2024 is a bit of a bumper year, a ‘full house’ of publications for me: a journal article, book chapter, video essay, and literary magazine article. Of the four, I am especially pleased that my latest journal article on the public personality and entrepreneur Dato Seri Vida is now published in the Religion and Gender journal. It’s an article long in the making and has enjoyed many years of development, iterations, and presentations – at Monash University in Bandar Sunway and the Department of Malay Studies at NUS in 2018, and in a (failed) job talk at the Harvard Divinity School in 2020. Anyone who’s known me will know that I am drawn to irreverence in places and spaces where one should be more serious, which is why I am particularly chuffed to introduce the concept of ‘ludic piety’ in the article:
Ludic piety as a communicative genre of piety is the inter-play that takes place in the performative realm and enunciations of one’s faith, though one that invites a playfully open-ended polyvalent and polysemic approach to religious meaning-making. Additionally, ludic piety makes room for the feeling of perplexity, of the disinclination to rationally resolve paradoxes and contradictions” (2024: 7)
Alicia Izharuddin 