Religion, Colonialism, and Postcolonialism Unit

2026 AAR Call for Papers: Religion, Colonialism, Postcolonialism

In addition to papers and proposals dealing with religion, colonialism, and post-colonialism more broadly, we invite papers on the following topics:

• "Haunting Future/s" (panel co-sponsored with Theology and Religious Reflection)

  In response to this year’s presidential theme, we invite papers that investigate questions of futurity in theological and colonial discourses on haunting, spectrality, and ghostliness. Topics can include but are not limited to:

  • Political messianism
  • The “post” of postcolonialism
  • “Vanishing races”
  • (Post-)Colonial Melancholia
  • Fascism and utopia in the settler colony (re: Jameson?)
  • Theology and horror
  • Theologies of spectral media
  • Necropolitics and biopolitics
  • Spectrality and the archive
  • Imperial boomerangs
  • "Survivance"
  • Ancestral presences and interventions                                                                   
• Book panel: Tisa Wenger, Spirits of Empire: How Settler Colonialism Made American Religion (UNC, 2026)                                                                                 

• Legacies of Tomoko Masuzawa’s The Invention of World Religions (panel co-sponsored with Cultural History of the Study of Religion)       

  Some two decades after the publication of Tomoko Masuzawa’s seminal account of the formation of the World Religions paradigm, we invite reflection on the multiple effects of her work. These may address any of the following: (1) the reception history of Invention; (2) its intellectual legacy, including continuities/discontinuities across various subfields; (3) its pedagogic impact; (4) the institutional effects or non-effects of the critique of the pluralist paradigm.                                                                         

• Competing Empires: Religion, Secularism, and Exceptionalism                           
• Theology, economics, and politics of "gold"

Please note that the Religion, Colonialism and Postcolonialism Unit is deeply committed to inclusion and diversity. Please ensure that any full panel proposals are sensitive in their consideration of a plurality of gendered and racialized voices.

Thank you for considering sending a proposal to the Religion, Colonialism, and Postcolonialism Unit and we look forward to seeing you in Boston.