Decolonial responses to secularism from the underside of modernity

This dissertation investigates the relationship between secularism and colonization as theorized by contemporary Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx thinkers. Contrary to the customary understanding that secularism is an intra-European phenomenon that separated modernity from the dogmas of religion, this dissertation argues that secularism is a global phenomenon that expands the coloniality of religion initiated in the Christian conquest of the Americas. Accordingly, this dissertation pays attention to the intellectual production of the Americas to make visible the colonialist legacy inherent in both religious and secular discourses. The principal contribution of this dissertation is to reframe the key terms of the “postsecular debate” across the humanities and social sciences, which contests the long-held assumptions about the relation between religion and secularism in modernity. This debate has problematized, on the one hand, the conventional hypothesis that modernization is a teleological process of secularization, and on the other, the widespread idea that the space of the secular is mutually exclusive of the religious. However, this debate has yet to explicitly articulate the extensive historical and normative consequences of colonization on the edification of modernity, secularization, and secularism. My dissertation addresses this gap. With this intervention, this dissertation reconceptualizes the very notion of “the postsecular” from an internal self-reflexivity of Western secular modernity to a global project that strives for the decolonization of secular modernity. Chapter One traces the emergence of liberation theology and liberation philosophy to interrogate the work that secularization does as a disciplinary division, challenging the common supposition that liberation philosophy puts liberation theology on “secular grounds.” Chapter Two examines the work of the Afro-Caribbean critic Sylvia Wynter, who unearths the colonialist assumptions in the secular humanisms of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment in order to critically re-write the meaning of secularity from the perspectives of those subjects historically colonized in the name of secular humanisms. Chapter Three analyzes the deployment of spirituality in the works of the Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa and the Afro-Caribbean scholar M. Jacqui Alexander as an alternative mode of knowing that circumvents the coloniality of both religious and secular discourses. Finally, Chapter Four looks at how aesthetics informs each of the previous three chapters as a creative site for the critical response to the modern/colonial secular/religious divide.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference