Religion, secularism, and postsecularism in global south literatures: introduction to the special forum

Abstract

As guest editor of this forum, I outline in this introduction some features of this inquiry into the interactions among religion, secularism, and postsecularism in postcolonial and global literary contexts. The term “postsecularism” has many connotations across scholarly disciplines and even within a single discipline, such as literary studies or theology. This forum unpacks some of these meanings, with a focus on “postcolonial postsecularism,” which this introduction elaborates. Among my own work, it has approached postcolonial postsecularism as postcolonial writers’ search for values through select aspects of religion (such as faith and enchantment) and political secularism (such as equality and nondiscrimination toward religions).¹ The articles assembled here aim to inform further scholarship on the multifaceted and productive intersections among the literary, postsecular, postcolonial, and the Global South. The three sections that follow present the framework of the forum, its contributions, and an overview of its articles.

1. Framework of the forum

“What if,” asks An Yountae, “the various theories of decoloniality are significantly more informed by religious imaginations than we often think?”² An’s question, from his book The Coloniality of the Secular (2024), is part of the challenge faced by scholars in a variety of disciplines—including literary studies, religious studies, and postcolonial studies—on how to recognize the mutually constructive and enabling roles of religion and secularism in relation to postcoloniality. An’s book raises the central question of whether postcoloniality would imply a kind of postsecularity. Furthering this discussion, this forum examines the relationships between postcoloniality and postsecularity. It focuses on postcolonial literatures and theory as sources of, among other interpretive possibilities, what An terms “religious imaginations.”

The last fifteen years have seen several literary studies and religious studies journals, across a variety of literary fields and religions, dedicate issues to postsecularism.³ This forum extends this work by focusing on postsecularism’s intersections with not only postcoloniality, but how postcoloniality shapes the literatures and scholarship of the Global South—Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It contributes to recent scholarship by postcolonial literary critics which has argued for analyzing the overlooked yet important influences of religion and postsecularism on postcolonial literature and theory. This work includes Abdelaziz El Amrani’s article “The Postsecular Turn: Interrogating Postcolonialism After 9/11” (2022) and Asha Sen’s article “The Promise of Postcolonial Postsecularism” (2022).⁴

This forum asks: How do postcolonial writers and critics from the Global South explore, reinterpret, contest, and/or affirm aspects of religion, secularism, and postsecularism? How does postcolonial literary form shape—and how is it shaped by—religion, secularism, and postsecularism? How can postcolonial writers and critics represent the seemingly unrepresentable—faith, the divine, spirituality? How do writers and critics affirm the ideals of political secularism—which include, in the case of India, that the state should prevent interreligious conflict, not discriminate against any religion (including minority rights), and prevent intrareligious oppression based on caste and gender?⁵ How can writers and critics explore the limits of political and philosophical secularism? What is the writer’s postsecularism of experience, as a lived experience melding the secular and the religious? What is the critic’s experience of postsecularism, as a critical and theoretical framework, in both its potentials and limitations?

As with postcolonial theory, postcolonial postsecularism is informed by the premise that secularism and modern religion in the Global South are shaped, historically and into the present, by colonization and imperialism. The last two forces have resulted in the global spread of Christianity and Western political concepts, with the latter including political secularism as the purported separation of religion and state.

The legacies in both the West and the Global South of colonial and imperial histories include the characterization of secularism and religion as not only separate but opposite from each other.⁶ Secularism can be constructed as rational, linked with the Enlightenment, civilization, progress, and modernization. Religion, in contrast, can be considered irrational, linked with pre-Reformation Christianity and non-Western, non-Christian religions—particularly Islam.

The above characterizations of secularism and religion—which undergird reductive binaries such as the “secular West” and the “non-secular, non-West”—can occlude not only the presence but also the influence of religion and religious pluralism in the West and of non-Western secularisms, rationalities, and modernities. In questioning such characterizations and binary oppositions, postcolonial postsecularism serves as much a marker for critical and theoretical scholarship as for creative and literary writing. The postcolonial postsecular thus emerges in the spaces of literature, history, criticism, and theory.

2. Contributions of the forum

The contributions of this forum lie in at least three broad and necessarily overlapping aspects of postcolonial postsecularism: the political, the religious/philosophical, and the literary. In the following descriptions of these areas, I have used some terms as nominal adjectives (e.g. “the political”) to signal those terms’ breadth and fluidity, whether across literature, culture, criticism, or theory.

2.1 Postcolonial postsecularism and the political

As with postcolonial theory, the postcolonial postsecular recognizes that power intimately shapes what constitutes the religious and the secular. This power can be manifest as “political” across social differences, such as those of race, gender, caste, and class. It can also be formalized as “politics”, such as those of the state and its laws. The religion-secularism opposition—including the aforementioned binary of the “secular West” and the “non-secular, non-West”—animates and is problematized by political crises and violence. These numerous crises include the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including the violence that began in 2023 and the Intifadas of 2000 and 1987; the nearly fatal attack against Salman Rushdie in 2022 in New York, echoing the death sentence issued in 1989 by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini against Rushdie for The Satanic Verses (1988); the Global War on Terrorism (including the US/coalition occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq); and the 11 September 2001 attacks. The challenges of secularism are also evident in Global South nation-states—such as India and Turkey, both of which this forum examines—that at least partially emulate American and French political secularism’s separation of religion and the state. Given the crises of state secularism, how do writers imagine peaceful co-existence among differences of religion, nation, race, ethnicity, gender, caste, class, and ideology?

2.2 Postcolonial postsecularism and the religious and philosophical

I have grouped the religious and the philosophical together because they closely overlap with one another and are even inseparable, especially in relation to secularism as both a politics and philosophy. While religion can foster inspiration and creativity, it can also lead to violence, civil war, partition, majoritarianism, and communalism, especially in the framework of the modern nation-state. Philosophical secularism, grounding belief within the natural and immanent (non-transcendental) world, can lead to disenchantment. How can the need for faith, awe, wonder, enchantment, and ethics that religion and literature seek to fulfill find expression and significance, including in the postcolonial nation-state and in newly secular political contexts?

2.3 Postcolonial postsecularism and the literary

Literature serves as a vital and creative space for writers to imagine alternatives to the binary of secularism and religion, negotiating between the two. This forum does not study postsecularism as an alternative organization of the state but as a process of the literary and critical imaginations, as creative, exploratory, and speculative possibilities. What then are the literary forms—such as tropes, images, themes, genres, allusions, epigraphs, style, voice, narration—of postcolonial postsecularism? For several of the writers studied in this forum, writing attains a kind of generative, sacred quality, one not unlike that of religion. Because it is informed by postcoloniality, this writing resists religion’s links with violence. Writing can thus embody a paradoxical “secular sacredness” with a life-giving, life-affirming capacity, whether that is manifest as exultation, self-understanding, creativity, survival, spirituality, mysticism, enchantment, or more. This pursuit and affirmation of writing as generative is of course not unique to postcolonial writers in the Global South. Rather, the articles that follow analyze how religion and secularism are inseparable from the politics and enduring power structures of coloniality and postcoloniality—and how those precarities, even dangers, of the political shape writers’ exploration of the generative, as well as vulnerable, qualities of writing.

3. Overview of the forum articles

The scholars in this forum analyze diverse writers, nations, religions, and literary genres across the Global South. There are as many varieties of postcolonial postsecularism as there are of secularism—political, philosophical, literary, and more. Reflecting this variety, the forum articles illuminate different facets of the connections among postcoloniality, religion, secularism, and postsecularism.

Erdağ Göknar’s article “The Postsecular Imaginaries of Orhan Pamuk’s Novels” analyzes how Pamuk’s novels place religion and the state—din and devlet respectively in Turkish—in equal dialogue with each other, in contrast to the separation of religion and state as aspired to by secularization in Turkey. Göknar argues for Pamuk’s literary “postsecularism,” one that decolonizes the political and philosophical separation of din and devlet. Given this decolonizing commitment, Pamuk’s novels constitute part of a debated Turkish postcoloniality. Göknar demonstrates that among the formal and thematic innovations of Pamuk’s novels is their incorporation of Turkey’s Ottoman past, such as its material culture and mystical Islam (Sufism). For Göknar, this revaluing and revisioning can re-enchant secularizing narratives of the nation, affirm a sacredness of writing and the literary text, and form part of Turkish literary modernity. Göknar argues that Pamuk’s “postsecularism” manifests through the synchronicity and layering of the secular and postsecular in the Ottoman-Turkish context.

Aníbal González’s contribution “Fears and Joys of Writing in the Fiction of Roberto Bolaño” analyzes how fear and joy, as affects and literary themes, inform the novels of Chilean-Mexican writer Roberto Bolaño and his search for ethics. González argues that even as Bolaño’s novels depart from Latin American Boom writers’ use of religion to imbue the novel and the nation with transcendental auras, they exhibit similarities with religious affects, including with the Protestant theologian Miroslav Volf’s notion of joy as a “blessing.” González shows how Bolaño’s novels, via experimentations that can be considered “postsecular,” search for non-transcendental, personal values and resist religious belief. Yet these works also function in a religion-like mode, through their capaciousness, contemplative openness, and a sense, however incipient, of community. González argues that while Bolaño knows writing can produce fear—given the history in Latin America of colonialism’s use of writing for state control and worldly (secular) violence—his narratives demonstrate a generosity and optimism of narration.

Feroza Jussawalla’s piece “Salman Rushdie and Postsecularism: The Satanic Verses and the Postcolonial Bildungsroman” argues for the overlooked elements of awe and wonder in The Satanic Verses (1988) and how they are shaped by both religious and secular influences. These influences include Indo-Islamic literary forms such as qissas (tales of adventures), ghazals (lyrical love poems), and dastans (prose poems, often epics). The “postsecular” in Jussawalla’s criticism seeks to shift literary and cultural criticism of Rushdie’s novel away from oppositions such as religion-secularism, modernity-tradition, and reverence-blasphemy. These oppositions were prominent after the 1989 death sentence against Rushdie and reappeared after his assassination attempt in 2022. Combining a postsecular framework with the notion of the “postcolonial Bildungsroman,” Jussawalla argues for Rushdie’s awe and wonder for the survival stories of the Prophet Muhammad and postcolonial migrants, including how they arrive at self-understanding after exile, dislocation, and questioning dominant religions and cultures.

Arvind-Pal S. Mandair’s article “Unsayable Word: Gurbani, Punjabi Poetry, and the Postsecular Impulse” critiques literary criticism that categorizes Punjabi poetry in India using oppositions such as secular-sacred and modern-medieval, with Sikh scriptural poetry or gurbani thus categorized as “sacred and medieval.” For Mandair, a metacritical “postsecular” framework challenges these and other oppositions, such as worldly/non-worldly, since they are informed by colonial models that do not reflect the indigenous hybridity and metaphysics of gurbani and its concepts of sabad (“language,” “word,” “resonance”) and anhad sabad (“unsayable word”). Mandair suggests how the “postsecular” can decolonize, not unproblematically, the reductive philosophical frameworks of literary criticism. These frameworks not only reduce Sikh concepts to categories of the secular and religious, but construct a teleology of Punjabi poetry’s “evolution” from pre-modern theocentrism to modern secularism. In place of this secularizing criticism, Mandair shows “postsecular” ways of reading Sikh concepts that recognize those concepts’ paradoxical philosophies of language, mind, and the self.

Zhange Ni’s contribution “Religion, Secularism, and Postsecularism in Chinese Internet Literature” argues that internet popular fiction, particularly the fantasy novel, inheres in a “postsecularism” consisting of magic and enchantment revived and reinvented from the cosmologies of Chinese religions—Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism. State secularism had sought to eradicate these cosmologies as “superstition,” based on Enlightenment scientific rationality and its binaries of science-superstition and superstition-modernity. Ni demonstrates how fantasy novels experiment with possibilities of religious and secular enchantment by fusing cybernetics and biodigital technologies with cosmological ideas and everyday self-cultivation practices, such as fengshui (“wind and water”), neidan (“internal alchemy”), and qi (“enchanted cosmos”). For Ni, Chinese literary postsecularism is a complex confluence and layering of China’s religions, early twentieth-century literary secularism, state secularism, capitalism, and (post)socialism. Showing the nuances of digital novels’ postsecularism, Ni also analyzes its limitations, including how the novels reinforce scientific rationalities and the state’s domination of religion.

Sura Qadiri’s article “Following the Signs: Reading the Qur’anic Epigraphs as Postsecular in Sofiane Hadjadj’s So Perfect a Garden and Yamen Manai’s The Ardent Swarm” analyzes these novels’ representation of national and political turmoil—for Hadjadj, the Algerian Civil War, and for Manai the Arab Spring in Tunisia—and their shared resistance to postcolonial religious atavism and religious orthodoxy. For Qadiri, the “postsecular” frames explorations of a personal religious vernacular and practice that are grounded in a secular (this-worldly) attentiveness consisting of social, environmental, and political commitment. Qadiri demonstrates the different and suggestive ways that Hadjadj and Manai use Qur’anic epigraphs to reflect their protagonists’ postsecular searches. Qadiri also analyses writers’ use of barzakh—in Islam, the liminal “zone” or “space” between earthly death and resurrection in the afterworld—as a trope for how writing can imagine and incorporate regenerated senses of the self and nation, especially after political crises.

In my piece “Precarious Joy: Meena Alexander, Postsecularism, and Bhakti Poetry,” I argue that a framework of “postsecularism” can highlight secularism and religion as non-oppositional, pluralistic, and inseparable elements that inform, and are represented within, Alexander’s poetry. I demonstrate how Alexander draws upon select and enabling aspects of secularism and religion to understand and challenge the hierarchies of race, gender, nationality, and postcoloniality that shaped her lived experience across India, Sudan, the UK, and the USA. I compare her poetry with India’s history of bhakti (“devotional”) poetry. Emerging from Hinduism and challenging its hierarchical strands, bhakti emphasizes an individual, devotional relation between oneself and the divine, welcoming people of all castes, genders, and classes. A critical lens of postsecularism shows how Alexander invokes bhakti tropes, imagery, and bhakti poet-saints themselves in her search for spirituality and secular values among the spiritual and worldly precarities of her life.

With the above diversity of literatures, religions, and (post)secularisms, the articles that follow seek to reach a breadth of readers, encouraging continued scholarly inquiry into the distinctiveness of postcolonial postsecularism.

Footnotes