Clash of Civilizations

As the year continues, I continue to find the places where my classes speak to each other and introduce many layers and dimensions to the same topics without realizing their intersections. My human rights seminar is one that came to mind when I was thinking about Third World and Transnational feminisms after my presentation. The class, called Human Rights, Religion, and Social Justice begins to tease out the ways that two of the biggest organizational forces help or hurt the other’s cause. In one of my readings, and in-class discussion, the usefulness and drawbacks of global pluralism (in this case as pertains to religion) came up. Here, I found that pluralism ran into many of the same tensions as transnational feminists have with Third World feminists. From an article by Rosemary Hicks titled “Saving Darfur”, she notes in her final remarks, “pluralism is often articulated as an ethic essential to democratic practice and an appropriate framework for resolving national and international conflicts. Though good in many respects, pluralism is a technique for making supposedly irreducible differences coexist, and therein lays its naturalizing power…resonant appeals to static animosities elided the fluidity of religious and racial identities and the political circumstances under which differences become salient.” Just as the writers of This Bridge Called My Back had to reckon with the democratizing of the text at the expense of black women and their labor, and transnational and Third World women have to reckon with the need to destroy larger systems of power in conjunction with location/nation-specific problems, religions have run into the same tension. As the clash of civilizations theory I studied a while back posits there will always be an innate struggle of one nation and culture over the other that it comes in contact with in postcolonial society, it becomes increasingly clear that this tension has been made explicitly clear for quite some time. The authors of This Bridge were able to reckon with it in the end because it achieved its goal despite its non-linear path, but I continue to question how we reckon with these tensions when the outcomes are negative, or neutral? How do we respect particularities while also finding common ground? Even in the ad that we watched in class claiming “freedom is basic” brought to the foreground questions of how individuals define freedom and what it even means for that freedom to be basic. I doubt this is a question that is easily resolved as it has been grappled with for years, but I am interested to see how this generation creates a different world from the victories and progression of smaller communities they are a part of.