DSR Lecture Series: "Vindication of Invention: World Religions to Lived Religion"

Despite its generative influence for postcolonial studies, Edward Said’s Orientalism has had a limited impact, at best, in Religious Studies, the humanistic discipline most invested in Orientalist labor. What are the sources of our post-Saidian retrenchment?

This talk takes up this question by querying Robert Orsi’s rude reception of Tomoko Masuzawa’s Invention of World Religions (2005) as backdrop to the project of “lived religions.” Given the discipline’s move away from the more overtly Orientalist paradigm of Comparative World Religions to the study of American religions, why did Masuzawa’s postcolonial project draw the ire of Americanists? Reading Orsi’s major works, Geslani argues that a latent Orientalism continues to play a constitutive role in the lived religion movement, despite its occasional postcolonial pretense.

About the speaker

Marko Geslani is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of South Carolina. His first book, Rites of the God-King (2018), detailed the formative role of the astral sciences (jyotihśāstra) in the development of medieval Brahmanical political ritual. His current projects explore the political theology of the Brahmanical state and the racial-colonial politics of the study of Asian religions.