The Coloniality of the Secular

The purpose of An Yountae’s The Coloniality of the Secular: Race, Religion, and Poetics of World-Making  is to connect decolonial studies and religious studies by taking up literature in the Caribbean. More specifically, it is an attempt to read perspectives of the sacred into decolonial studies, a discipline that largely takes a secular position. (Yountae uses the term “the sacred” to avoid western cosmological implications loaded on the term “religion.”)

For this purpose, chapter 1 illustrates that colonialization by the west marginalized the Caribbean not only as the racial other (i.e., through racism) but also as the “religious-racial other” specifically (32). Here, Yountae examines how the modern European concept of “autonomous political subjectivity” laid the ground for colonialism by representing the Caribbean people as “the colonial imaginary of the irrational and enchanted natives” (32). He highlights the entanglements of religion (Christianity) and non-religion (secularism), where the imposition of the Christian worldview and that of the secularism-oriented colonial bureaucracy coincided with each other. By critically engaging with both Christianization and secularization as an imposition of the western story of the sacred, he bridges religious studies and decolonial studies. In chapter 2, Yountae sheds light on Latin American Liberal Theology (LALT), which emerged in the 1960s through the 1970s and problematized global inequality with inspiration from Marxism. He continues to bridge the two disciplines by showing how seemingly secular decolonial thoughts share a root with LALT and have been in a mutually productive relationship.

The remainder of the book demonstrates what kinds of new political imagination can be offered when decolonial and religious studies are connected. In chapters 3 and 4, Yountae revisits Franz Fanon’s decolonial and phenomenological account of racism from the perspective of the sacred. According to Fanon, racism is that which reduces Black living bodies into “existence as nothingness” (122). Although Fanon rejected the racist representation of Blackness, he did not abandon Blackness altogether. Instead, Fanon accepted Blackness but worked to reclaim it as an animation of “one’s capacity to love and act” (127). Yountae focuses on this tension of rejection and acceptance (of Blackness) and finds it in Fanon’s relationship with the sacred. According to a popular view within academia, not only did Fanon’s phenomenology follow a secular academic style, but he also remained critical of the colonial imposition of religion. However, Yountae argues that Fanon’s criticism of religion does not have to be applied to everything that is religious. Rather, Fanon’s critique of the colonial worldview of the sacred can be applied to the imposition of secularism. If so, a post-secularist reading of Fanon enables “the diverse forms of religion-making that take place in and through various forms of decolonial movement” (128). Thus, the sacred, once rejected in Fanon’s decolonial theory, can be reconfigured as the soil for cultivating a decolonial political imagination.

In chapter 5, Yountae finds a glimpse of decolonization in the poetics of creolization. According to Yountae, religion functions as a root for making meaning and order in a chaotic world. In this sense, in the paradigm of colonial Christianity and secularism, people in the colonies are regarded as those who are outside of such an order and thus rootless. He sees hope for decolonization in those who have been working to creolize the western worldviews and local worldviews, for creolization is an act of absorbing imposed worldviews and repurposing them for the making new meanings in the world. He writes, “The imposed religion (with its anthropomorphic monodeity) and secular humanism’s replacement with religion seemed to indicate surrender but it was in fact a redemption. Religion is creolized so that what seemed the loss of tradition was its renewal” (169).

While this volume critically sheds light on the role of Christianity (and secularism) in the colonization of Latin America, it also sees a glimpse of decolonization in LALT. This might seem confusing. However, this contradiction, or ambivalence, is the key to Yountae’s approach to decolonization. His monograph attempts to stretch decolonial thinking from an attempt to deconstruct colonial knowledge to restore the sociality existed prior to colonialism. With his critical perspective on liberal secularism and the western notion of modernism, Yountae observes that such an approach does not bring one outside of colonialism: “the illusion of a redeemed present is inseparable from the liberal fantasy of its own corrective capacity” (179). Instead, he attempts to open the possibility of decolonial thinking by illustrating the ambivalence of Christianity both as a colonial project and as a basis for decolonial imagination. In particular, he illustrates that one can find hope for decolonization even within the colonial power. This ambivalence of concepts is highlighted throughout the manuscript, such as in his discussion of Blackness, religion, and creolization. This discursive jiujitsu, a conversion of repressive power into counter-power, could be applied to many other topics beyond the book’s main themes—beyond decolonial theories and religious theories in Latin America.

Tomoyo Nishira is a PhD student in socio-cultural anthropology at the University of Virginia.

Tomoya Nishira

Date Of Review:

August 30, 2024