Race and Religion in American Buddhism

ISBN-13: 9780199756285 / Angielski / Twarda / 2011 / 192 str.

Joseph Cheah

Opis

While academic and popular studies of Buddhism have often neglected race as a factor of analysis, the issues concerning race and racialization have remained not far below the surface of the wider discussion among ethnic Buddhists, converts, and sympathizers regarding representations of American Buddhism and adaptations of Buddhist practices to the American context. In Race and Religion in American Buddhism, Joseph Cheah provides a much-needed contribution to the field of religious studies by addressing the under-theorization of race in the study of American Buddhism. Through the lens of racial formation, Cheah demonstrates how adaptations of Buddhist practices by immigrants, converts and sympathizers have taken place within an environment already permeated with the logic and ideology of whiteness and white supremacy. In other words, race and religion (Buddhism) are so intimately bounded together in the United States that the ideology of white supremacy informs the differing ways in which convert Buddhists and sympathizers and Burmese ethnic Buddhists have adapted Buddhist religious practices to an American context.

Cheah offers a complex view of how the Burmese American community must negotiate not only the religious and racial terrains of the United States but also the transnational reach of the Burmese junta. Race and Religion in American Buddhism marks an important contribution to the study of American Buddhism as well as to the larger fields of U.S. religions and Asian American studies.

Recenzje

Race and Religion in American Buddhism is an excellent contribution to the fields of religious studies, Asian American Studies, ethnic studies, immigrant religions, and studies of American Buddhism that lays bare the white supremacist assumptions of privilege in the defition of what makes a real Buddhist... Such a book-length study as this stands to transform the discourse on American Buddhism and Asian American religions in significant and much needed ways.

O autorze

Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Saint Joseph College