The Imperial Dynamic and the Discourse on Sui Generis Religion

Abstract Adopting the widest lens yet, this chapter provides case studies on how the sui generis discourse on religion functions well outside the scope of academia, given that it effectively depoliticizes events that might otherwise be understood as immersed in history and culture, making them all too human and thus contestable and negotiable rather than purely apolitical because they are essentially religious. Using the example of contemporaneous and subsequent media representations of the early 1960s self-inflicted deaths by burning of some South Vietnamese protestors as the example, this chapter makes plain the broader effect of the discourse examined throughout the book.