Echoing Gayatri Spivak's seminal essay, Gruber asks, Can women in interreligious dialogue speak? She develops an answer through an analysis of Theo van Gogh and Ayaan Hirsi Ali's film Submission and Candice Breitz's video installation Love Story. Both of these works of art raise questions of representation and agency for marginalized people, and by bringing these questions into conversation with theoretical reflections about women in interreligious dialogue, Gruber charts potential positions of women in the field of interfaith dialogue. The crucial argument is that what position women take in this field depends on their access to epistemic privilege, which is distributed unevenly along gendered, racialized, and religious differentiations-interreligious dialogue takes place at the intersection of male, white, and Christian privilege.
This article starts from the observation that current debates about race and racism are often couched in soteriological terms such as guilt and forgiveness, or confession and exoneration, and it argues that this overlap calls for theological analysis. Using the debate about Achille Mbembe’s disinvitation from the German art festival ‘Ruhrtriennale’ 2020 as a case that is typical of a specifically Western European discourse on race, it first sketches a brief genealogy of the modern/colonial history of religio-racialisation and its intersections with Christian tradition, in which racial categories were forged in soteriological discourses, and in which, in turn, soteriological categories were shaped by racist discourses. It proposes that in this process, Christianity, Whiteness and salvation were conflated in a way that has sponsored White supremacy, disguised as innocence. Engaging with performative race theory, the article concludes by making a constructive proposal for a performative theology of race that can account for the profound intersections between racism and soteriology, but also opens trajectories for transforming hegemonic discourses of race and their theological underpinnings.
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