Journeys to the Other Shore

Beyond Home and Return: Negotiating Religious Identity Across Time and Space Through the Prism of the American Experience

“…Yet their labels remain static and gloss over the tension and heterogeneity within them (Euben 2006). People use religious categories and geographies because they help them make sense of the world around them.…”

Histories of Thought and Comparative Political Theory

“…43 As a remedy, Euben and others have urged attention to theory not as a set of texts or questions, but as a broadly comparative practice in which critical distance-facilitated, among other things, by the displacement of both real and imagined travel, encounters with otherness, and self-reflection-plays an integral role. 44 Euben, for example, focuses her study of Islamic travel narratives not on ideas, but on subjectivities-those grammars of representation through which humans organize experience into comprehensible narratives-to examine what those practices disclose about how her particular Muslim and Western subjects "make sense of themselves and the worlds through which they move." 45 The point for Euben, as for many comparative political theorists, is not to frame their work within these "grammars."…”

“…44 Euben, for example, focuses her study of Islamic travel narratives not on ideas, but on subjectivities-those grammars of representation through which humans organize experience into comprehensible narratives-to examine what those practices disclose about how her particular Muslim and Western subjects "make sense of themselves and the worlds through which they move." 45 The point for Euben, as for many comparative political theorists, is not to frame their work within these "grammars." Nor is it typically to advance a literal "comparison between civilizational worldviews," 46 which would require identifying prefigured and distinct political doctrines in a way that many comparative theorists would disavow as impossible or essentialist.…”

“…2 These efforts tend to focus on how typically marginalized (usually coded as "non-Western") thinkers can be meaningfully interpreted by differently-situated Anglophone political theorists, who come to represent these thinkers within political theory as a means of disturbing its universalist assumptions, enhancing the self-reflexivity of its practitioners, or signaling its respect for global cultures. 3 However, even as political theorists acknowledge possible contributions of such marginalized thought to substantive issues in political theory, their practices often fail to recognize in such thought the same capacity to discipline intellectual production as is typically enjoyed by work in North Atlantic languages 4 -in the process further encoding such thought as "non-Western." Theorists tend to either represent otherness in a way that merely acknowledges its difference, or draw theoretical inspiration from it in a piecemeal way without attending to the historically situated discourse that originally produced it.…”

Inclusive versus Exclusive Public Reason: Invitation to Comparative Political Philosophy or the Affirmation of “Liberal Hegemony”

“…In this context we can mention works by Roxanne Euben, Fred Dallmayr, Farah Godrej, and Anthony Parel, or (Williams, Warren 2014). One can mention in this context following publications: Parel, Keith 1992;Euben 1997;Euben 2006;Angle 2002;Dallmayr 1999;Dallmayr 2004;Freeden 2007;Freeden, Vincent 2013;March 2009;Jenco 2009;Jenco 2014;Godrej 2011. Williams and Warren signal interesting terminological problems linked to the attempts to provide a definition of comparative research in political ideas -whether the field should be called "comparative political theory", "comparative political philosophy", "comparative political thought" or more specifically and explicitly programmatic: "nonwestern [or non-American] political theory".…”