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 Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/reseafrilite.48.2.01 Accessed: 29-06-2017 19:35 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Research in African Literatures This content downloaded from 128.220.159.5 on Thu, 29 Jun 2017 19:35:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms ,QWURGXFWLRQ5HOLJLRQ6HFXODULW\ 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 This content downloaded from 128.220.159.5 on Thu, 29 Jun 2017 19:35:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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 This content downloaded from 128.220.159.5 on Thu, 29 Jun 2017 19:35:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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 This content downloaded from 128.220.159.5 on Thu, 29 Jun 2017 19:35:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms x 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 This content downloaded from 128.220.159.5 on Thu, 29 Jun 2017 19:35:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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$IULFDQLVW humanities, for their part, have the colonial-global contradiction at their core. (“Globality,” that is to say, is not for us necessarily a paradigmatic improvement.) Colin Jager makes the structural isomorphism of “Africa” and “secular modernity” explicit when he notes that “reconciliation,” in the context of truth commissions but also, by extension, of radically different and racialized worldviews, “requires a slightly different analytic frame [from the transnational], for it springs from a particular religious tradition (Christianity) associated [in Africa] with both colonialism and its opposition” (439). In this sense, to bring an expanded geography to the larger postsecular conversation is for Africanist scholars somewhat redundant. If the challenge for Americanist and western European scholars concerned with religion and secularity is how to globalize the interrelation of these concepts, then the challenge in African literary studies (and for postcolonialists in general) is where to go when the global frame has for so long been acknowledged and problematized. We propose that the place to go fromWKHJOREDOLVWRZDUGWKHVSHFLÀFJURXQGV RQZKLFKJOREDOLW\ULVHVRUIDOOV7RWKLVHQGLWLVLQVWUXFWLYHWKDWWKHVHOIUHÁH[LYH study of religion and secularity that has largely appeared missing from African literary studies has, in Africanist anthropology, paved a course for the wider anthropological study of global religion. Matthew Engelke, for example, turns This content downloaded from 128.220.159.5 on Thu, 29 Jun 2017 19:35:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms xii RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES VOLUME 48 NUMBER 2 a hermeneutic lens on Christian practice rather than scripture in Zimbabwean religious life in A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church, one of WKHÀUVWYROXPHVLQWKH8QLYHUVLW\RI&DOLIRUQLD3UHVV·VÀHOGGHÀQLQJ$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. This content downloaded from 128.220.159.5 on Thu, 29 Jun 2017 19:35:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 128.220.159.5 on Thu, 29 Jun 2017 19:35:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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. WORKS CITED Abbas, Sadia. At Freedom’s Limit: Islam and the Postcolonial Predicament. Fordham UP, 2014. Allan, Michael. In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt. Princeton UP, 2016. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry, vol. 17, no. 2, 1991, pp. 336–57. Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford UP, 2003. $VKFURIW%LOO*DUHWK*ULIÀWKVDQG+HOHQ7LIÀQThe Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2002. Branch, Lori. “Postsecular Studies.” The Routledge Companion to Literature and Religion, edited by Mark Knight, Routledge, 2016, pp. 91–101. &RPDURII-RKQDQG-HDQ&RPDURII´7KHRU\IURPWKH6RXWK2U+RZ(XUR$PHULFD Is Evolving Toward Africa.” Anthropological Forum, vol. 22, no. 2, 2012, pp. 113–31. &RYLHOOR3HWHUDQG-DUHG+LFNPDQ´,QWURGXFWLRQ$IWHUWKH3RVWVHFXODUµAmerican Literature, vol. 86, no. 4, 2014, pp. 645–54. De Kock, Leon. Civilising Barbarians: Missionary Narrative and African Textual Response in Nineteenth-Century South Africa. Wits UP, 1996. This content downloaded from 128.220.159.5 on Thu, 29 Jun 2017 19:35:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms JEANNE-M ARIE JACKSON AND NATHAN SUHR-SY TSM A xv During, Simon. “Toward the Postsecular.” PMLA, vol. 120, no. 3, 2005, pp. 876–77. Engelke, Matthew. A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church. U of California P, 2007. Engelke, Matthew, and Joel Robbins, editors. Global Christianity, Global Critique, special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 109, no. 4, 2010, pp. 623–832. “Global Christianity—A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Christian Population.” Pew Research Center'HFSHZIRUXPRUJJOREDO -christianity-exec. Huggan, Graham. “Is the ‘Post’ in ‘Postsecular’ the ‘Post’ in ‘Postcolonial?’ ” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 56, no. 4, 2010, pp. 751–68. -DJHU &ROLQ ´5HFRQFLOLDWLRQ LQ 6RXWK $IULFD :RUOG /LWHUDWXUH *OREDO &KULVWLDQLW\ Global Capital.” The Routledge Companion to Literature and Religion, edited by Mark Knight, Routledge, 2016, pp. 432–45. Jameson, Fredric. The Antinomies of Realism. Verso, 2013. Kaufmann, Michael. “Locating the Postsecular.” Religion & Literature, vol. 41, no. 3, 2009, pp. 68–73. ³³³´7KH5HOLJLRXVWKH6HFXODUDQG/LWHUDU\6WXGLHV5HWKLQNLQJWKH6HFXODUL]Dtion Narrative in Histories of the Profession.” New Literary History, vol. 38, no. 4, 2007, pp. 607–27. Korang, Kwaku Larbi. Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa: Nation and African Modernity. U of Rochester P, 2003. 0ćF]\ĸVND0DJGDOHQD´7RZDUGD3RVWVHFXODU/LWHUDU\&ULWLFLVP([DPLQLQJ5LWXDO Gestures in Zadie Smith’s Autograph Man.” Religion & Literature, vol. 41, no. 3, 2009, pp. 73–82. Madsen, Richard. “The Many Globalizations of Christianity. ” The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Spher1RYEORJVVVUFRUJWLI WKHPDQ\JOREDOL]DWLRQVRIFKULVWLDQLW\ Mahmood, Saba. “Can Secularism Be Other-Wise?” Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, edited by Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun, Harvard UP, 2010, pp. 282–99. ———. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton UP, 2005. Masuzawa, Tomoko. The Invention of World Religions. U of Chicago P, 2005. Mathuray, Mark. On the Sacred in African Literature: Old Gods and New Worlds. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. McClure, John A. Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison. U of Georgia P, 2007. Meyer, Birgit. Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana. U of California P, 2015. Mufti, Aamir R. “Why I Am Not a Postsecularist.” boundary 2, vol. 40, no. 1, 2013, pp. 7–19. Neuman, Justin. Fiction Beyond Secularism. Northwestern UP, 2014. Pecora, Vincent P. Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity. U of Chicago P, 2006. Peel, J. D. Y. &KULVWLDQLW\ ,VODP DQG 2ULʫD 5HOLJLRQ 7KUHH 7UDGLWLRQV LQ &RPSDULVRQ DQG Interaction. U of California P, 2016. Ratti, Manav. The Postsecular Imagination: Postcolonialism, Religion, and Literature. Routledge, 2013. Said, Edward W. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Harvard UP, 1983. This content downloaded from 128.220.159.5 on Thu, 29 Jun 2017 19:35:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms xvi RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES VOLUME 48 NUMBER 2 Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2007. Vaughn, Olufemi. Religion and the Making of Nigeria. Duke UP, 2016. Warner, Michael, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun. “Editors’ Introduction.” Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, edited by Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun, Harvard UP, 2010, pp. 1–31. This content downloaded from 128.220.159.5 on Thu, 29 Jun 2017 19:35:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms