With this theme, the Journal not only intends to center recent international research being conducted on the colonial history of religious encounters, in particular in the field of missionary history. The Journal also aims to break new ground by bringing religion into the emerging synergy between postcolonial and memory studies. Conceptualizing ‘postcolonial religious memories’ in a broad and interdisciplinary manner, we invite contributors to analyze and reflect on the construction, public usage, contestation and transformation of memory regarding the entanglement of religion and European imperialism, colonialism and decolonization by different agents in the public sphere, in the past and the present.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Critical analyses of spaces, practices and narratives of religious memory regarding the colonial past, across different media of memory, e.g., museums, material objects, monuments, digital platforms, arts and popular culture.
- The legacy and heritage of 19th and 20th-century missionary histories.
- Comparative approaches to the ways in which the entanglements of colonialism and Christian missions are narrated and depicted in sites of public memory.
- Individual and collective memories of colonial/missionary experience, with a special interest in the politics and practices of remembering and forgetting in relation to minority groups.
- Self-reflection within scientific approaches in religious and church history pertaining to the history, legacy and heritage of colonialism.
- The place of religion in discourses and practices of postcolonial memory.
Guidelines for authors
A number of contributions, peer-reviewed, of no more than 25,000-40,000 characters (including footnotes and spaces), framed by the editors, will constitute the main part of the SJRCH 117 (2024). Further information concerning the articles in the SJRCH can be found on the website: www.unifr.ch/szrkg.
Abstracts and working titles with a maximum of 800 characters, accompanied by a short biography, are to be submitted by the end of September 2022 in German, French, Italian or English, to the chief editor Prof. Dr. Franziska Metzger (franziska.metzger@phlu.ch) and the scientific collaborator PD Dr. David Neuhold (david.neuhold@unifr.ch). The articles themselves should be submitted by December 1, 2023.
SJRCH is published in November 2024 by Schwabe, Basel; and with a one-year moving wall, the articles are available in open-access versions, for example, via e-periodica.ch.
Prof. Dr. Franziska Metzger, chief editor, Lucerne
Madelief Feenstra, intern, Lucerne
PD Dr. David Neuhold, scientific collaborator, Fribourg
10 May 2022