Monday, 9:00 AM – 11:00 AM | Sheraton, Back Bay D (Second Floor)Session ID: A24-126
Roundtable Session
Hosted by: Political Theology Unit
Theme: Political Poetics of Singularity: Theopolitical Entanglements
Andrew Walker-Cornetta, Georgia State University, presiding
This roundtable aims to rethink the intersections of politics and theology through a poetics of singularity (i.e. how the imaginative expression of a single figure, event, or experience disables or activates collectivities in ways irreducible to human history, agency, and categories of identity). Bringing together scholars of anthropology, religious studies, and literature, it seeks to dis-imagine current versions of politics, universality, and subjectivity by locating the political at the intersection of mystical, environmental, aesthetic, technological, religious, and historical imaginaries.
Linking these entry points is shared interest in how claims to singularity efface difference, but also affirm a radical uniqueness, reifying the exception (i.e. in claims about the singularity of the Holocaust, the figure of the survivor, or death as a limit case). We hope to challenge these forms of categorical stasis by converging on a poetics of singularity and the enfleshed speech acts in which it is performed.
Panelist
· Adam Stern, University of Wisconsin, Madison
· Yunus Dogan Telliel, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Sunday, 9:00 AM – 11:00 AM | Sheraton, Back Bay D (Second Floor)Session ID: A23-121
Roundtable Session
Hosted by: Political Theology Unit
Theme: Political Theology as Performance: A Panel on Staging Sovereignty by Arthur Bradley
David Newheiser, Florida State University, presiding
This roundtable explores the relation between political theology and performance in conversation with Arthur Bradley’s book Staging Sovereignty: Theory, Theater, Thaumaturgy (Columbia University Press, 2024). The panel gathers an interdisciplinary group of scholars drawn from departments of English, Philosophy, and Religion. Taking Bradley’s book as an incitement, they will place of religion in debates over sovereignty, aesthetics, and theatrical power. By clarifying the link between ritual performance and the production of authority, the panelists will reflect upon the crisis that currently faces pluralist democracies.
Panelist
· Nichole Flores, University of Virginia
· Miguel Vatter, Deakin University
· Elettra Stimilli, Sapienza Università di Roma
· Montserrat Herrero, Universidad de Navarra
Respondent
· Arthur Bradley, Lancaster University
Business Meeting
Monday, 12:30 PM – 2:30 PM | Hynes Convention Center, 312 (Third…Session ID: A24-237
Papers Session
Hosted by: Philosophy of Religion Unit and Political Theology Unit
Theme: Freedom as Fugitivity and Marronage
This panel explores marronage and fugitivity as embodied, relational, and imaginative practices of freedom, extending beyond narrow conceptions of escape and resistance. Through sonic expressions within Black preaching traditions, historical reconsiderations of maroon communities in North America, philosophical challenges to notions of self-possession, and critical ethnographic engagements with Mennonite utopian communities, the papers demonstrate how fugitivity reveals nuanced articulations of freedom. Marronage emerges as a complex interplay involving relational ties to land, ecosystems, sound, spiritual traditions, and community formation. Overall, the session explores how to redefine liberation and belonging in ways that disrupt colonial and capitalist logics of domination.
Papers
Joshua Lazard, Boston University
A Sound from ‘Something Within’: The Sonic Properties of Fugitivity in the Black Preaching Tradition
Blair Wilner
Exorcizing Property: Marronage as a Practice of Freedom
Ryne Beddard
Freedom as Dismal Swamp Marronage
Lars Akerson
Anika Reynar
The Good Place and No Place: Reading Utopias in Old Colony Mennonite Communities and the Book of Revelation
