"Contesting Eternal Enmity: How Decolonial Theory Can Help to Re-Evaluate Jewish-Muslim Relations" with Santiago Slabodsky
Please join us for a special CJS and CIS event featuring a conversation with Santiago Slabodsky on contesting the narrative of "eternal Jewish-Muslim enmity" and its relation to coloniality.
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"Contesting Eternal Enmity": How Decolonial Theory Can Help to Re-Evaluate Jewish-Muslim Relations
In the current heated political context, it is commonplace to observe governmental officials, media outlets, social media platforms and even some academics perpetuating a narrative of an ‘eternal Jewish-Muslim enmity.’ While critical scholarship has been proven this eternity cannot resist the historical record, the question is why it is so difficult to contest it in the public square. In this presentation, Santiago Slabodsky will argue that this difficulty does not stem from mere “ignorance” but rather from the perpetuation of coloniality—or patterns of domination originating in colonial contexts that were reproduced globally into the present day. This narrative asserts the existence of two clearly demarcated opposed sides and an independent, objective and neutral arbitrary (a side that is ‘too big to be seen’) as the only capable of mediating. Paradoxically, this mediation is posited as the sole human solution to a problem that the same party has created.
Santiago Slabodsky holds the Florence and Robert Kaufman endowed chair in Jewish Studies at Hofstra University in New York where he serves as Professor of Religion and was the inaugural associate director of the Center for the Study of Race, Culture and Social Justice. He is the co-director of the trilingual journal Decolonial Horizons, core faculty of Jewish-Muslim relations at the Critical Muslim Studies Program of the Global Dialogue Center in Spain and has been concurrent visiting professor in institutions in Latin America, Africa and Europe. Among his publications, his book Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking, received the Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award by the Caribbean Philosophical Association.