Postcolonial Literature and Religion

Edited by Asha Sen, University of Wisconsin—Eau Claire

Introduction

In 2010, in an essay entitled, “Is the ‘Post’ in ‘Postsecular’ the ‘Post’ in ‘Postcolonial’?”, Graham Huggan identified a new “post” to add to “post-structuralism,” “post-modernism,” and “post-colonialism.” The then-emergent concept of “post-secularism,” Huggan writes, signifies “a reawakened interest in the role of religion in world society and politics, some of the latest ethical developments in continental philosophy, and a recognition—inexorably shaped by the events and aftermath of 9/11—of the increasing politicization of religious attitudes, values, and beliefs in an unevenly developed late-capitalist world” (751). The surge in anti-Semitism and Islamophobia on college campuses in the U.S., prompted by the 2023-2024 Israeli–Palestinian conflict, is just one of the most recent manifestations of religious polarization today.

What is often ignored in the overdetermined visibility given to religion is that variants of religious belief are also embedded in the daily lives and habitual practices of people to the extent that religion has always claimed a life of its own away from national and state policy. As has been pointed out elsewhere, “European ideas of rationality permeated the formation of the postcolonial nation-state as well as early generations of postcolonial authors who adopted it as a model for literary descriptions of their newly formed societies” (Ashcroft et al. 16). In the work of earlier postcolonial authors, religion functions more as a historical marker of a national trauma (e.g., the 1947 partition of India; the 1967-1970 Biafran Civil War) than an aesthetic rendering of how religious ideas are embedded and embodied in daily practice. Consequently, until very recently, postcolonial literature and scholarship were markedly secular in theory and practice. When references to religion did occur, they primarily focused on the literary incorporation of religious symbolism and mythology (And the Birds Began to Sing, 1996) or the role played by politics, geography, and social values in sacred representation (Mapping the Sacred: Religion, Geography, and Politics, 2001). By contrast, the emergent postsecular trend in postcolonial writing and scholarship today explores “how postcolonial lives—in all the heterogeneous, lived experiences of race, gender, nation, class, caste, language and sexuality intersect with (post)secularism, religion, faith, indigenous traditions and practices, and state policies, including laws and rights” (Ratti, “Intersections” 2).

Graham Huggan cites three monographs—Manav Ratti’s The Postcolonial Secular (2009); Debjani Ganguly’s Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity: Notes on a Postcolonial Hermeneutics of Caste (2009); and Arvind Mandair’s Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality and the Politics of Translation (2009)—as signifying a potential post-secular turn in postcolonial criticism that might begin to signify a change in approach. He writes that “In this context, postsecularism should be understood like other ‘post’ terms, as both back-ward looking and anticipatory—looking back to the root term it deconstructs, and that can never adequately be reconfigured, but also looking forward to a future society in which the structuring antimonies of our existence (“faith” versus “reason”, “self” versus “other,” and so on) may be productively undone” (766). Consequently, as Huggan points out, this conceptualizing of the post-secular clears the space to make visible what has been present all along but elided by the secularism of postcolonial scholarship.

My own research experience bears witness to this elision. When I started research on my book Postcolonial Yearning: Reshaping Spiritual and Secular Discourses in Contemporary Literature (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), I could find only three books that took as their focal point the role of religion in literature: And the Birds Began to Sing: Religion and Literature in Postcolonial Literatures (1996), edited by Jamie S. Scott; Mapping the Sacred: Religion, Geography and Postcolonial Literature, edited by Jamie S. Scott and Paul Simpson-Housley (2001); and Identity, Ethics, and Non Violence in Postcolonial Theory: A Rahnerian Theological Assessment by Susan Abraham (2007), which presents Catholic theologian Karl Rahner in conversation with postcolonial critics Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and Ashis Nandy. Since then, however, there has been so much scholarly revisioning of the sacred/secular binary as to merit the recent establishment of the field of “Postcolonial Postsecularism.” Manav Ratti points out that “Just as postcolonial theory contests the practices, discourses, and epistemologies of colonialism (historical and ongoing), postcolonial postsecularism contests the practices, discourses, and epistemologies of (post)secularism, including the very distinction between secularism and religion” (Ratti, “Intersections” 2).

Two works by Manav Ratti, The Postsecular Imagination: Postcolonialism, Religion, and Literature (2013) and a more recent essay, “The Intersections of Postcolonialism, Postsecularism, and Literary Studies: Potentials, Limitations, Bibliographies” (2022), provide an excellent introduction for scholars wanting to think through the intricacies of the postcolonial postsecular. Published in 2013, the same year as my monograph, Ratti’s work is driven by a similar search for a critical vocabulary by which to affirm mystical moments that are resistant to secular representation. He suggests that literature’s ability to juxtapose contradictory values might help us to think through the limitations of the sacred/secular binary. And even as the author admits that literary aesthetics might not always bring about immediate political change, a point he returns to in his later essay, both he and I believe that it can begin the process of addressing the epistemic change that needs to happen in order for all of us to inhabit desirable futures. Both The Postsecular Imagination and “Intersections,” an essay that reiterates the need to focus on small, localized histories that often get elided by the more abstract sensibilities of postcolonial postsecular terminology, along with the other secondary sources listed below, are excellent resources for scholars interested in the revival of religious interest in postcolonial literature and theory.

Essential Readings

Cumpsty, Rebekah. Postsecular Poetics: Negotiating the Sacred and Secular in Contemporary African Fiction.Routledge, 2023.

Habermas, Jürgen. “Notes on a Post-Secular Society.” New Perspectives Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 4, 2008, pp. 17-29.

Huggan, Graham. “Is the ‘Post’ in ‘Postsecular’ the ‘Post’ in ‘Postcolonial’?” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 56, no. 4, 2010, pp. 751-768.

Ratti, Manav. “The Intersections of Postcolonialism, Postsecularism, and Literary Studies: Potentials, Limitations, Bibliographies.” Sikh Formations, vol. 18, nos.3-4, 2022, pp.383-414. DOI: 10.1080/17448727.2022.21561983

—. The Postsecular Imagination: Postcolonialism, Religion and Literature. Routledge, 2013.

Sen, Asha. Postcolonial Yearning: Reshaping Spiritual and Secular Discourses in Contemporary Literature. Palgrave MacMillan, 2013.

—. “The Promise of Postsecularism.” Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies, vol. 10, nos.1-2, 2022. DOI: 105744/jgps.2022.1000

Introduction

Essential Readings

Further Readings