This panel seeks to explore the relationship between religion and forms of counter-hegemony in the African Great Lakes region over the last 500 years. We offer a critical reading of religious praxis in Africa, exploring the political dimensions of sacred acts. We ask how spiritual leaders and devout practitioners make incisive critiques of politics through worship and warfare — both armed and spiritual. The fasting and all night prayer sessions of contemporary Pentecostal churches highlight the subversive potential of quotidian religious practices. In a time increasingly marked by the myth of the divide between the secular/political and personal/religious, scholarly attention to the ways ordinary people have wielded spiritual power for political ends provides new pathways for understanding historical and contemporary crises. How can we rethink the relationship between the supposedly secular realm of politics and the imagined apolitical world of religion? The mobilization of military power through Alice Lakwena’s Holy Spirit Movement exemplifies the material power of “invisible agents.” Spiritual forces, and the impact they have on their human interlocutors, play a significant role in the political history of the African Great Lakes. By exploring these patterns across time and space, we highlight the enduring entanglement of counter-hegemonic religious movements and more conventional forms of political authority. This panel asks how religious actors have both responded to political crises and actively reshaped the political landscape through spiritual practice.
Please send an abstract to Adele Stock (alstock@stanford.edu) or Jacob Katumusiime (jkatumusiime256@gmail.com) by March 14th.
