A Loophole of Retreat - Spring 2023 Syllabus

“I may be too thin, but I can still dance.”—Audre Lorde

As we gather, we honor and acknowledge that the University of Colorado’s four campuses are on the traditional territories and ancestral homelands of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Ute, Apache, Comanche, Kiowa, Lakota, Pueblo and Shoshone Nations. Further, we acknowledge the 48 contemporary tribal nations historically tied to the lands that comprise what is now called Colorado.

This is not a statement of property. Land is no property. Land is no territory. Land was meant to be free.

The CMRC Seminar

There are many seminars at the university. Why add one more? What is the point of yet another research gathering? At the dawn of a new academic year, we wonder under what skies

We have been called to meet now? Through the years we have come to understand our fellowship beyond the conventional modes of academic assembly. What began as a mere reading group has matured into a community of deep sharing and listening, a forum where we don’t horde knowledge and confer degrees. Our Center has achieved a lot in its short history and we will persist in our commitment to lead research in the study of media and religion, but we wish to deepen the radicalism we have been long cultivating in our praxis, and to explore in new ways how the understanding of global religious and mediatic imaginaries can open doors to liberation, in our community and far beyond.

In this space, we have developed an intimate intellectual community and an approach to academic fellowship with multiple tasks, goals, and styles. Over the years, we have supported each other through personal and political crises, read and edited each other’s work, studied authors that deeply challenged the canons in our fields, and rehearsed work before publications and conference presentations. In fact, we believe now more than ever that before the research grants, the polished publications, and the conference talks, there is first the small, slow, and nonetheless audacious incubation of the seminar space.

Moving forward, we wish to double down on the audacity of our space. We ask you to consider with us a simple yet profound question: what does it mean to hold a seminar in the tumult of our times?

We would like you to imagine this space as a fugitive practice we might describe as "a loophole of retreat." We borrow the phrase from Harriet Jacobs' 1861 memoir where she tells the story

of living in a crawlspace for seven years after she escapes from enslavement. Jacobs describes that crawlspace both as an enclosure and a site for the enactment of practices of freedom. The same phrase was used by black feminist artist Simone Leigh when she exhibited her work at the Guggenheim in 2019 and also when she was asked to represent the United States at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Leigh used sculpture to challenge the conventional uses of space to invoke history and memory. She introduced a new concept she calls, "the creolization of form," a creative and hybrid use of language and form that allowed her to defy the restricted spaces of the crawlspace (the plight of black women) by creating giant sculptures of women whose stories have been left out from the archives.

We are inspired by how deeply decolonial and stunningly uplifting it is to speak of loopholes, retreat, and creolization of form. Our seminar is both a space of hiding and an opening of alternative conspicuousness. We hide to appear differently. There is both absence and presence in the idea of the seminar we seek to practice. We wish for our work to go underground but only to resurface anew. Our loophole of retreat is in fact an invitation to rise up. Who said that the seminar can only be one thing? We wish to preserve this space so that its potential force of incubation can extend beyond the walls of the university. Our work together must be a burst and a trickle. We will read, listen, learn, and get on the road together, but we must also fight to escape the lull of business as usual. We must turn up the ground. We must win!

In our last conference, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist, spoke movingly about biidaaban, that very first ray of light in the morning which announces the dawn of another day. As a Nishnaabeg concept, “Biidaaban,” Simpson said, “is this idea that every moment is a collapsing of the future and the past, and what we do now gives birth to that next moment.” That next moment is contingent on how we act in the space of this seminar, on the deep sense of presence we wish to invoke around our table, on the generative refusals we seek to enact with our work, and on the kind of relationships we hope to weave with one another. Our loophole is indeed a biidaaban. Let us begin again¹

Fall Seminar Focus

This Fall we will devote the seminar to reading selected texts written by the plenary speakers in our upcoming conference in January. In the spirit of loopholes and retreats, we hope to cultivate a practice of reading-in-common in preparation of a conference that invites us to be in fellowship creatively and differently. Reading without an aesthetics of community, without a commitment

to the common good is a mere act of mapping the world when this world must be transformed. The Fire on the Mountain Conference summons us against the vulgarity of property embedded in the practices of nation and nationalism but also against the comfort of simply listing the inventory. The poetics of our seminar wants us to read and act in the world to be in real connection with others and figure out how the facility of our thinking and our writing can link up with the tribulations of our global reality. We read work by the speakers in the conference not simply to acknowledge their expertise or recognize their notoriety in the field of media, religion, and nationalism. We read these authors because when we think and write, we think and write with others not as footnotes or potential resources in a reference list but as people from whom we acquire a debt of understanding, translating, and sharing.

Our labor cannot be solitary and conventional because convention ain’t a loophole.

The Plenary Speakers are:

Philip Gorski, Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at Yale University. He writes on religion and politics in early modern and modern Western Europe and North America from a comparative historical perspective. His current work focuses on the history and politics of White

Christian Nationalism and American Civil Religion. He is the co-author of The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy.

Raka Shome, The Harron Family Endowed Chair, and Professor of Communication at Villanova University. She writes on postcolonial cultures, transnational feminism and nationalism as they intersect with media/communication cultures. Her current research interests are in Asian (and non-western) Modernities, Contemporary Indian (Hindu) Nationalism and Gender; the Global South; Transnational Politics of Knowledge Production as a Communication issue. She is the author of Diana and Beyond: White Femininity, National Identity, and Contemporary Media Culture. Dr. Shome is currently finishing up a book Cleansing the Nation:  Hindu nationalism, Gender and the Clean India campaign (contracted with Duke U Press).  She is a Distinguished Scholar of National Communication Association (USA) and an elected fellow of International Communication Association.

Ramesh Srinivasan, Professor of information studies and design media arts at UCLA and Director of UC Digital Cultures Lab. He writes about the intersection of technology, innovation, politics, business, and society. A Bernie Sanders campaign surrogate and author of Beyond the Valley: How Innovators around the World are Overcoming Inequality and Creating the Technologies of Tomorrow, Srinivasan militates for a democratic Internet and a digital bill of rights around the world.

Reiland Rabaka, Professor of African, African American, and Caribbean Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies and Founding Director of the Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. His books include W.E.B. Du Bois and the Disciplinary Decadence of Sociology; The Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism; and Black Power Music! Protest Songs, Message Music, and the Black Power Movement.

This weekly Seminar is a major component of the research and teaching mission of the Center for Media, Religion and Culture. It brings together faculty, graduate students, and visiting fellows from a variety of academic fields with an interest in media and religion. Center fellows explore leading literature in a variety of academic fields, including media studies, religious studies, sociology, anthropology, social theory, and philosophy. Students also receive concrete

training in research development, methodology, and analysis, and are mentored through the development of conference presentations and publications.

Center Projects

Conference

“Fire on the Mountain Media, Religion, and Nationalism.” January 10-13, 2024. This will be the tenth in a series of successful international conferences held by the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture in Boulder. The previous meetings have brought together an interdisciplinary community of scholars for focused conversations on emerging issues in media and religion. Each has proven to be an important landmark in the development of theory and method in its respective area and has resulted in important collaborations, publications, and resources for further research and dialogue.

You can join our team of organizing volunteers for this event. This is an important occasion to learn how scholarly fellowship is made and to connect with both leading and rising scholars in the fields of media and religion.

Research Projects

Public Religion and Public Scholarship in the Digital Age:

A research project (January 2017 through June 2023) funded by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation (New York) in the amount of $500,000. The purpose of the project is to explore and develop a new role for scholars of religion in shaping public understanding of religion and improving public and political discourses about religion. Due to changes in media, religion today is no longer limited to private experience or what goes on inside the walls of churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples. Religion is being remade by media, and religious, academic, cultural, and political actors need new understandings of its shape and its role. The project brings experts on religion and experts on media together in a common effort to “jump- start” new research and innovation that takes advantage of the digital age. It will pilot new means of research and collaboration between scholars and broader communities and new means of communication the results of these collaborations.

Major activities under the Grant:

1. A Working Group of leading scholars and practitioners from the fields of media studies and religious studies. The four investigators from CMRC will also be full members of this Working Group.

-Sarah Banet-Weiser, Annenberg School of Communication USC and University of Pennsylvania.

-Anthea Butler, University of Pennsylvania

-Nabil Echchaibi, University of Colorado Boulder

-Chris Helland, Dalhousie University

-Stewart Hoover, University of Colorado Boulder

-Marwan Kraidy, Northwestern University, Qatar.

-Mirca Madianou, Goldsmiths, University of London

-Peter Manseau, The Smithsonian

-Jenna Supp-Montgomerie, University of Iowa

-Nathan Schneider, University of Colorado Boulder

-Sarah McFarland Taylor, Northwestern University

-Deborah Whitehead, University of Colorado Boulder

Working Group members are each engaged in a research project relevant to the theme and objectives of the Project. The grant provides a limited amount of graduate funding for CMCI Graduate Students to collaborate on these projects and receive support for their own contributions.

• A major conference on the theme of the project was organized by the Center in August 2018 in Boulder, in collaboration with the International Society for Media, Religion, and Culture. Keynote speakers were: Anthea Butler, John Durham Peters, and Merlyna Lim.

• The project is supported by purpose-designed web platform through which we experiment and explore the possibilities for digital collaboration, research design, circulation of ideas and findings, and new ways of doing scholarship in a public way. The site, called Hypermediations, was launched in 2017.

• A book volume is forthcoming in fall 2023 entitled, Hypermediations: Essays on Religion, Media, and Crisis, edited by Nabil Echchaibi, Nathan Schneider, Stewart Hoover, and Deborah Whitehead. The book explores how media and religion converge in the making and habitation of overlapping crises that call on us today. Scholars in media studies and religious studies present new research while reflecting on the impossible demands that today’s sense of continuing crisis place on the vocation of scholarship.

• Podcast Series to be released in fall 2023 with 10 episodes featuring in-depth conversations with each member of the working group.

CMRC Publication

RHYTHMS: The first issue Rhythms was published in December 2022 and focused on the theme of “writing in times of urgency.” The second issue on "Concepts Under Repair” will be out in September. The prompt for this issue is: what is a concept you are interested in repairing, maintaining, resuscitating, or abolishing for the sake of repairing something else?

Expectations

Fellows are encouraged to get involved in center projects over the course of each semester. Please consult with the faculty of the center on how you can best use your time and expertise in these projects or if you have other ideas for collaboration and outreach.

Research Presentations: fellows are expected to present their work this fall on their research. Think about the invitation in this seminar to operate as if we were in a loophole of retreat. What does this description provoke in you and in the way you think about your own work?

Check with Nandi Pointer to sign up for a time slot at the beginning of the semester.

Tentative Schedule and Readings

Week 1: 9/6 Introductions of Faculty and Fellows

-Discussion of the Theme: The Seminar as A Loophole of Retreat

-Fire on the Mountain Conference: organization and volunteering

Week 2: 9/13 White Christian Nationalism I

Readings:

- “Introduction: Eruption” and ““This Is Our Nation, Not Theirs,” in Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy.

Week 3: 9/20 White Christian Nationalism II

Readings:

-“The Spirit of 1690” and “Avoiding “The Big One,” in Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy.

Presentation _______________________

Week 4: 9/27 Nation, Religion, and Gender I

Readings:

-“White Femininity in the Nation, the Nation in White Femininity,” in Raka Shome, Diana and Beyond: White Femininity, National Identity, and Contemporary Media Culture

Presentation _______________________

Week 5: 10/4 Nation, Religion, and Gender II

Readings:

- Raka Shome, “The long and deadly road: the covid pandemic and Indian migrants,” Cultural Studies 35:2-3, 319-335.

-Pradip Thomas, “Populism, Religion, and the Media in India,” International Journal of Communication 17 (2023), 2925–2938.

Presentation _______________________

Week 6: 10/11 Visit by Dr. James Hoesterey, Emory University

Associate Professor and Winship Distinguished Research Professor of Religion at Emory. Dr. Hoesterey’s research and teaching interests focus on Islam, media, and politics. His first book, Rebranding Islam: Piety, Prosperity, and a Self-help Guru (Stanford University Press, November 2015), chronicles the rise, fall, and rebranding of celebrity televangelist Kyai Haji Abdullah Gymnastiar. In 2016, Rebranding Islam was awarded Runner-Up for the Clifford Geertz Book Prize awarded by the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. He is currently leading a large research project on diplomacy, soft power, and the making of "moderate Islam" in Egypt, Morocco, and Indonesia (funded by the Henry Luce Foundation's Program on Religion & International Affairs).

Readings: TBA.

Week 7: 10/18 Technology and Transnational Solidarity

Readings:

- “Digital Stories from the Developing World,” in Ramesh Srinivasan, Whose Global Village?: Rethinking How Technology Shapes Our World

-“An Internet For Us All,” in Ramesh Srinivasan, Beyond the Valley: How Innovators around the World are Overcoming Inequality and Creating the Technologies of Tomorrow

Presentation _______________________

Week 8: 10/25

Media, Religion, and Populism Readings: - Johanna Sumiala, Stewart M. Hoover, Corrina Laughlin, “Global Populism: Its Roots in Media and Religion| Religious Populism? Rethinking Concepts and Consequences in a Hybrid Media Age—Introduction,” International Journal of Communication 17. -Bilge Yesil, “Mediating Muslim Victimhood: An Analysis of Religion and Populism in International Communication,” International Journal of Communication 17 Presentation ______________________

Week 9: 11/1

Alternative Frameworks of Nationalist Consciousness: Pan-Africanism Readings: - Reiland Rabaka, “Introduction: On the Intellectual elasticity and political plurality of Pan-Africanism,” in Rabaka (Ed.). The Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism. - Presentation ______________________

Week 10: 11/8 Alternative Frameworks of Nationalist Consciousness: Black Power Nationalism and Aesthetics

Readings:

-“Introduction Protest Songs, Message Music, and the Black Power Movement” AND “The Black Power Movement, the Black Arts Movement, and the Black Aesthetic,” in Reiland Rabaka, Black Power Music

Presentation _______________________

Week 11: 11/15 Alternative Frameworks of Nationalist Consciousness

Readings:

-Benjamin Neuberger, “Black Zionism: The Return to Africa in Theory and Practice,” in African Nationalism.

-Camilla Hawthorne, “Black matters are spatial matters: Black geographies for the twenty-first century,” Geography Compass 13(11).

Presentation _______________________

Week 12: 11/22 THANKSGIVING

Week 13: 11/29 Workshop

Week 14: 12/6 Workshop

Week 15: 12/13 CMRC End of Semester Lunch