Books

Let Us Talk About Your Book:
Arvind Pal Singh Mandair - "Religion & The Specter of The West"
Part II

Q & A with Author by SIKHCHIC.COM

Continued from last week ...

PART II

Q   How has your book been received by other scholars and academics so far? 

A   The book has been reviewed fairly widely in the scholarly world. Conventional reviews started to come out in 2010 in a wide variety of leading academic journals.

It was reviewed well in Journal of Asian Studies, and the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. Both of these are what we call Asianist or Oriental studies journals.

Probably its widest reviewing has taken place in the journals that specialize in the study of religion such as History of Religions, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Religions of South Asia, Sophia: Journal of Comparative Religion, Ethics and Metaphysics, Translation Studies, etc. Apart from individual reviews, there were several major review forums where groups of scholars reviewed the book and I had to respond to their readings.

The first one as I remember happened at the Annual Conference on South Asia in 2010, Wisconsin, Madison, USA. Another happened at U.C. Berkeley, again in 2010, and then one at the American Academy of Religion meeting in 2011. These very constructive, lively affairs and I learned much from them.

Apart from these there were review forums that went straight into journals such as Interventions: Journal of Postcolonial Theory; Method & Theory in The Study of Religion, and RoSA. So the main audiences it has reached include, Asian Studies, Study of Religions and Postcolonial Studies.

Q   And … how have the reviews been?

A   It would be fair to say that the reviews are still continuing.

The book’s reception in the fields of postcolonial studies and comparative philosophy has hardly begun. Interestingly, its most avid reception has been within the rapidly growing area of scholarship that is re-examining the relationship between the domains of religion and the secular. It usually takes about 4 or 5 years for a normal book to find its way into the academic market.

However, this is not a normal book by any stretch of the imagination. For a first monograph it breaks a lot of the rules. It style is radically interdisciplinary and tries to forge its own critical idiom by synthesizing conventional modes of critique with a subjective Sikh standpoint.

That’s why the reception of this book will go on for some time yet as it reaches new audiences.

Q   Tell me more. What have the reviews been?
 
A   There’s been a tremendous variation in the way that scholars reacted to the material. Most focused on what interested them, or the particular field of study they were comfortable with, which is not surprising. By doing this, however, the major organizational strands of the book were somewhat eclipsed in these reviews.

Q   I note that the book has been published as one in a series called “Insurrections”? Was this choice intentional, and if so, what was your goal?

A   My decision to publish with the Insurrections book series does indeed have something to do with the audience I wanted to reach. I wanted the book to reach several major scholarly audiences including:

i   conventional religious studies, especially history of religions;

Ii  the theoretical study of religion;

iii  continental philosophers of religion;

iv  the rapidly growing industry of scholarship that works on the relationship between religion and violence and religion and politics;

v  postcolonial theory and cultural studies audience;

vi  scholars who work on critical Asian studies;

vii South Asian studies, especially those who offer critical approaches to the secular Indian state;

viii the field of comparative philosophy especially in its continental version;

ix  the developing domain of critical Sikh studies.

The problem for me was twofold. First, publishers tend to have difficulty marketing books to more than one or two target audiences at the most. Marketing my book presented a real challenge, even though the number of scholars and graduate students who appreciate interdisciplinary work was growing rapidly. And secondly, I didn’t want to change my writing style, or indeed the message, just to suit a single audience.

Q   How did you solve that dilemma, then?

A   Luckily, an opportunity presented itself just as I was completing the first draft of the manuscript. In November 2005 I happened to be part of a panel discussion at the American Academy of Religion on Hardt and Negri’s best selling book Empire. I think the panel was organized by the Continental Philosophy group. Also present on the panel was Jeff Robyns who was presenting a paper on Empire.

Jeff and I presented papers that were quite different in their messages – his was framed from a Western standpoint, while mine was questioning the boundaries between East and West. So we both did our stuff and the feeling I got when we left the panel was that we would agree to disagree.

Or so I thought. Because a couple of years later, and to my complete surprise, I received a note from Jeff Robyns inviting me to give a talk at his institution on Religion and the Democracy in India. He wanted me to elaborate on what I had said in Philadelphia a couple of years earlier, which he had apparently found interesting.

I looked at the list of speakers who had either spoken or due to speak in that series of invited lectures and it was really impressive. They included major philosophers and cultural theorists such as Slavoj Zizek, Catharine Malabou, Catharine Keller and John Caputo. These were all people whose work I had read (and at times disagreed with but nevertheless respected) and continued to read, so I happily accepted.

Q  And how did the talk go?

A   It went well. And because it was close to Vaisakhi, they also invited members of the local Sikh community to attend, which I thought was a rather nice touch.

After the lecture we got talking about what the contents of the manuscript I was working on, and it was at that point that Jeff told me about a new book series that was being published by Columbia University Press, which he and several others were editing. The series was called Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics and Culture and the main editor was no less a figure than Slavoj Zizek – arguably the world’s leading cultural critic and philosopher.

As soon as I heard the name of the series, I thought to myself, ”Wow, the name ‘insurrections’ puts the finger exactly on what I am doing” - which, as I saw it, was an intellectual resistance to established frameworks of civil authority as these manifest themselves in structures of State, Media and Academia. So ‘Insurrections’ suitably fitted not only the content but also the style of my manuscript which was designed to not fit easily into conventionally allocated places.

And the blurb for the book series was even more interesting. It went like this:

The intersection of religion, politics and culture is one of the most discussed areas in theory today. It also has the deepest and most wide-ranging impact on the world today. Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics and Culture will bring the tools of philosophy and critical theory to the political implications of the religious turn. The series will address a range of religious traditions and political viewpoints in the United States, Europe and other parts of the world. Without advocating any specific religious or theological stance, the series aims nonetheless to be faithful to the radically emancipator potential of religion.

Now I had actually placed my manuscript with another publisher (I think it was Chicago) but as soon as I read the Insurrections blurb I decided to pull it out and send it to Columbia University Press for review.

Q  Was there a downside to going with "Insurrections”?

A  Only two things that concerned me about publishing with Insurrections. One worry for me was that I had strongly criticized Slavoj Zizek in the final chapter of the book. So I was worried that the editors, and especially Zizek, might reject the manuscript outright because I had critiqued him and other icons of Western theory and philosophy such as Hegel.

Another worry I had was that they would decline because they might find Sikhism to be too narrow and ghettoized a subject area for them – partly because the field of Sikh studies itself was still stuck in a narrow area studies mode, which was a turn off for readers outside that area.

But I needn’t have worried. They found my arguments interesting and of value to a much wider audience and the review process was handled very delicately by the Columbia commissioning editor.

In any case, I soon learned that Western theorists and scholars tended to invite criticism of their standpoints, rather than shun it. The reviews came out great and the rest is history.

Publishing in Insurrections was a great decision. First, there was a large and sophisticated readership associated with it because of its subject area. The upside of it all was that I got to introduce the Sikh issues and Sikh concepts to a mainstream audience at the same time that I was selling to them my critique of Western theory (while using theory) and of the West as a political and cultural institution.

Q  With the years that have passed since publication, do you still feel positive about it?
 
A   Basically Insurrections helped me to by-pass the institutional mechanisms which intellectually and politically segregated non-Western cultures within global consciousness. It allowed me to practice co-contamination as I theorized it.

The series has become extremely successful with 26 published titles so far (and is growing strongly each year) by major European, American and South Asian thinkers, including Slavoj Žižek, Gianni Vattimo, Alain Badiou, Catherine Malabou, and Peter Sloterdijk, John D. Caputo, Richard Kearney, and Ananda Abeyesekara.

Continued next week …

January 23, 2014

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