Race and religion in American Buddhism : white supremacy and immigrant adaptation

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Bibliographic Information

Race and religion in American Buddhism : white supremacy and immigrant adaptation

Joseph Cheah

(American Academy of Religion academy series)

Oxford University Press, c2011

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Includes bibliographical references and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

When the first wave of Burmese immigrant Buddhists set foot on American soil in the late 1960s, they came into contact with a variety of forms of Buddhism not found in their native Burma. One of these forms was a white or convert Buddhism, whose legacy includes the specter of an Orientalist and racist past, often hardly acknowledged, yet rarely if ever entirely absent from the discourse within Euro-American Buddhism. The legacy of Orientalism in convert Buddhism can be traced to the works of Western Orientalists in the middle and late Victorian era. Stemming in part from Orientalist racial projects, vestiges of white supremacy ideology can still be detected today in the controversy surrounding who represents "American Buddhism" and the smorgasbord of approaches in Buddhist practices that are taken for granted in many meditation centers, hospitals, and other institutions. The prevailing ideology of white supremacy operative in these and other contexts influences the ways in which Buddhist practices have been adapted by both convert and ethnic Buddhist communities. Within the scope of Buddhism as both a religion and a practice, focusing primarily on the Theravada tradition, Joseph Cheah examines in Race and Religion in American Buddhism rearticulations of Asian Buddhist practices through the lens of race and racialization.

Table of Contents

  • Chapter One: Introduction
  • Chapter Two: Colonial Legacy of White Supremacy in American Buddhism
  • Chapter Three: Buddhist Modernism and the American Vipassana Movement
  • Chapter Four: Adaptation of Vipassana Meditation by Convert Buddhists and Sympathizers
  • Chapter Five: Assimilationist Paradigm and Burmese Americans
  • Chapter Six: Monastic and Domestic Settings
  • Chapter Seven: Burmese Loyalty Structure of the Dual Domination Paradigm
  • Chapter Eight: Conclusion
  • Bibliography
  • Index

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