The comparative study of religion has long been shaped by Eurocentric, post-Enlightenment categories that consider “religion” as a bounded, privatized sphere, to be controlled and disciplined by, if not separated from, the nation-state. As critical scholarship on liberal secularism has shown, these frameworks historically delegitimized religious traditions as pre-modern, even as the latter continue to structure the everyday lives of different communities. Consequently, the nation-state form effectively creates bottlenecks that prevent minorities from entering the legitimate space of participation and belonging. Literary and cultural texts from minor traditions have brilliantly captured some of these constraints. 

In this context, this seminar seeks to explore how texts and community histories from South Asia and the wider global south could produce a critical, or different, understanding of religion and state. Here, by “after,” we mean the nation-state’s continuing disciplinary hold on religious discourse since its emergence, as well as the religious discourse after the collapse, if any, of the nation-state.

Production and emergence of minority as a critical concept, especially in relation to the nation-state, have been significantly shaped by colonial and postcolonial law, citizenship, caste, and community self-fashioning. We are interested in papers that read how minor traditions are lived, translated, and narrated within specific regional and linguistic worlds; how communities constitute themselves as minorities in relation to majoritarian or state power; and how such formations are recorded in literary, legal, and print archives.

The seminar welcomes work that engages with Islamic, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and other religious traditions worldwide, particularly from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. We invite an interdisciplinary conversation between comparative literature, history, legal studies, theology, anthropology, translation studies, and religious studies, bringing together textual, ethnographic, and archival approaches to study nation, minority, and community formation.

Rather than proposing a single corrective model to replace Eurocentric frameworks, this seminar explores “community” as a critical concept for attending to how religious minorities imagine, narrate, and contest their place within and against the nation. We welcome papers from graduate students and early-career scholars alongside senior faculty, and particularly invite scholars from underrepresented communities.

Potential topics could include: formation of religious communities as legal subjects of colonial and postcolonial nation-states; minority identity formation; caste, race, gender, and community configurations of minority histories; religious traditions and devotional literatures as sites of communal and political imagination; missionary and colonial archives as sites of resistance; and critiques of liberal secularism in the context of nation-states.