Asian American Religious Futures

When is the political future? Asian American and Canadian politics tend to look to the past for their visions of what is to come, greatly constraining their views of present political agency. This paper argues that Asian North American political thought has been hampered by an ontological problem of time, and that an alternative notion of political futurity is needed. Drawing on Bergson and Deleuze, I argue that the future has been misconstrued as possibility, prefiguring it in what is already known as possible (i.e. past) without asking after the conditions of the radically new. Against this ontological frame, I call for an approach to Asian North American futurities as potentials and desires in the real and undetermined present. Theology, I suggest, allows us to speak this futurity where conventional political language falters, opening our politics to articulations of newness beyond the possible.

We propose a theological rereading of Asian Americanist engagements with the turn in the humanities toward new materialisms. Rereading the work of three Asian Americanist new materialist scholars – Mel Y. Chen, Jasbir Puar, and Michelle Nancy Huang – we argue that the consideration of the concept of ‘animacies’ in Asian Americanist critical scholarship is a tacit exploration of theodicy. What is theodical is the way that Asian American subject formation is, as Mimi Khúc puts it, animated as perpetually unwell. What is indeterminate in these theodicies, we claim, is the animating source of such unwellness and whether other Asian American religious futures are therefore possible by way of switching gods, so to speak. The future liberation from the unwellness associated with orientalizing racism might thus be found in theologies that new materialist scholars in our discipline have alluded to but have yet to fully explore.

This paper asks: Is there a way to use an anti-caste framework within an adage of death as equalizer to develop resistant practices in life. The paper explores how the author's experiential work with regenerative agriculture intersects with scholarship in South Asian American Studies and lived religions to offer some insights on rethinking caste privilege. The author uses an autoethnographic approach, which insists that a centering of self engage with intersections of sociopolitical, economic, and/or cultural dynamics of meaning and change. The paper takes on the privileges of caste status by interrogating such concepts as karma and reincarnation as passed through what is learned through lived experiences among U.S.-based South Asians born into and brought up with the savarna privileges of caste Hinduism.

This paper examines how ancestral ecological wisdom preserved among marginalized women offers alternative visions of human–Earth relations in the context of intensifying ecological crisis. While dominant environmental discourse often focuses on technological solutions or policy reform, this study highlights everyday ecological practices that sustain relational forms of environmental care within diasporic communities.
The paper draws on ethnographic research that includes interviews with sixty-two Korean grandmothers in both Korea and the Korean diaspora in New York. These women maintain ecological practices shaped by intergenerational knowledge, including seasonal attunement, food preservation, seed-saving, water reuse, and relational understandings of land and nonhuman life. Although many of these practices originated in agrarian settings, they are creatively adapted in urban diasporic environments through apartment-based cultivation, community gardens, and church-centered networks of food sharing and care. By foregrounding the lived ecological practices of grandmothers, this paper argues that ancestral wisdom represents a living archive of ecological knowledge that sustains relational understandings of care for land, community, and future generations. These practices reveal how alternative ecological futures may emerge from intergenerational memory, embodied knowledge, and everyday forms of ecological responsibility within diasporic religious communities.