Full Description
At a time when secularism is put forward as the answer to religious fundamentalism and violence, Secularisms offers a powerful, multivoiced critique of the narrative equating secularism with modernity, reason, freedom, peace, and progress. Bringing together essays by scholars based in religious studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, science studies, anthropology, and political science, this volume challenges the binary conception of "conservative" religion versus "progressive" secularism. With essays addressing secularism in India, Iran, Turkey, Great Britain, China, and the United States, this collection crucially complicates the dominant narrative by showing that secularism is multifaceted. How secularism is lived and experienced varies with its national, regional, and religious context. The essays explore local secularisms in relation to religious traditions ranging from Islam to Judaism, Hinduism to Christianity. Several contributors explicitly take up the way feminism has been implicated in the dominant secularization story. Ultimately, by dislodging secularism's connection to the single (and singular) progress narrative, this volume seeks to open spaces for other possible narratives about both secularism and religion-as well as for other possible ways of inhabiting the contemporary world.
Contributors: Robert J. Baird, Andrew Davison, Tracy Fessenden, Janet R. Jakobsen, Laura Levitt,
Molly McGarry, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Taha Parla, Geeta Patel, Ann Pellegrini, Tyler Roberts,
Ranu Samantrai, Banu Subramaniam, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Angela Zito
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Times Like These / Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini 1
Part 1. Secular Interventions
1. (Un)Veiling Feminism / Afsaneh Najmabadi 39
2. Secularism and Laicism in Turkey / Taha Parla and Andrew Davison 58
3. Women Between Community and State: Some Implications of the Uniform Civil Code Debates / Rajeswari Sunder Rajan 76
4. Other Moderns, Other Jews: Revisiting Jewish Secularism in America / Laura Levitt 107
5. Disappearances: Race, Religion, and the Progress Narrative of U.S. Feminism / Tracy Fessenden 139
6. Late Secularism / Robert J. Baird 162
7. What Tangled Webs We Weave: Science, Secularism, and Religion in Contemporary India / Banu Subramaniam 178
Part 2. Secular Relations: Micronarratives
8. Secularizing the Pain of Footbinding in China: Missionary and Medical Stagings of the Universal Body / Angela Zito 205
9. Ghostly Appearances / Geeta Patel 226
10. "The Quick, the Dead, and the Yet Unborn": Untimely Sexualities and Secular Hauntings / Molly McGarry 247
Part 3. Public Alternatives
11. Toward Secular Diaspora: Relocating Religion and Politics / Tyler Roberts 283
12. Feminisms and Secularisms / Kathleen Sands 308
13. Continuity or Rupture? An Argument for Secular Britain / Ranu Samantrai 330
Bibliography 353
Contributors 387
Index 391
