[Discussion] CFP: Religion, Secularism and Cultural Studies (7/1/05; journal issue)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, a referred academic journal
dedicated to publishing cultural studies scholarship from both
established and emerging scholars, is currently soliciting submissions
for an upcoming special issue on:

RELIGION, SECULARISM, AND CULTURAL STUDIES

Guest Editors: Lori Branch and Everett Hamner

Culture may be, as Raymond Williams informs us, "everyday," but as it is
reified in cultural studies practice, it is rarely religious. The
Blackwell Companion to Cultural Studies (2001), for instance, uncovers
not a hint in 579 pages or a detailed index that religion operates in
culture at all: no prayer, no yoga, no Religious Right, abstinence
campaigns, televangelism, no daily practice of Hinduism, Buddhism,
Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. And this, despite the daily news, world
politics, and a cadre of critics hailing the "return of the religious"
to critical discourse. In her Presidential Address to the Modern
Language Association in December 2003, Mary Louise Pratt proclaimed the
urgency of the interdisciplinary study of religion in our literature
departments. "Who can doubt today," she asked, "the need to study
secularism and religiosity from every viewpoint we can muster?" As
Stanley Fish has recently pointed out in The Chronicle of Higher
Education, the distinctions between reason and faith, truth and belief,
have been increasingly called into question in culture and academia, and
religion promises, in his words, to "succeed high theory and the
triumvirate of race, gender, and class as the center of intellectual
energy in the academy."

This special issue of The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies seeks to
speak in and to cultural studies' silence on religion and secularism,
and to gain a critical perspective on that silence and the reasons it
has existed. This issue will explore the conversations that can take
place between cultural studies and highlight the new outpouring of work
from a variety of critical perspectives that points toward vibrant
engagement in the coming years with the historical study of the mutual
transformation of religion and secularism in modernity.

We solicit submissions on any aspect of religion, secularism, and
cultural studies, from any time period, literature, or media, and
particularly those that implicitly or explicitly address the following
questions: What would a cultural studies approach to religious texts,
behaviors and artifacts look like? How would this affect or challenge
"secular" cultural studies? What is at stake in the secular portrayal of
everyday life created by the silence surrounding religion in cultural
studies? How can recent critical studies of the emergence of secularism
in modernity?

Please submit papers no later than 7/1/05 to:

Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies
308 English-Philosophy Building
University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA 52242-1492

Two hard copies of the manuscript and a disk, preferably in Microsoft
Word, should be provided. Manuscripts cannot be returned unless a
self-addressed envelope with US postage is provided. Submissions should
be no longer than 30 pages and should be prepared following the MLA
Style Manual.

For more information about contributing or subscribing to this journal,
please contact the managing editor at <ijcs@uiowa.edu>.  The journal's
web site, which includes excerpts from previous issues, editorial board
and other information, is at: <www.uiowa.edu/~ijcs>.


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