Secularism And The Crisis Of Minority Identity In Postcolonial Literature

Secularism and the Crisis of Minority Identity in Postcolonial Literature examines how writers from religious and ethnic minority communities (Anglo-Indians, Burghers, Dalits, Muslims, and Parsis) in India and Sri Lanka engage secularism through novels, short stories, and autobiographies. Given the rise of Hindu nationalism in India and Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka, it would seem obvious that minorities would rally around secularism (the separation of church and state). However, this bookargues that the relationship between minorities and secularism is extremely ambivalent. On the one hand, it shows how writers belonging to oppressed communities can deploy secularism as a mode of critique (secular criticism) to challenge the ideologies of dominant groups—the nation, upper-castes, and religious hierarchies. On the other hand, it examines how these writers reveal that other aspects of secularism (secularization and secular time) are responsible for creating essentialized identities that have not only exacerbated relationships between majorities and minorities and between minority groups, but have also created tension within minority groups themselves. Turing to aesthetics and religious faith, these writers attempt to undermine secular social and cultural structures that are responsible for this crisis of minority identity.

Enlightenment in the Colony opens up the history of the "Jewish question" for the first time to a broader discussion--one of the social exclusion of religious and cultural minorities in modern times, and in particular the crisis of Muslim identity in modern India. Aamir Mufti identifies the Hindu-Muslim conflict in India as a colonial variation of what he calls "the exemplary crisis of minority"--Jewishness in Europe. He shows how the emergence of this conflict in the late nineteenth century represented an early instance of the reinscription of the "Jewish question" in a non-Western society undergoing modernization under colonial rule. In so doing, he charts one particular route by which this European phenomenon linked to nation-states takes on a global significance. Mufti examines the literary dimensions of this crisis of identity through close readings of canonical texts of modern Western--mostly British-literature, as well as major works of modern Indian literature in Urdu and English. He argues that the one characteristic shared by all emerging national cultures since the nineteenth century is the minoritization of some social and cultural fragment of the population, and that national belonging and minority separatism go hand in hand with modernization. Enlightenment in the Colony calls for the adoption of secular, minority, and exilic perspectives in criticism and intellectual life as a means to critique the very forms of marginalization that give rise to the uniquely powerful minority voice in world literatures.

The Routledge Handbook of Postsecularity offers an internationally significant and comprehensive interdisciplinary collection which provides a series of critical reviews of the current state of the art and future trends in philosophical, theoretical, and conceptual terms. The volume likewise presents a range of empirical knowledges and engagements with postsecularity. A critical yet sympathetic dialogue across disciplinary divides in an international context ensures that the volume covers a wide and interrelated intellectual and geographical scope. The editor’s introduction with Klaus Eder offers a robust foundation for the volume, setting out the central aims and objectives, the rationale for the contributions, and an outline of the structure. Thorny issues of normativity and empirical challenges are highlighted for the reader. The handbook comprises four interrelated sections. Part I: Philosophical meditations discusses postsecularity from philosophical standpoints, and Part II: Theological perspectives presents contributions from a variety of theological viewpoints. Part III: Theory, space, social relations contains pieces from geography, planning, sociology, and religious studies that delve into theoretically informed empirical implications of postsecularity. Part IV: Political and social engagement offers chapters that emphasize the political and social implications of the debate. In the Afterword, Eduardo Mendieta joins the editor to reflect on the notion of reflexive secularization across the volume as a whole, alluding to new lines of inquiry. The handbook is an invaluable guide for graduate and advanced undergraduate teaching, and a key reference for students and scholars of human geography, sociology, political science, applied philosophy, urban and public theology, planning, and urban studies.

What exactly is goodness? Where is it found in the literary imagination? Toni Morrison, one of American letters’ greatest voices, pondered these perplexing questions in her celebrated Ingersoll Lecture, delivered at Harvard University in 2012 and published now for the first time in book form. Perhaps because it is overshadowed by the more easily defined evil, goodness often escapes our attention. Recalling many literary examples, from Ahab to Coetzee’s Michael K, Morrison seeks the essence of goodness and ponders its significant place in her writing. She considers the concept in relation to unforgettable characters from her own works of fiction and arrives at conclusions that are both eloquent and edifying. In a lively interview conducted for this book, Morrison further elaborates on her lecture’s ideas, discussing goodness not only in literature but in society and history—particularly black history, which has responded to centuries of brutality with profound creativity. Morrison’s essay is followed by a series of responses by scholars in the fields of religion, ethics, history, and literature to her thoughts on goodness and evil, mercy and love, racism and self-destruction, language and liberation, together with close examination of literary and theoretical expressions from her works. Each of these contributions, written by a scholar of religion, considers the legacy of slavery and how it continues to shape our memories, our complicities, our outcries, our lives, our communities, our literature, and our faith. In addition, the contributors engage the religious orientation in Morrison’s novels so that readers who encounter her many memorable characters such as Sula, Beloved, or Frank Money will learn and appreciate how Morrison’s notions of goodness and mercy also reflect her understanding of the sacred and the human spirit.

While secularism has been integral to India’s democracy for more than fifty years, its uses and limits are now being debated anew. Signs of a crisis in the relations between state, society, and religion include the violence directed against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 and the precarious situation of India’s minority religious groups more generally; the existence of personal laws that vary by religious community; the affiliation of political parties with fundamentalist religious organizations; and the rallying of a significant proportion of the diasporic Hindu community behind a resurgent nationalist Hinduism. There is a broad consensus that a crisis of secularism exists, but whether the state can resolve conflicts and ease tensions or is itself part of the problem is a matter of vigorous political and intellectual debate. In this timely, nuanced collection, twenty leading Indian cultural theorists assess the contradictory ideals, policies, and practices of secularism in India. Scholars of history, anthropology, religion, politics, law, philosophy, and media studies take on a broad range of concerns. Some consider the history of secularism in India; others explore theoretical issues such as the relationship between secularism and democracy or the shortcomings of the categories “majority” and “minority.” Contributors examine how the debates about secularism play out in schools, the media, and the popular cinema. And they address two of the most politically charged sites of crisis: personal law and the right to practice and encourage religious conversion. Together the essays inject insightful analysis into the fraught controversy about the shortcomings and uncertain future of secularism in the world today. Contributors. Flavia Agnes, Upendra Baxi, Shyam Benegal, Akeel Bilgrami, Partha Chatterjee, V. Geetha, Sunil Khilnani, Nivedita Menon, Ashis Nandy, Anuradha Dingwaney Needham, Gyanendra Pandey, Gyan Prakash, Arvind Rajagopal, Paula Richman, Sumit Sarkar, Dwaipayan Sen, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Shabnum Tejani, Romila Thapar, Ravi S. Vasudevan, Gauri Viswanathan

This is an examination of how Britain and France are handling the new religious and racial diversity that has become a fact of life in both countries, and how postcolonial minorities are caught between the nation and the state in relation to status and identity, acceptance and integration.

Working with processes of translocation enabled Edward Said to point out interdependence and complementarity across geographical borders and disciplinary boundaries while recognizing cultural difference and the distinct historical experiences of colonizer and colonized. This book brings into focus Said’s politics of reading, from his literary criticism in English to his political columns in Arabic. The international contributors—from Britain, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Switzerland, and the United States—investigate his intellectual legacies without necessarily identifying themselves with the critical positions these involve. Instead of treating his work as a unitary theoretical system, the various arguments explored offer a critical assessment of those situations in which his writing has entered into a productive relationship with other theoretical positions and interlocutors. The collection considers location, which has always been a central category in and for Said’s writing; readings, which designates the acts by which, according to Said, the world comes to be constituted; and legacies, which pertains to the many fields across the boundaries of established academic disciplines that have taken up Said’s challenges. The critical positions visited in this book include critical and cultural theory, postcolonialism, literary studies, theatre and performance studies, and visual and music studies.

"The book takes a closer look at the phenomenon of the 'opportunism' of minority cultures - in the Indian context, the Dalit and the Muslim - and suggests that this might be the consequence of nationalism itself, especially of postcolonial nationalisms. For it is nationalism, in fact, which produces the minority problem in the first place."--BOOK JACKET.