The 2024 EdWARD BAIlEY KeynotE: Dr. ANUPAMA RANAWANA

"“I have told you already, it is there”: Anticolonial internationalism in feminist faith based storytellers of 1960s-1980s Asia."
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This lecture  will address  the need to recover the radical consciousness of anticolonial religious thought as a site of struggle, and how Third World faith-based feminist writers and storytellers of and from Asia from the 1960s-1980s provide us with a framework for what this radical consciousness is.   This paper centers the Third World in it’s original understanding, that of a political project, a ‘third something’ that was an internationalist collective attempt to establish political and economic sovereignty for the former colonial world. In the time periods of the 1960s through to the 1980s, we clearly see how Third World feminists mobilised liberation movements, created transnational networks of solidarity and dialogued about a radical vision of the world. Many of these individuals and collectives were anchored to the anticolonial struggles of Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia. This paper draws from a variety of feminist writers but focusses primarily on the Indonesian writer Marianne Katoppo, discussing how language and writing were, for her, tools of power, of resistance and of feminist faith expression, and importantly, internationalism. In closing, I discuss why the work of such writers is important for the field of implicit religion, particularly how internationalism opens up both religious and non-religious communities to meaningful, global lives.

ABOUT Anupama Ranawana

Anupama Ranawana is a Researcher in the Center for the Study of Religion and Politics St Andrew's University, a  senior researcher  for the Centre for Poverty Analysis in Sri Lanka and co-Editor in Chief of Religion and Culture. Her PhD (University of Aberdeen , 2017)  focused on religious political thought in the global political economy with a specialism in international development; her PhD thesis:"Decolonising religious narratives in the International with special reference to Buddhist feminist thought."