Nye010: 20 years of Disney’s Pocahontas: the underlying tragedy of Matoka, Smith, & Jamestown (podcast)
Release Date: 07/24/2015
malorynye's podcast
This is the first episode of season 2, which is on the general theme of religion, race, and coloniality. The episodes for this season are recordings from lectures that I presented at the University of Stirling in autumn 2018
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info_outlinemalorynye's podcast
What are we looking for when we look at ‘religion and popular culture’? In this episode I explore the ways in which religion in books, film, and dramas is a way that authors and readers engage with ideas of specific religions. This can be broadly understood through the concept of 'religionization'.
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How should Australia try to understood its unsavoury history? In this episode, I discuss a recent TV drama series called Cleverman about an Indigenous superhero who finds himself fighting a securitised white establishment. So what does Cleverman tell us about the dynamics of race, history, and Indigeneity in contemporary Australia?
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There can be no doubt that the academic study of religion emerged out of European colonialism. There are various lines of descent for the discipline, and like much of the humanities and social sciences, they all lead back to colonialism, and in particular the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And so, during a time when there is a widespread movement for the decolonisation of knowledge, is there a need for a decolonisation of the study of religion? And if so, then what does it involve? These are some initial thoughts on this major issue.
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I am a student of religion who does not study religion. I study what people think and talk about as religion. I study the spaces, places, things, objects, ideas, practices, and conflicts that can be found in particular discourses that get labelled and thought about as ‘religion’. I study the idea of religion.
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In this podcast I do something a little different, reading the text of King James I & VI's short 1604 tract called A Counterblaste to Tobacco
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In 1604, King James I of England wrote a short tract against the smoking of tobacco, which had recently arrived in the country from America. This episode is a short exploration of the significance of this book.
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When we speak of religion are we in fact talking about race? Does the idea of ‘religion’ only make sense if we consider it as a particular instance of a racial formation?
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To understand the burkini bans in France in summer 2016, our starting point needs to be based on an assumption of intersectionality. The bans are not only about religion or security, they also involve gender, sexuality, race, power, and history.
info_outlineThis podcast is a slightly expanded version of a blog that I published on the Huffington Post, which can be found here.
The Disney Pocahontas film can be found on YouTube here.
You can also find a short trailer of the 2005 Terrence Malik film The New World here, as well as the opening part of the film that shows the arrival of the English settlers in the Chesapeake Bay.
My modern version of the anti-tobacco pamphlet, This Vile Habit: A counterblast to tobacco by King James can be found here.
The quote from Professor Cornel Pewewardy, a Comanche-Kiowa writer is:
‘We live in a society that suffers from historical amnesia, and we find it very difficult to preserve the memory of those who have resisted and struggled over time for the ideas of freedom, democracy and equality. America has always been both deeply xenophobic and a land of relative opportunity.
‘White interest in the American Indian surges and ebbs with the tides of United States history…, forever linking Indians with the untamed forests, fields and streams.
‘… We need to carefully review our historical past in order to understand the present, move on to the future, and not get caught up and trapped in old negative stereotypes of the American frontier past, freeze dried and recycled as modern cultural myths — all of which were mostly established by white inventors of Indian images.’