Maltese G (2026)
Publication Type: Journal article
Publication year: 2026
Global religious history (GRH) has made important strides in decentering historiographies that naturalize European claims of hegemony. Yet key concepts such as entanglement, relationality, and situatedness remain under-Theorized. When engaging with language and signifiers, GRH works tend to overlook that signifiers are inseparable from materiality, bodies, and practices, thereby obscuring crucial power dynamics. Building on Karen Barad's ethico-onto-epistemological concepts of diffraction and the agential cut, which theorize meaning and matter as co-constitutive, I propose to reconceptualize signifiers as material-discursive markings-as practices that enact specific boundaries and relations in particular configurations, thus enacting reality. This means analyzing signifiers as material-discursive practices-not only as effects, but precisely as enactments-both in the research object and in the research process, with consistent attention to one's own situatedness and to the exclusions they help enact. This is illustrated through a case study of debates among Muslim intellectuals in 1930s-40s South and Southeast Asia on religion, Islam, and mysticism. Ultimately, the paper urges a reflexive and self-critical historiography that is accountable for the cuts and the exclusions it enacts, along with the possibilities of inclusion and change.
APA:
Maltese, G. (2026). Europa dezentrieren: Globale Verflechtungen und Signifikanten als materiell-diskursive Markierungen. Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft. https://doi.org/10.1515/zfr-2025-0038
MLA:
Maltese, Giovanni. "Europa dezentrieren: Globale Verflechtungen und Signifikanten als materiell-diskursive Markierungen." Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft (2026).
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