What is it about?
The article sets the current student uprisings in South Africa in the context of the current (2016) constitutional crisis, and interprets the meaning of the uprisings against the history of apartheid and the failed political compromise of 1994 that ushered in the "new" South Africa. The article further demonstrates how the student uprisings raise questions about new knowledge discourses and how the other articles in this thematic issue address and speak into this situation of crisis in so far as "religion" as concept operates as focalizer for this process.
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Why is it important?
The article makes concrete how a new knowledge-power regime emerges in South Africa as an epiphenomenon of the social, cultural, and political crisis created by the failure both of constitutional politics and of neoliberal financial capitalism. In this article it is shown how the concept of "religion", operationalized and applied in various concrete theory and study domains, serve to theorize contemporary burning social, political, economic, and ideological issues in South African society.
Perspectives
This articles captures my interaction with current burning social, political, and economic questions in South Africa, and offers my interpretive contextualization of what is at stake in the scholarly discourses of "religion" in so far as these focalize critical and postcolonial perspectives on current events. It is particularly the role of "religion" as social definition and as agency-constructor that is highlighted through the analysis of current discourse.
Prof Gerhard G A van den Heever
University of South Africa
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This page is a summary of: Naming the Moment, Religion and Theology, January 2016, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/15743012-02303009.
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