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The Canadian Centre for German and European Studies
CCGES > Talk: Configurations of Religious Otherness in German Leitkulturalist Discourse

Talk: Configurations of Religious Otherness in German Leitkulturalist Discourse

Posted: February 9, 2010
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Michael Nijhawan

CCGES faculty affiliate, Prof. Michael Nijhawan will present a paper entitled “Precarious Presences, Hallucinatory Times: Configurations of Relgious Otherness in German Leitkultur Discourse” on Monday, February 22nd from 12:00-2:00PM in 2101 Vari Hall, York U. Keele Campus (building #30 on the map found here). Prof. Amira Mittermaier (University of Toronto) will act as the discussant.
In the light of recent controversies around mosque projects in Germany and the “No” vote on minarets in Switzerland, this paper examines the broader implications and discursive structure of contemporary anti-mosque movements. Drawing on ethnographic material, media analysis and other relevant texts, Prof. Nijhawan will try to chart out how within European regimes of multicultural tolerance, specifically in the German-speaking context, particular bodies and practices are discursively and affectively rendered heretic in their articulation of cultural and religious difference.

Michael Nijhawan is Associate Professor in Sociology at York University. His research interests include religious formations and violence, religious transnationalism, and theories in aesthetics and cultural performance. He is author of Dhadi Darbar. Religion, Violence and the Performance of Sikh History (OUP, 2006) and has co-edited Shared Idioms, Sacred Symbols, and the Articulation of Identities in South Asia (Routledge, 2009). He recently also completed his first documentary film Musafer: Sikhi is Traveling (2009).

Amira Mittermaier is Assistant Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University in 2006. Prior to joining the  University of Toronto, Professor Mittermaier held a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities. Professor Mittermaier has conducted fieldwork on Muslim imaginations and dream interpretations in contemporary Egypt. Her book, Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the
Imagination, is forthcoming with University of California Press.