'Woke' Racism Comes to Europe in Full Force

Beware of American(ised) People Bearing Gifts, Courtesy of the U of Groningen

This is another one of the more troubling postings, dear readers, and I’m sorry for bringing this up so close to the Christmas holiday season, but we must talk about this current job advert from the U of Groningen, Netherlands (here and below all emphases mine):

Are you intrigued by how esoteric belief and practice shape whiteness, and vice versa? Would you like to develop an innovative research project at the intersection of race, spirituality and religion? Then you may be the PhD candidate we are looking for! You will develop an independent research project, be supervised by a team of experts, and work closely with other scholars interested in race and religion.

If you’re thinking WTF is this nonsense now, well, here’s the rest of the advert:

Over the past decades, scholarly interest in esoteric, heterodox and alternative spiritualities has shown a steady increase. More recently, scholars have begun to use race as an analytical category to better understand the history, context and nature of such spiritualities, asking how such spiritualities inform political, societal and cultural domains, and vice versa. However, there has been little explicit attention to how whiteness shapes, and is shaped by, such spiritualities. We are looking for a PhD candidate who will address this gap.

Apparently, one PhD candidate suffices to address this certainly meaningful ‘gap’ in the research literature.

Broadly, we are interested in two questions. How do contemporary esoteric spiritualities construct, reinforce, resist, or transform whiteness? In turn, how does whiteness shape esoteric practice and ideas, representation, and scholarship?

This gets more stupid by the line: remember, in the preceding paragraph, the project is supposedly about ‘the history, context and nature of such spiritualities’, and now it’s about ‘contemporary spiritualities’. Moreover, at no point does the advert explain, however briefly, what ‘whiteness’ is.

We explicitly invite you to develop and choose your own research questions, theoretical framework, methodology, and case studies, which may address either or both of these broad concerns. We are open to proposals that focus on specific movements, currents, people, or phenomena (for instance, New Age, Theosophy, occulture [I have no clue what that might be], reality shifting, conspirituality [or this one], or new animism) as well as industries and forms of cultural production that engage these (examples here could be the wellness industry or Silicon Valley, and Ari Aster's Midsommar or Jordan Peele's Nope, respectively). We invite applications with a background in a range of disciplines and fields—including religious studies, anthropology, literary studies, media studies, cultural studies, art history, and colonial and global history—and with various geographic and theoretical foci.

So, let me get this straight: there are two overarching research questions, but the candidate is, at the same time, invited to ‘develop and choose your own research questions, theoretical framework, methodology, and case studies’.

I’m sorry, but this is incoherent blabber: it’s either-or here, not some kind of postmodernist whatever.

Also, if that is a position about ‘whiteness’ (whatever that might be), how would that work with the explicit emphases on ‘various geographic and theoretical foci’?

At this point, I have the following two questions: who comes up with this kind of contradictory nonsense, and who is funding this extravaganza in stupidity and racism?

Down the Rabbit-Hole of ‘Current Academia’ We Go (sigh)

Here’s more ‘information’ from the job advert:

[The successful candidate] will be supervised by Dr Justine M. Bakker (daily supervisor), Assistant Professor of Comparative Religious Studies specialising in the study of race and esotericism, and a second supervisor, who will be chosen and assigned in relation to your specific project [which I thought was ‘whiteness’]. Prof. Thomas Quartier, who specialises in spirituality and ritual studies, will be the promotor.

The project will be funded by a starter grant awarded by the Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies to Dr Justine M. Bakker.

Here we have our two answers, and we shall take them in turn.

Meet Dr. Justine M. Bakker, dear readers (source as in the above link):

I am an assistant professor in Comparative Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen. Broadly, my work concentrates on the intersections of race and religion. It encompasses two broad research foci. Firstly, a study of alternative and esoteric forms of religion in the African diaspora. I have written most extensively about the Nation of Islam, as esoteric religion. Secondly, I am concerned with conceptual and epistemological questions in the field of religious studies. What is religion? How did ideas about race inform and shape our conceptualizations of terms such as religion and esotericism?

Prior to taking up a position as Assistant Professor, I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Ethics and Political Philosophy, also at the RU. I am also associated with Dr. Anya Topolski's Race-Religion Constellation Project.

I obtained my PhD in Religion at Rice University, Houston TX USA (May 2020), with a dissertation that looked at Afrodiasporic literature, poetry and art as forms of parareligion, a concept I develop in conversation with the work of Sylvia Wynter. I am currently revising this project into a book manuscript.

You may obtain Dr. Bakker’s CV by clicking here. Note that Dr. Bakker is engaging in the all-too-typical shenanigans so prevalent in academia these days, namely, stating that she’s been at this fancy-names institution (e.g., Harvard) or there while omitting, in clear wording, that the funding came from some other place (typically a national science foundation’s postdoc mobility program); I’ve seen so many colleagues blowing up their CVs—which I didn’t do—that I can easily spot these things. As with many other things, once you know that, it’s impossible to un-see. I consider such behaviour borderline fraudulent.

Expertocracy at its Worst

Dr. Anya Topolski’s website is here, by the way, and it’s a real gem of po-mo woke-fied nonsense; see if you can spot anything that reeks of specific expertise in the above-mentioned field of study supervised by Dr. Bakker:

Anya Topolski is an associate professor in ethics and political philosophy at the Radboud University Nijmegen. She obtained two bachelor degrees at McGill University in Montreal, Canada: BSc in Biochemistry (1999) and an BA Honours in Philosophy (2000). After a brief but memorable experience teaching in Korea, Anya moved to Belgium to complete a Masters in Continental Philosophy (Magna Cum Laude) specialising in the political thought of Hannah Arendt. She obtained her PhD in Philosophy at the KU Leuven, for which she was awarded the 2008 Auschwitz Foundation Stichting Prize, with a focus on the political thought of Hannah Arendt, the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas and contemporary Jewish thought.

In 2009, she joined an interdisciplinary NWO project as a post-doctoral researcher to consider the application of her theory of relationality in the field of military ethics where she engaged in post-Srebrenica research on responsibility and judgment. In 2012 her research on European Identity and Exclusion, antisemitism and islamophobia, was funded by FWO – Flanders. In addition she was a lecturer at the University of Kent in Brussels in political rhetoric and communication. In 2015 she became an assistant professor in political theory at the Faculty of Management at Radboud University, Nijmegen. In 2017 she received tenure as an assistant professor in ethics and political philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen.

How great of an ‘expert™’ is Dr. Topolski? Well, according to her CV, her languages don’t include any of the ones spoken in Bosnia-Herzegovina, for starters:

So, Dr. Topolski, who is an ‘expert™’ on contemporary political thought, worked on Bosnia-Herzegovina without bothering to learn the language. Excellent, and for me, this is a no-go. People, I actually hold a PhD in south-eastern European history from the U of Graz in Austria (2011), and while I won’t claim my spoken ‘South Slavic’ is memorable, I at least undertook the effort to learn to read it well enough (albeit quite slowly) to read the literature produced by colleagues and friends in former Yugoslavia. But for our valiant po-mo-spouting ‘experts™’ who worked on Bosnia-Herzegovina as a post-doc, this was neither required nor something that Dr. Topolski thought necessary.

What’s Dr. Bakker’s PhD About?

This one’s more of a doozy, really, for it’s too obvious and stupid at that. Dr. Bakker wrote her thesis ‘that looked at Afrodiasporic literature, poetry and art as forms of parareligion, a concept I develop in conversation with the work of Sylvia Wynter’.

Fine enough, but keep in mind that we’d need to talk about that person, Sylvia Wynter now. This is what Wikipedia says (references removed, emphases mine):

Sylvia Wynter, O.J. (Holguín, Cuba, 11 May 1928) is a Jamaican novelist, dramatist, critic, philosopher, and essayist. Her work combines insights from the natural sciences, the humanities, art, and anti-colonial struggles in order to unsettle what she refers to as the ‘overrepresentation of Man’. Black studies, economics, history, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, literary analysis, film analysis, and philosophy are some of the fields she draws on in her scholarly work…

Critical Work

Sylvia Wynter's scholarly work is highly poetic, expository, and complex. Her work attempts to elucidate the development and maintenance of colonial modernity and the modern man. She interweaves science, philosophy, literary theory, and critical race theory to explain how the European man came to be considered the epitome of humanity, ‘Man 2’ or ‘the figure of man’. Wynter's theoretical framework has changed and deepened over the years.

In her essay ‘Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and What It Is Like to be “Black”’, Wynter developed a theoretical framework she refers to as the ‘sociogenic principle’, which would become central to her work. Wynter derives this theory from an analysis of Frantz Fanon's notion of ‘sociogeny’. Wynter argues that Fanon's theorization of sociogeny envisions human being (or experience) as not merely biological, but also based in stories and symbolic meanings generated within culturally specific contexts [no shit analysis]. Sociogeny as a theory therefore overrides, and cannot be understood within, Cartesian dualism for Wynter. The social and the cultural influence the biological [classical cultural Marxism in the mould of Gramsci, by the way].

In ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument’, Wynter explains that the West uses race to attempt to answer the questions of who and what we are—particularly after the enlightenment period that unveils religion as incapable of answering those questions.

I’ll spare you more of Ms. Wynter’s writings here—it’s enough, I suppose, to understand two issues:

1. Sylvia Wynter is a Communist/Cultural Marxist whose influence over Dr. Bakker must be big, indeed, for the latter explicitly mentions the former as her (kinda) mentor.

2. WTF do scholars of the left-ish persuasion (ab)use ‘race’ to further their seemingly ideological agendas?

In the case of Dr. Bakker, since she’s a product of the Literature Dept. of a ‘liberal’ US private university, I’m assuming she’s a crypto commie, too, even though she may not know that.

Still, this crap is what passes for ‘research’ in the humanities these days; it’s bad enough that many US universities are circling down the drain of woke-ness, but this is even worse now that this nonsense is imported to Europe.