Introduction: Religion, Secularity, and African Writing
Author(s): Jeanne-Marie Jackson and Nathan Suhr-Sytsma
Source: Research in African Literatures, Vol. 48, No. 2, Religion, Secularity, and African
Writing (Summer 2017), pp. vii-xvi
Published by: Indiana University Press
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and African Writing
JEANNE-MARIE JACKSON AND NATHAN SUHR-SYTSMA
E
dward Said’s apologia for “secular criticism,” now more than three decades
old, is at once an obvious and yet inescapable starting point from which to
approach the question of the secular in postcolonial and area studies (Said
1–30). By “secular,” Said meant that “texts are worldly, . . . a part of the social world,
human life, and of course the historical moments in which they are located and
interpreted” (4). By “criticism,” he meant a distancing from the cultural status quo
in order to be “oppositional” (29). At the same time, Said in many ways called for
criticism to be less distant from the world, breaking bonds of national and even
FXOWXUDODIÀOLDWLRQWRZRUNWRZDUGPRUHFRVPRSROLWDQIRUPVRISROLWLFDOHQJDJHment. This regionally attuned transnationalism was an outlier within literary
studies during the heyday of the “linguistic turn,” yet quickly came to be a seminal
VWDQFHIRUWKHÀHOGQRZNQRZQDOWHUQDWHO\DVSRVWFRORQLDODQGJOREDOOLWHUDWXUH7R
the extent that African literary studies is institutionally situated within this rubric,
Said remains unavoidable.
Said pitched his “secular criticism,” of course, against the “religious criticism” of Harold Bloom, Northrop Frye, and René Girard, among others, whose
writings Said rejected as both too committed to systems of belief and not committed enough to political action (290–94). Since then, however, this opposition
between “secular” and “religious” has come to seem misleading.1 Is “religious
discourse” necessarily what Said calls “an agent of closure” (290)? Does “the
religious,” glossed by Said as the “secure protection of beliefs,” really operate as
the antithesis to “critical activity or consciousness” (292)? This question becomes
especially pressing as we reckon with a recent broadening of interest in the Africanist humanities in the universities of the Global North. While Europe’s status
as Christian hegemon has waned, for example, since the early twentieth century,
sub-Saharan Africa has played an increasingly dominant role in Christianity’s diffusion (Pew). From the wealth of interactions between Arabic and local languages
in the Horn of Africa to the much-discussed role of social media in the Arab Spring
across North Africa, the continent is also fertile ground for timely scholarship on
writing in Muslim-majority countries.2
It is not surprising then that in recent years, as the Global North academy has
grown more internationalist in its aims, the secular in “secular criticism” has come
under pressure from several directions. Even an avowedly secular literary critic
like Simon During has acknowledged that “[o]ur methods of analysis and critique
RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES, 9RO1R 6XPPHU GRLUHVHDIULOLWH
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viii
RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES
VOLUME 48 NUMBER 2
falter when it comes to religion” (876), and one might add that they falter especially
when contemplating religion beyond the historic forms of Western European
&KULVWLDQLW\(YHQDVUHOLJLRXVVWXGLHVKDVEHFRPHLQFUHDVLQJO\VHOIUHÁH[LYHDERXW
what is embedded in the term “religion,” this interdisciplinary movement has
raised key questions about the historicity and politics of the secular across sevHUDOGLVFLSOLQHV 0DVX]DZD$VDG7D\ORU1HXPDQ² ,QOLWHUDU\VWXGLHVIRU
instance, Michael Kaufmann argued a decade ago that the discipline has tended
to narrate its history as one of “secularization,” thereby staking its professional
GHÀQLWLRQRQDGLVWLQFWLRQIURP´UHOLJLRXVµZD\VRIUHDGLQJWH[WV ´7KH5HOLJLRXVµ
Kaufmann’s argument draws heavily on Talal Asad’s 2003 monograph, Formations
of the Secular, particularly Asad’s claim that the “religious” and the “secular” are
neither essentially stable nor essentially opposed (Asad 25). For Kaufmann, “a
UHFRQÀJXUHGKLVWRU\RIWKHSURIHVVLRQZRXOGWDNHWKHG\QDPLFDQGUHFXUVLYHUHODtionship between the secular and the religious as an object of inquiry rather than
the stable grounds upon which that inquiry is based” (“The Religious” 615). From
this perspective, literary scholars need to revisit “the Arnoldian replacement theory” at the heart of our discipline (Ibid. 616), in which literature replaces religion
as privileged bearer of spiritual values, as well as privileged site of exegesis.
The best-known book by a literary scholar that meets Kaufmann’s criteria
is likely Vincent Pecora’s Secularization and Cultural Criticism (2006). Pecora takes
Said’s notion of “secular criticism” as his point of departure, arguing that Said, like
cultural criticism broadly, misses the “complicated, and often quite contradictory
process of secularization” (4). For Pecora, this “contradictory process” encompasses both the “retreat of religion” and the “transfer” or “worlding” of Christianity
1RULVLWDOZD\VFOHDUZKLFKUHDGLQJVKRXOGWDNHSUHFHGHQFHD0DU[LVWFULWLF
like Fredric Jameson, for example, sees revolution as the “true” apotheosis of the
Christian salvation narrative, not a humanistic substitution for a religious urge,
but an unveiling, rather, of that urge’s fundamental humanism. In The Antinomies
of RealismKHLVWKXVDEOHWRDUJXHWKDWOLWHUDU\IRUPVRIVRFLDOVXEOLPLW\GRQRWÀOO
the gap left by a bygone sacred need, but realize a historical one that previously
lacked an expressive vocabulary. For Pecora, however, secularization is more aptly
described by the Heideggerian term Verwindung RU ´D FRQWLQXDO UHÀQHPHQWDV
convalescing-distortion” (22). This process involves not only intellectual liberation,
but also the intensifying of nationalism and racism—a paradox that humanistic
scholarship, including literary studies, must therefore confront.
Among philosophers, meanwhile, Charles Taylor has indisputably been
WKH OHDGLQJ ÀJXUH LQ GHEDWHV DERXW VHFXODULW\ VLQFH WKH SXEOLFDWLRQ RI KLV
magnum opus, A Secular Age. A major contribution of this work is to consider
secularity neither as the separation of religious and state institutions nor as the
decline in religious adherence, but as the frame in which modern forms of belief
DQGXQEHOLHIDFTXLUHVLJQLÀFDQFH 7D\ORU²:DUQHU9DQ$QWZHUSHQDQG&DOhoun 21–23). Secularity means, in part, that people are aware that their choices
to believe or not could be otherwise, an awareness that Taylor calls the “mutual
fragilization” of religious and exclusively humanist viewpoints (303). Investigating the emergence of this state of affairs by retelling the history of North Atlantic
Christendom, he argues against “subtraction stories,” which presume that cleareyed secular humanism is what necessarily emerges once people start to shed
their irrational religious beliefs (22). Instead, for Taylor, secularity is a contingent
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JEANNE-M ARIE JACKSON AND NATHAN SUHR-SY TSM A
ix
and historical attainment with its roots in intra-Christian movements for Reform.
As Saba Mahmood observes, however, Taylor’s focus on what he calls “the North
Atlantic world” leaves out the crucial story of how this world has been shaped by
“Christianity’s encounters with its ‘others’ ” within and beyond Europe, including
the encounters catalyzed by imperial and missionary adventurism (Mahmood,
“Can Secularism Be Other-Wise?” 285). As a result, Mahmood, an anthropologist
best known for her 2005 book on the women’s mosque movement in Egypt, Politics
of PietyÀQGV7D\ORU·VQDUUDWLYHWREHFRPSOLFLWZLWKSROLWLFDOVHFXODUism, or what
she calls “the operation of modern secular power”—the political moves by which
some people are cast as fundamentalist and pre-modern (Ibid. 294).
These debates have already made their mark on literary studies, but important questions remain, particularly for scholars working within the long-“othered”
UHJLRQVWRZKLFK0DKPRRGEURDGO\VWDNHVKHULQWHUYHQWLRQ6KRXOGWKHÀHOGVWULYH
for a “postsecular” critical stance—that is, one that questions the very “secularization narrative” from which it arguably originated? Or is now the time to dig in
our heels on the secular imperatives of critique, insisting on a crucial distinction
between knowledge and faith? A number of critics see the postsecular as a promising term for naming both a trend in contemporary global anglophone literature
DQGDFULWLFDODSSURDFKWRLW 0F&OXUH.DXIPDQQ´/RFDWLQJµ0ćF]\ĸVND+XJJDQ5DWWL%UDQFK 2WKHUFULWLFVDSSURSULDWHWKHLQVLJKWVRI$VDG7D\ORUDQG0DKmood for world literature without identifying their approach as “postsecular.”
Justin Neuman, for instance, observes that within the ambit of Taylor’s thought,
talk of the “postsecular” makes little sense, as we are in, not after, a secular age (16).
Furthermore, the term calls to mind the contentious debates over the term postcolonial in a way that may hinder rather than aid in advancing literary-analytic work.
As Huggan puts it, playing off a well-known article by Kwame Anthony Appiah,
“Is the ‘post’ in ‘postecular’ the ‘post’ in ‘postcolonial?’ ” And does the “post-” in
both mark a temporal shift, a critical perspective, or something else entirely? At
the same time, “[t]he collapse of the consensus on secularization presents a unique
opportunity to investigate the range of social systems, bodily habits, and ways of
knowing that have been inadequately glossed as simply either secular or religious”
(Neuman 18). Michael Allan, extending the work of Mahmood, advocates “that
we push Said’s secular criticism one step further to ask how the methods, reading
practices, and supposed virtues of worldliness—and ultimately humanism—are
situated in time and place” (37) as well as “to ask how secularism . . . sanctions
ignorance about modes of textuality, dissent, and discussion within traditions
deemed religious” (137).
:KHWKHUH[SOLFLWO\Á\LQJXQGHUWKHEDQQHURIWKHSRVWVHFXODURUQRWWKLVOLQH
RIUHDVRQLQJKDVQRZDWWUDFWHGDKLJKSURÀOHEDFNODVKIURPFULWLFVRISRVWFRORQLDO
and particularly South Asian, literature. In a special issue of boundary 2 entitled “Antinomies of the Postsecular,” Aamir Mufti claims that “postsecularism”
betrays Said’s legacy insomuch as it “is inherently majoritarian in nature, seeking to
normalize certain religious and social practices and forms of authority and social
imagination as representative of ‘the people’ ” (18). Similarly, Sadia Abbas takes
0DKPRRGWRWDVNIRU´VDFULÀF>LQJ@DQXQGHUVWDQGLQJRIIDXOWOLQHVZLWKLQFXOWXUHV
and thus mak[ing] the culture seem monolithic” (64). Abbas argues instead for the
“enterprise of double critique” (71), which would not exempt misogyny within
colonized cultures in its efforts to contest past and present imperialism and would
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RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES
VOLUME 48 NUMBER 2
consequently remain allied with indigenous Marxism and Muslim feminism
(85).3 This debate begins to stall, though, without clear grounding in questions of
practiced—as opposed to “merely” broad theoretical—representation. Harnessed
to its maximum potential, Abbas’s intervention can thus push us toward digging
back into literary texts to discuss not “culture” and “imperialism” as such, but the
SDUWLFXODUVWUDWHJLHVZKHUHE\WKHVHFRQFHSWVDUHÀJXUHG
As many of the scholars cited above point out, uncovering the complex and
hybrid interactions of the secular and the religious has constituted a veritable litHUDU\VXEÀHOGLQWKHWZHQW\ÀUVWFHQWXU\/RUL%UDQFKZKRLGHQWLÀHVSRVWVHFXODU
scholarship in literary studies as a successor to the “religious turn” in continental
philosophy (i.e., an upsurge in thinking about the negative theological dimensions
of poststructuralist and especially Derridean theory), proposes that “in passing
WKURXJKDQGPRYLQJEH\RQGDQXQUHÁHFWLYHRU¶SUHVXPSWLYH·VHFXODULVP³DSDVsage never fully complete and so perpetually future—postsecular studies opens
up new understandings of religion and secularism as they have been mutually
FRQVWLWXWHGDVWKH\UHFRQÀJXUHWKHPVHOYHVLQFXOWXUHµ 7KHSRVWVHFXODULQWKLV
reading, is not simply what comes after an age in which secularism was dominant,
but rather a recognition that the secular is and has always been fragile, coexisting with myriad other social and epistemological possibilities. Branch’s most
provocative proposition in terms of periodicity, though, is a broad assessment of
JHRJUDSKLFDOUDWKHUWKDQPHUHO\FRQFHSWXDOH[SDQVLRQ´:KDWLVQHZHVWDERXWWKLV
postsecular conversation about experience and belief, desire, and meaning, is the
global table at which it is taking place” (100). Branch’s turn to the global is echoed
by Peter Coviello and Jared Hickman in their introduction to a 2014 special issue
of American Literature, titled “After the Postsecular.” In seeking to move past the
“epistemological and methodological self-interrogation” (647) in which literary
studies’ interests in secularity have mostly resided, Coviello and Hickman call for
the instantiation of globality as an actually postsecular frame. “Replacing secularity with globality as the background condition of modern life,” they write, “has
WKHVLJQDOYLUWXHRILQWURGXFLQJDPDVWHUFDWHJRU\WKDWE\GHÀQLWLRQWKHRUHWLFDOO\
makes all planetary inhabitants full subjects of history and also is considerably
more neutral in relation to religion” (649). Secularity is thereby not just questioned,
or fragilized, but altogether replaced as the dominant optic through which to
gage modernity. While we have, perhaps, been “always already” global, it is only
upon secularity’s more recent and explicit fragilization as a clear-cut condition of
“progress” that Americanists here begin to excavate globality’s full implications.
,QPDQ\ZD\VWKH&RYLHOOR+LFNPDQVSHFLDOLVVXHLVDQDSWSUHFXUVRUIRU
WKLVRQHLWWDNHVKROGRIDPDMRUWKHRUHWLFDOFRQYHUVDWLRQWKDWPD\KDYHUXQLWV
FRXUVHVRDVWRDGYDQFHDJHRJUDSKLFDOO\VSHFLÀFOLWHUDU\ÀHOG6RIDUWKHÀHOGRI
African literature has played very little role in this conversation. From this vantage point, this collection of essays on religion and secularity might be successful
simply by virtue of redoing for African writing what Coviello’s and Hickman’s has
done for American literature. Indeed, a search for articles pertaining to “secular,”
“secularity,” “secularism,” or “postsecular” in this very journal currently turns
up only three results, the most recent in 2008. While work on “religion” is more
FRPPRQLQWKHÀHOGWKDWZRUNGLVSOD\VYDU\LQJGHJUHHVRIVHOIUHÁH[LYLW\DERXWLWV
concepts and methods.4 Whereas Coviello and Hickman can position themselves
“after” the merely self-corrective postsecularity of recent years, then, our issue
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JEANNE-M ARIE JACKSON AND NATHAN SUHR-SY TSM A
xi
must introduce it and offer something new at the same time. This, at least, is one
ZD\RIORRNLQJDWRXUWDVNKHUHZHDUHÀOOLQJLQDJDSLQWKHOLWHUDWXUHZKHUHRQH
clearly exists.
But we would also like to introduce this issue from another, richer perspecWLYHQDPHO\WKDWWKH$IULFDQLVWFULWLFDOÀHOGKDVEHHQDKHDGRIDJDPHWKDWLWPD\
not seem to have entered. If the goal of the most innovative new work on secularity is to move toward the global, then African studies has already been there long
and constitutively enough to see the global as an equally fragile frame. “Cultural
globalization,” Richard Madsen has argued on the website The Immanent Frame,
“is what the world looks like from the point of view of an imperium in decline.”
5HWXUQLQJEULHÁ\WR6DLGLWLVZRUWKUHPHPEHULQJWKDWWKHFRQMXQFWXUHKLVRHXYUH
H[HPSOLÀHVRIWKHSRVWVWUXFWXUDODQGWKHSRVWFRORQLDO³WKHIUDXJKWLQWHUSOD\RI
what a geographical entity is with how it is named by others—in essence sought
ZKDW %UDQFK &RYLHOOR DQG +LFNPDQ GR D KXPDQLVP UDGLFDOL]HG E\ D PRUH
inclusive conception of the world. To the degree to which African literary studies
FRPHVRIDJHDVDQLQWHUQDWLRQDOÀHOGDORQJVLGHSRVWFRORQLDOLVPDQGLWVDWWHQGDQW
debates throughout the 1970s and 80s (e.g., Foucaldian discursivity versus Marxist
materialism, or nationalism versus cosmopolitanism), we thus suggest that Africanists have long since internalized the breakdown of dichotomies with which
(post)secular theorists now struggle. As Kwaku Larbi Korang writes in Writing
Ghana, Imagining Africa, “any consideration of the modernist invention of Africa by
Africans at the frontline of encounter must be fundamentally prepared to grapple
with contradiction and paradox” (165).5
Here, the structural resonances with recent forays into postsecular theory
DUHFOHDUDVWKHFRQVWUXFWRI$IULFDLV-DQXVIDFHGLQFRQMXULQJLQGLJHQHLW\DQG
imposition, “secularity” always implies the religion it purportedly forecloses.
Both “Africa” and “secular modernity” as organizing concepts in fact originate,
differentially, from colonial encounters. But whereas Coviello and Hickman can
MXVWLÀDEO\VHHNWRreVKDSHWKH$PHULFDQLVWÀHOGDORQJWKHVHOLQHVWKH$IULFDQLVW
humanities, for their part, have the colonial-global contradiction at their core.
(“Globality,” that is to say, is not for us necessarily a paradigmatic improvement.)
Colin Jager makes the structural isomorphism of “Africa” and “secular modernity”
explicit when he notes that “reconciliation,” in the context of truth commissions
but also, by extension, of radically different and racialized worldviews, “requires
a slightly different analytic frame [from the transnational], for it springs from a
particular religious tradition (Christianity) associated [in Africa] with both colonialism and its opposition” (439). In this sense, to bring an expanded geography
to the larger postsecular conversation is for Africanist scholars somewhat redundant. If the challenge for Americanist and western European scholars concerned
with religion and secularity is how to globalize the interrelation of these concepts,
then the challenge in African literary studies (and for postcolonialists in general)
is where to go when the global frame has for so long been acknowledged and
problematized.
We propose that the place to go fromWKHJOREDOLVWRZDUGWKHVSHFLÀFJURXQGV
RQZKLFKJOREDOLW\ULVHVRUIDOOV7RWKLVHQGLWLVLQVWUXFWLYHWKDWWKHVHOIUHÁH[LYH
study of religion and secularity that has largely appeared missing from African
literary studies has, in Africanist anthropology, paved a course for the wider
anthropological study of global religion. Matthew Engelke, for example, turns
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RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES
VOLUME 48 NUMBER 2
a hermeneutic lens on Christian practice rather than scripture in Zimbabwean
religious life in A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church, one of
WKHÀUVWYROXPHVLQWKH8QLYHUVLW\RI&DOLIRUQLD3UHVV·VÀHOGGHÀQLQJ$QWKURSROogy of Christianity series.6 Likewise, in a South Atlantic Quarterly special issue
on Global Christianity, Global Critique, Engelke (with Joel Robbins) harnesses his
VSHFLÀFDOO\$IULFDQLVWWUDLQLQJWRIRVWHUFURVVIHUWLOL]DWLRQEHWZHHQVRFLDOVFLHQWLÀFDQGKXPDQLVWLFUHOLJLRXVVWXGLHV,QDQWKURSRORJ\WKHQZHPLJKWVD\WKDW
Africanists are truly leading the way in thinking about the co-imbrication of
religious and secular modes of existence in contemporary life. In their much-cited
´7KHRU\IURPWKH6RXWK2U+RZ(XUR$PHULFD,V(YROYLQJ7RZDUG$IULFDµ-RKQ
and Jean Comaroff similarly exemplify this trend. In place of the series of dualisms on which the very notion of the global has long rested (center and periphery
chief among them), the Comaroffs suggest a shift in the geographical balance of
FXOWXUDOLQÁXHQFHZKLFKZHFDQQRWHQRWLQFLGHQWDOO\UHÁHFWVWKDWZLWKLQJOREDO
Christianity.
In light of such recent inquiries into African epistemologies and temporalities
that exceed the rote conjuncture of colonialism and Christianity, we thus ask here
how the study of African texts and spaces might contribute to, rather than merely
derive from, these broader debates about the status of the secular. One answer,
in a word, is time. In each of the essays featured here, a grounding, rethinking,
RU VSHFLÀFDWLRQ RI VHFXODULW\ LQ UHODWLRQ WR VSHFLÀF WH[WV WDNHV WKH IRUP RI FRQtemplating temporalities. This means that these critical interventions are also
intrinsically literary, in the sense that they directly address the relation among
formal structure, generic designation, and lived experience. Our special section’s
consideration of time as the bedrock of both literary and spiritual expression
ZRUNVSRLQWHGO\RQWZRFRQMRLQHGOHYHOVWKDWRIOLWHUDU\LQWHOOHFWXDOSHULRGLFLW\
and that of textual structuration. By periodicity, we do not mean simply a division
of literary production into notable eras, movements, or hallmark textual characteristics. We refer here, rather, to the acute consciousness on the part of these essays’
authors, as well as their objects of inquiry, of a need for precise and institutionally
astute response to one’s historical situation. Akin Adesokan and Cuthbeth Tagwirei, in their respective contributions on Yoruba poetry and white Zimbabwean
narrative, both wrestle with the limitations of an avowedly postcolonial way of
thinking about the relation of politics to literary expression. Adesokan argues
IRUDPRUHÁH[LEOHXQGHUVWDQGLQJRIKRZWKHSROLWLFDODVDFDWHJRU\LVFRQVWLWXWHG
in the hybrid genre of ewì, aligning it with a capacious morality rather than a
QDUURZHULQWHUYHQWLRQLVP:KLOHGHÀQLQJSROLWLFVDVDVHFXODUFDWHJRU\GLVWLQFW
from broader moral injunction may once have seemed necessary, Adesokan demonstrates how Yoruba poet-performers in fact reach their publics on both sets of
terms at once. There is no possibility, that is, of distinguishing the moral (often
grouped as “religious”) from the social. Tagwirei, for his part, acknowledges that
there is good reason to be suspicious of white Zimbabwean writers’ depictions
of local “African” religious practices, given the Rhodesian inheritance of avoiding black subjects’ complex spirituality by treating them anthropologically. The
time has come, however, to look at how recent white writing approaches black
Zimbabwean faiths more seriously, as it now strives to represent them outside an
imperative to Christian conversion.
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JEANNE-M ARIE JACKSON AND NATHAN SUHR-SY TSM A
xiii
In addition to thinking about literary genres and trends in this overarching
sense—that is, as distilling a larger, very real shift in social and political possibility—our contributors also attend to how African writers’ texts are formally
structured by their engagement with the past, the present, and (most surprisingly)
the future. Stephen Ney’s essay considers why the structure of teleology or the
expectation of a certain future, so much out of fashion in theoretical circles, was
LPSRUWDQW IRU WKH DYRZHGO\ VHFXODU QRYHOLVWV $\L .ZHL $UPDK DQG 1JŕJĤ ZD
Thiong’o. His essay uncovers an Augustinian idea of secularity as the saeculum or
current age as an unexpected ground for the narrative work of both these writers.
Sara Nimis explores how the body of a village saint in a novella by Egyptian writer
Salwa Bakr serves as a locus for an embodied critique of Egyptian society. While
published in the 1980s, the novella, Nimis contends, is best understood in light of
concepts from a longstanding tradition of WDʫDZZXI 6XÀVPRU,VODPLFP\VWLFLVP
DQGRIWURSHVIURP6XÀKDJLRJUDSK\(YHQVR,VODPLFP\VWLFLVPIDUIURPEHLQJ
otherworldly, becomes a canvas on which to oppose both the totalizing excesses of
the Egyptian military government and the gender norms of Islamists. Finally, the
issue’s turn to the South African novel in an essay by Michael Titlestad highlights
structural conjunctures between modes of inquiry that might seem discrepant or
opposed. By taking hold of one particularly rich strain of theological debate that
dovetails with key lines of Afro-Caribbean thought—namely, negative theology
as an “undoing” of the Christian belief system through a repurposing of its own
tropes and forms—Titlestad also debunks various overdetermined “theologies” of
South African history. Afrikaans novels by Eben Venter and Karel Schoeman both
WXUQWRDQLPDJLQHGIXWXUHLQRUGHUWRÀQGDJHQUHWKDWFDQUHWLUHWKHVHWKHRORJLHV
and broach new narrative space.
Our interview with Nigerian novelist Elnathan John rounds out this collection of extended meditations on the relationship between belief and critique,
as mutually constitutive, and their representational forms. Set in Islamic comPXQLWLHV LQ QRUWKHUQ 1LJHULD -RKQ·V VHDUFKLQJ ÀUVW QRYHO Born on a Tuesday,
lends imaginative heft to a scholar’s recent claim that “Muslim and Christian
PRYHPHQWV KDYH ÁRXULVKHG LQ PRGHUQ 1LJHULD EHFDXVH WKHLU LQVWLWXWLRQV DQG
doctrines are consistently embedded in the structures of society, shaping social
UHODWLRQVDQGWKHFRQÀJXUDWLRQRISRZHUµ 9DXJKQ -RKQ·VWKRXJKWVRQPRYing among differently located readerships—his work negotiates between nation
and region, across a transatlantic print network—speak, as well, to our aim of
bringing Africanist scholars together across different national academies. While
such efforts are always imperfect (one contributor from Ethiopia, for example,
was forced to withdraw his contribution for reasons of political anxiety), we are
pleased to provide a forum for early-career and senior scholars to engage such
big questions across continental boundaries. In total, this special section should
be read as equally concerned with (post)secular theory “as such” and with religion’s primary role in regionally grounded literary expression. Though “Africa,”
we acknowledge, is only the sum of its many complex parts, the disbanding of
modernity’s secularization thesis through a fraught turn to “globality” demands
WKLV DJJUHJDWH FRQWULEXWLRQ WR IXUWKHU ÁHVKLQJ RXW ZKDW that framework, now,
may reveal or obscure.
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xiv
RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES
VOLUME 48 NUMBER 2
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We are grateful to Molly Reinhoudt and the editors of Research in African Literatures for their support of this special section, Sebastian Lecourt for his comments
on its introduction, and the many colleagues who provided advice or served as
anonymous peer readers for the essays therein. Research by Nathan Suhr-Sytsma
was supported in part by the University Research Committee of Emory University.
NOTES
1. The authors of The Empire Writes Back, a founding text of postcolonial literary
studies, see “secular criticism” primarily as an unfortunate but consequential choice of
ZRUGV´$OWKRXJKE\¶WKHRORJLFDO·6DLGPHDQWVFKRROVRIFRQWHPSRUDU\WKHRU\WKDWZHUH
dogmatic and bounded, . . . the term seemed to suggest that the theological and the
sacred were not the province of enlightened post-colonial analysis. Such an assumption
reminds us of the gap that often exists between the theoretical agenda of the Western
DFDGHP\DQGWKHLQWHUHVWVRISRVWFRORQLDOVRFLHWLHVWKHPVHOYHVµ $VKFURIW*ULIÀWKV
DQG7LIÀQ 2UDV-XVWLQ1HXPDQKDVQRWHGPRUHUHFHQWO\LQFiction Beyond Secularism, “Though Said claims that his target is not religion as such but rather the forces of
nationalism and empire, his use of the term secular fosters inevitable, if unfortunate,
occlusions of the dynamic interplay of religious and secular modes of thinking and
feeling” (187).
2. See, for example, the ongoing large-scale research project Islam in the Horn of
Africa: A Comparative Literary ApproachKWWSZZZLVOKRUQDIUHX
3. Abbas’s At Freedom’s Limit was co-winner of the MLA Prize for a First Book.
4. For a monograph that proposes “the sacred” rather than religion as an operative
concept for African literature, see Mathuray.
5. 6HH DOVR /HRQ GH .RFN·V LQÁXHQWLDO Civilising Barbarians, about nineteenthcentury missionary discourse in South Africa.
6. For recent works in this series with relevance for scholars of literature and
media in West Africa, see Meyer and Peel.
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