2013 Branigin Lecture Series

Wild Religion: Sacrifice, Sports, and Sovereignty in South Africa

David Chidester

Wednesday, April 3, 2013, Woodburn Hall 120 IU Bloomington

Although the “religion of football” might very well be global, the wild religion of the FIFA World Cup was distinctively local in South Africa, with prayers composed by Christian churches, events planned by interfaith organizations, and collective rituals emerging in fan walks and Football Fridays, which would awaken the rest of the world to Africa.

David Chidester is Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Institute for Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (ICRSA) at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Author or editor of over twenty books in North American studies, South African studies, and comparative religion, his major publications include Salvation and Suicide: Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown (Indiana University Press, 1988; revised edition 2003); Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture (University of California Press, 2005); Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (University of Virginia Press, 1996); and Wild Religion: Tracking the Sacred in South Africa (University of California Press, 2012). Professor Chidester presented a Branigin Lecture on April 3, 2013.

Watch Professor Chidester's Lecture

Race, Representation, Resonance

Herman Gray

Thursday, April 25, 2013, Georgian Room, Indiana Memorial Union IU Bloomington

Scholars of television and race often consider visibility as a site of cultural power. This talk lays out the need for different conceptions that nudge our approach from representation to resonance, a line of inquiry that seeks to understand the cultural politics of media visibility in the post-racial, post-network era. The goal is not merely greater representation or even more accurate media depictions of people of color but expressions of public feeling that in themselves serve as modes of engaging with dimensions of social power that exceed the limits of representation. Such an approach requires thinking about the cultural politics of race in the media differently, not only as struggles to be seen but as expressions of how it feels to live as racial subjects under neoliberal rule. This analytic is particularly necessary given the shifting role of television as a node in producing, organizing, and circulating such feelings.

Herman Gray is professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a renowned scholar in the fields of black visual cultures, music and cultural identity, and media representation and cultural politics. His works are ground-breaking analyses of race, identity, and the politics of representation. He is the author of Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness (1997) and Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation (2005). His visit to the Institute (April 23–26, 2013) coincided with the conference on the Gendered Politics of Reality Television organized by Professor Brenda R. Weber, Gender Studies.

Watch Prof. Gray's Branigin Lecture