Race and Religion. Re-membering their displacements, supersessions, and geographies

Race and Religion. Re-membering their Displacements, Supersessions, and Geographies The racial dimension of ‘Europe’s Muslim Question’ is often conceptualized in terms of ‘racialization of religion’: meaning that religious markers start to function as ‘race’. Race and religion then are approached as two separate formations, in which the one can obtain characteristics of the other. This dissertation however, departs from (re)conceptualizations of ‘religion’ (as coupled to the secular), and ‘race’ that takes seriously the theological underpinnings of both formations: of race-making (Anidjar 2014, Jennings 2010, Heschel 2008, Topolski 2018, Maldonado-Torres 2014, Chidester 2016) and of religio-secularism as the separation between ‘religion’ and the ‘secular’ ( Asad 2003, Masuzawa 2005, Carter 2008, Jansen 2013, Mahmood 2015). The crux is that religio-secularism makes ungraspable these very connections, since it separates theology (religion) from politics (secular) and religion from race. To re-member these divides, this dissertation centers a theological concept, Christian supersessionism, as a lens to establish new relationalities between political formations such as race/whiteness, religion/secularism, gender/sexuality, coloniality, ‘secular’ scholarship, and property in the re-making of ‘Europe’, the ‘New World’, (diasporic) ‘Africa’ and the ‘Orient’. The dissertation introduces amalgamated terms such as 'racial supersessionisms', 'supersessionist geographies', and 'supersessionist religio-secularisms' to re-connect theology and its political implications. This not only helps to investigate the interrelations between Christian supersessionism, race, gender, coloniality, and religio-secularism. These terms also help to differentiate between what is now merged under the rubric of ‘religion’: enabling distinctions between Christian supersessionism (as implicated in race-making and religio-secularism) and non-Christianity, or non-‘proper’-Christianity, as possible sourc