I was in Chicago on June 12, 2019 when my friend, a Christian theologian from Hong Kong, sent me a Facebook Live video of Civic Square, the site outside the government offices that got its name from a 2012 protest against a bill to revise Hong Kong's education curriculum to feature nationalistic Chinese themes. Civic Square was also where the 2014 Umbrella Movement began. The crowd that gathered there in June of last year was singing the evangelical chorus "Sing Hallelujah to the Lord." The word on the street, my friend said, was that Christians were trying to calm the police attired in riot gear. A day of protests was expected against the second reading of a bill to amend the extradition law to allow for any requesting foreign jurisdiction, including the Chinese mainland, to request the return of "fugitive offenders" to face legal repercussions for their crimes. The fear was that it would be used to repress critics of Beijing.
In Racial Formations in the United States, Michael Omi and Howard Winant have one of the best takes, I think, on why the interrogation of racial formations has been so central to American studies. Calling the Civil Rights Movement the beginning of 'the great transformation,' what Omi and Winant help us to see is that by calling attention to race, what began in the 1950s led to what they term the 'politicization of the social,' the revelation that there were multiple inequalities and oppressive structures – gender, sexuality, religion, age, ability – on which American society was founded and that there were multiple ways to reckoning with these legacies.
I became Eastern Catholic because I was a bad intellectual. And I wanted to become a better one. I did not know that my intellect was in such bad shape until I finished my doctorate. Professionally, I have a Ph.D. in geography. My dissertation is on Cantonese-speaking Protestants and how they engage with politics and social issues. It's over 600 pages long. By all measures, I was doing fine.
Among decent, intelligent, and respectable human beings in the United States and around the world, the occupation of Donald Trump of the American presidency is the shock that never ends. Much of this has to do with how vulgar the man is. The activist-academic terms intersectionality and identity politics have in turn entered into our popular vocabulary as words that might describe how all of these aggrieved groups might resist the Trump Administration. This resistance, it is claimed, is necessary because these various groups have not only been insulted by Trump's rhetoric, but have also been oppressed by draconian policies either passed during Trump's first 100 days or spoken of by way of rumor.
Prior to the Umbrella Movement, there was little reason for people who were not from Hong Kong to care much about its politics, unless, of course, one were a devoted reader of The Economist, which did cover Hong Kong as a former British colony. Alas, my experience in the academy corroborates the former sentiment: when I began studying Christian involvement in Hong Kong's politics in the late 2000s, nobody was interested. "You have to study Christianity in China," one advisor said, "because that's where the jobs are." The growth of the People's Republic of China (PRC), especially the explosion of Christianity in China, was what people wanted to talk about. The fascination was tied to the economic spectacle of China's spectacular urban landscapes, the political force of China's increasing influence on international relations, the social impact of Chinese immigration to Anglo-American metropolises. Indeed, with the recent spate of church buildings being demolished in Wenzhou and crosses being taken down in Zhejiang Province, China proper is still the only thing in the Greater China region that everyone wants to talk about. In this context, Christianity was fascinating because it told the story of China's human rights record as well as missionary impulses still alive and well in the West. Another faculty committee member told me: "I know people who go over to China and go through networks in Hong Kong. You should follow them on a missions trip and do an ethnography on them." Hong Kong, it turns out, was only interesting as it was tied to doing research on China proper. The local politics of Hong Kong and the engagement of Christians with them were not on my Anglo-American advisors' radar screens. When I finally did get myself over to Hong Kong in 2010, people there confirmed to me that, as an Asian American, I was ill equipped to study China and Hong Kong's relations with the motherland. Indeed, theologians and social scientists in Hong Kong were already studying Christianity in China, and church leaders were getting heavily involved in various kinds of missionary projects. They told me to go home.
September 28, 2014, is usually considered the day that the theological landscape in Hong Kong changed. For 79 days, hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong citizens occupied key political and economic sites in the Hong Kong districts of Admiralty, Causeway Bay, and Mong Kok, resisting the government's attempts to clear them out until court injunctions were handed down in early December. Captured on social media and live television, the images of police in Hong Kong throwing 87 volleys of tear gas and pepper-spraying students writhing in agony have been imprinted onto the popular imagination around the world. Using the image of a student standing up all wrapped up in plastic wrap to protect against police brutality, the cover story of The Economist on October 4, 2014, was titled "The Party v. the People," attempting to analyze the Hong Kong protests' impact on relations with Beijing. Not to be outdone, the Time magazine cover dated October 13, 2014, featured the image of a goggled young man with a face mask triumphantly holding up two umbrellas surrounded almost like incense with the smoke of the tear gas. On the front of the magazine is plastered three words, "The Umbrella Revolution," declaring that Hong Kong's youth were fed up with the lack of democracy in this Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Gathering shortly thereafter in their newly formed Umbrella Square, the Hong Kong Federation of Students and Scholarism (a secondary school student movement led by the charismatic Joshua Wong Chi-fung, himself gracing the cover of Time the very next week on October 20) declared that this was not a revolution because they were not overthrowing the government. They asserted that the occupations were a movement—the Umbrella Movement—to demand that the government institute "genuine universal suffrage," the right of citizens in Hong Kong to vote for candidates that they could directly nominate and who would not have to be vetted by the central government in Beijing. A series of debates circulated in the Umbrella Movement's wake, wondering whether the protests constituted Hong Kong's Tiananmen moment, hearkening back to the student democracy movement that had resulted in close to one million people occupying Beijing's central public square in 1989, only to be violently suppressed with tanks, bayonets, and live bullets throughout the streets of the PRC's capital on June 4.
Frederick Douzet's account of urban racial politics in Oakland, California attempts to frame the racial geopolitics of California via Yves Lacoste's geopolitical framework. Suggesting that American political geographers focus too much on international politics, Douzet contends for a return to Lacoste's classic definition of geopolitics as simply the study of how groups compete for power over territorial space—whether as large as nation-states in an international order or as small as neighbourhoods in cities. Douzet's study of Oakland thus claims to be about how African Americans in Oakland wrested power from a white oligarchy in the 1970s, only to be faced with the prospect of founding multiracial coalitions in the 1990s due to the increase of Asian and Latino immigration. Yet her book fails to bring the potential of her argument about California's geopolitics to full realization. Moreover, the work is plagued by Douzet's seeming unwillingness to cite existing work in American urban studies
What does Beyond Secular Order have to do outside of the quibbles of the theology and religious studies academy? What might Milbank be saying to plebeians like me who have to live our lives in a world whose order is understood as 'secular'? Milbank's answer is to present two sequences, signaling that Beyond Secular Order is not to be read so much as a technical text, but as art, poetry, music, perhaps even a map. As an artist, poet, and musician (and geographer), Milbank has crafted a first sequence on 'modern ontology' tracing the strands of modern philosophy that serves as the basis for a second sequence on 'political ontology' that proposes nothing short of a full-fledged merger of Anglican, Byzantine, and Roman Catholic polities for a Christian socialist recovery of global Christendom. Underlying both sections is what Milbank claims to be the 'hidden dimension of humanity' of 'trans-organicity,' understanding that human persons are not only natural organisms but are teleologically oriented toward the supernatural.
When Canon Andrew White, popularly known as the 'Vicar of Baghdad,' reported that Islamic State had cut a five-year-old child he baptized in half, the Church of England got behind the #WeAreN Twitter hashtag and Facebook profile picture campaign. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has changed his Facebook page's picture to the Arabic letter 'N' in solidarity with Christians whose Mosul homes were marked with the letter in orders to either convert to IS's version of Islam or face the sword. I want to argue that whatever one might believe about the incoherence of Anglican theology, the Vicar of Baghdad and the Archbishop of Canterbury resist the Islamic State through a coherent Anglican political theology. I want to argue, moreover, that that vision can be found in the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People.
As this Syndicate forum on the Umbrella Movement and theology winds to a close, the physical occupations in Hong Kong seem to be nearing their end stage. With court injunctions, police clearances, statements of support from the People's Republic of China (PRC) for the Hong Kong government, the attempted voluntary surrender of Occupy Central leaders to the police, and a student hunger strike after over seventy days of street occupations, it might seem late in the game to call for the mapping of "grounded theologies," "performative practices of placemaking informed by understandings of the transcendent," woven into the political constitution of the Hong Kong protests. However, as I shall argue, there is no better time to get to work
Weaving rich institutional histories of groups that have purported to speak for all Asian Americans, like the Japanese American Citizens League and the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, Ellen Wu's The Color of Success meticulously describes how their claims to represent their ethnic communities were vigorously contested by Japanese and Chinese Americans themselves from the 1930s to the 1960s. Wu sets these representational challenges against the larger backdrop of the rise of an American liberal political framework and its assimilationist agenda for racial minorities in the United States in the 1930s, which was produced by the geopolitical challenges of totalitarian fascism and communism. Always careful to position Asian Americans themselves as the agents of community formation, Wu describes how the "success story" of the so-called model minority could only have been produced by Asian American acceptance of such liberal racial ideologies. In so doing, Wu demonstrates with sophistication that intra-community contestations among Asian Americans over the making of American liberal racial formations have produced the ambivalent present of an ideologically fraught Asian American community landscape.
The public conversation swirling around Jian Ghomeshi's termination from the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) is a grand exercise in secular sexualities.It begins with his Facebook post. Explaining that he was fired because of his private BDSM consensual acts with an ex-girlfriend, he castigates the CBC for both acknowledging that his acts were consensual and then wrongfully pulling the plug on him because he would serve as a poor role model.
Over the last three years, three new important books have contributed to critical geographies of American evangelicalism: Jason Dittmer and Tristan Sturm's Mapping the End Times, Jason Hackworth's Faith Based, and Justin G. Wilford's Sacred Subdivisions. Demonstrating that evangelicals are ignored at geographers' peril in political, economic, and cultural geography, these new books each demonstrate that evangelical usages of space have contemporary salience in secular geopolitical formations, domestic economic policy, and the interpretation of cultural landscapes. Because these three books represent three different subfields in human geography (political, economic, and cultural geography), they can be taken together to critically interrogate the ways in which evangelicals use their theologies to exert secular power on a variety of modern spatial constructions. The strengths of each of these books are thus also their weakness, for although their critiques rightly interrogate the secular ends of some evangelical practices, the varieties of evangelical theologies are seldom explored, particularly in how contestations over the word evangelical shape the ways in which self-identifying evangelicals have made places.
The shooting in Ottawa on 22 October 2014 has uncovered the remarkable way that the Canadian state remains theologically constituted. In some ways, this is a relatively uncontroversial argument. The White House press conference immediately following the attacks made a link between the Canadian support for military action against the Islamic State and the deaths of both Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent on October 20 in Quebec and Cpl. Nathan Cirillo of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders on the October 22. When one says that Ottawa shootings have a religious dimension, the gut response is that my argument will be about Muslims in Canada and the potential for radicalization.
