual, and political relations between antisemitism, Islamophobia, and antiblackness in Europe and other geographies. This issue aims to publish interdisciplinary, conceptual, and historical pieces, novel empirical research, and case studies unraveling the convoluted nexus among these three racial formations, as well as pieces analyzing the borrowing, exchange, and adaptations of racial tropes, metaphors, practices, and the power relations which inform such phenomena. Furthermore, we invite submissions which fully engage with the gendered and sexualized dynamics of antisemitism, Islamophobia and antiblackness, as well as research concerned with the colonial and postcolonial formations of these racisms. Decolonial analyses of such race–religion constellations are welcome.

With these, we seek to bring into conversation bodies of scholarship on racism that have as of yet remained compartmentalized by and enclosed within disciplinary or epistemic boundaries. Understanding the nexus between antisemitism, Islamophobia, and antiblackness, as well as their gendered and racial dynamics, can shed new light on the different ways in which racisms operate transnationally and trans-historically. This Special Issue will contribute to and supplement the growing literature dealing with the nexus between antisemitism and Islamophobia by engaging with the history, formation, and conceptual articulations of antiblackness, and correspondingly contribute to scholarship on antiblackness by engaging with the insights from the race–religion constellation. The issue welcomes senior and early-career contributors and is open to single-authored and co-authored articles.

We invite contributors to submit their research in English for consideration. Please note that there is a two-stage submission procedure. We will first collect a title and short abstract (maximum 250 words), 5 keywords, and a short bio (150 words), by 15 February 2023, via email to Dr. Patricia Schor () and Dr. Luis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar (). Before 15 March 2023, we will invite selected abstracts to be submitted as 7000- to 9000-word papers for peer review by 15 September 2023. Journal publication is expected in late 2023 to early 2024, depending on the revision time needed after peer review. Each article will be published in open access on a rolling basis after successfully passing peer review.

Dr. Patricia Schor
Dr. Luis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • race–religion constellations
  • racism
  • antisemitism
  • Islamophobia
  • antiblackness
  • gender and sexuality
  • colonialism and coloniality

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Published Papers (5 papers)

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Research

18 pages, 317 KiB  
Article
Crafting True Religio in Early Christianity
by Marianne Moyaert
Religions 2024, 15(9), 1033; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15091033 - 26 Aug 2024
Viewed by 676
Abstract
Most studies of the religio-racial constellation begin with the medieval taxonomy of Christians, ‘Jews’, ‘pagans’ and ‘heretics’. Some scholars examine how this medieval taxonomy functioned as a system of dehumanization in the Middle Ages; others are more interested in how it has been [...] Read more.
Most studies of the religio-racial constellation begin with the medieval taxonomy of Christians, ‘Jews’, ‘pagans’ and ‘heretics’. Some scholars examine how this medieval taxonomy functioned as a system of dehumanization in the Middle Ages; others are more interested in how it has been adopted and adapted in modern racist taxonomies; and still others examine how religious images continue to influence the way non-white, non-European, non-Christian, and non-secular bodies are seen and treated today. What is lacking in the literature to date is an in-depth examination of how this fourfold taxonomy came to be. To understand how modern racialized taxonomies incorporated the earlier “religious” categories—a question that is beyond the scope of this article—we also need to better understand the genealogy of these religious categories, their scope, and their implication in processes of unequal power distribution. To that end, we must address the following questions: Where did the distinction between true and false religion come from; how did the figure of the pagan emerge; what about the Jews as anti-Christian? Rather than focusing on contemporary expressions of religio-racialization, or directing our attention to modern or even late medieval expressions of the religio-racial constellation, this article turns to the period of early Christianity when Christian apologists created the key religionized taxonomies that would shape the way Christians imagined, related to, and, in a later stage of history, governed Christianity’s others: the Jews, the heretics, and the pagans. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Race–Religion Constellations: Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Antiblackness)
15 pages, 233 KiB  
Article
Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Intersectional Experiences of Iranian Feminists from Minoritized Ethno-National Backgrounds
by Donya Ahmadi
Religions 2024, 15(5), 533; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15050533 - 25 Apr 2024
Viewed by 1180
Abstract
Over the past decades, Iran has been witnessing the growth of a burgeoning feminist movement. With its origins deeply rooted in the early 20th century, the Iranian feminist movement, as such, is not a uniform body: it embodies various, opposing even, political ideologies [...] Read more.
Over the past decades, Iran has been witnessing the growth of a burgeoning feminist movement. With its origins deeply rooted in the early 20th century, the Iranian feminist movement, as such, is not a uniform body: it embodies various, opposing even, political ideologies under the umbrella of feminism, reflecting the divergent social locations of its protagonists. While the movement has been criticized for its centralist, middle-class and at times apolitical tendencies, academic scholarship has yet to offer intersectional analyses that problematize historically rooted and daily materialized relations of power within the movement, particularly in relation to axes such as ethnicity (and race), religion, gender identity, sexuality, and (dis)ability. In light of this gap, the present article aims towards documenting and theorizing the intersectionality of the challenges facing Iranian feminist activists belonging to various ethnic nations and religious beliefs. Drawing on ethnographic research, it argues that minority feminists find themselves between a rock and a hard place: the rock being masculinist politics within their minoritized communities, which prioritize ethno-nationalist demands over gendered ones; the hard place being a centralist liberal feminist movement that fails to reflect the intersectionality of their experiences as non-Persian non-Shia women, thereby reproducing hierarchies of power in relation to ethnicity, religion, and class. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Race–Religion Constellations: Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Antiblackness)
19 pages, 334 KiB  
Article
The Burden of Being a Muslim Woman in India—The Instrumentalisation of Muslim Women at the Intersection of Gender, Religion, Colonialism, and Secularism
by Shilpi Pandey
Religions 2024, 15(3), 291; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15030291 - 26 Feb 2024
Viewed by 2580
Abstract
This paper focuses on the discourse on Muslim women’s rights in India, aiming to trace how policies concerning Muslim women affect their constitutional rights to equality and non-discrimination. In doing so, this paper explores a colonial continuity of policies in the post-independence era [...] Read more.
This paper focuses on the discourse on Muslim women’s rights in India, aiming to trace how policies concerning Muslim women affect their constitutional rights to equality and non-discrimination. In doing so, this paper explores a colonial continuity of policies in the post-independence era and the subsequent governments. The purpose of this paper is to provide an extensive and nuanced discussion on Muslim women’s rights in light of their historical evolution, the existence of personal laws, and the ongoing debates on a Uniform Civil Code. This article concludes that Muslim women continue to struggle for their rights to equal citizenship at the intersection of gender, religion, colonialism, and secularism. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Race–Religion Constellations: Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Antiblackness)
20 pages, 301 KiB  
Article
Unsettling Man in Europe: Wynter and the Race–Religion Constellation
by Anya Topolski
Religions 2024, 15(1), 43; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15010043 - 27 Dec 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1894
Abstract
Sylvia Wynter brings to light a structural entanglement between race and religion that is fundamental to identifying racism’s logic. This logic is continuous albeit often masked in particular in European race–religion constellations such as antisemitism and islamophobia. Focusing on the Americas, Wynter reveals [...] Read more.
Sylvia Wynter brings to light a structural entanglement between race and religion that is fundamental to identifying racism’s logic. This logic is continuous albeit often masked in particular in European race–religion constellations such as antisemitism and islamophobia. Focusing on the Americas, Wynter reveals a structural epistemic continuity between ‘religious’, rational and scientific racism. Nonetheless, Wynter marks a discontinuity between pre- and post-1492, by distinguishing between the Christian subject and Man, the overrepresentation of the human. In this essay, which focuses on European entanglements of race and religion, a process of dehumanization and its historical and geographic continuities is more discernible. As such, I question Wynter’s discontinuity, arguing that the Christian subject was conceived of as the only full conception of the human (although not without debate or inconsistencies), which meant that non-Christians were de-facto and de-jure excluded from the political community and suffered degrees of dehumanization. Within the concept of dehumanization, I focus on the entanglement of race and religion, or more specifically Whiteness and Christianity, as distinct markers of supremacy/difference and show that the Church had, and asserted, the power to produce both lesser and non-humans. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Race–Religion Constellations: Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Antiblackness)
17 pages, 1277 KiB  
Article
Gauging the Media Discourse and the Roots of Islamophobia Awareness in Spain
by Alfonso Corral, David De Coninck, Stefan Mertens and Leen d’Haenens
Religions 2023, 14(8), 1019; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14081019 - 9 Aug 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1841
Abstract
This article analyses the media discourse about Islamophobia in Spain. Specifically, an overview of all the appearances of the term in four Spanish newspapers (ABC, El Mundo, El País, and La Vanguardia) is provided with the aim of [...] Read more.
This article analyses the media discourse about Islamophobia in Spain. Specifically, an overview of all the appearances of the term in four Spanish newspapers (ABC, El Mundo, El País, and La Vanguardia) is provided with the aim of finding out when the term was first used and became standard language. The study also demonstrates the links with the public interest and identifies the ideological and terminological attitudes in the discourse of each newspaper. The corpus includes 1475 news articles since the first reference (in 1987) to the term Islamophobia and May 2022, which were quantitatively examined in two steps. While the first was manual and served to document the historical background, the second allowed us to monitor the media content by means of Sketch Engine. Furthermore, the searches for the term “islamofobia” in Google Trends from Spain were also reviewed. The main findings show that both terrorist attacks in Western countries and the controversies surrounding freedom of speech are key to the emergence and normalisation of the concept, particularly since 2015. However, the interest of each newspaper differs, with El País covering the topic most frequently. This left-wing newspaper offers some notable variations in terminology as well. While the three right-wing newspapers consistently relate Islamophobia to threat, the vocabulary used in El País underpins the victimisation of the Arab-Islamic population. According to the Sketch Engine analysis, the usual terms that occur in combination with Islamophobia are racism, terrorism, violence, hate, anti-semitism, and xenophobia. Finally, Google Trends data confirmed the peak in public interest in the Barcelona and Cambrils attacks (17A). Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Race–Religion Constellations: Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Antiblackness)
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