Headlines scream of burgeoning populism around the world, but the shift in politics today could also be described as a…
Indigeneity and secularity
Claims to indigeneity are often linked with a commitment to the sacrality of place. This can range from Native American land rights claims to contestation over “homeland” in Israeli/Palestine, but also to European and American white nationalist movements and perhaps even to environmental justice movements.
How is indigeneity articulated within the political and legal language of secularism? Does secularism make certain claims to indigeneity illegible? What might this illegibility suggest about the close linkages between secularism, settler colonialism, and Protestant Christianity? Does the assertion of indigenous identity, of whatever kind, necessarily push against secularism’s “immanent frame,” or are there ways that indigenous identity—and perhaps even the category of indigeneity itself—is a product of secularity? How might these questions be approached differently when we shift from the register of rhetoric to the register of affect, probing what it means to feel “native.” And what is the relationship between this form of affect and what might be called religiosity?
This forum brings together scholars from a variety of fields (religious studies, anthropology, law, literature, cultural studies) to address these questions, creating a space to explore how scholarly discussions of settler colonialism, nationalism, race, and secularity might productively inform each other.
This forum was cocurated by editorial board members Mayanthi Fernando and Vincent Lloyd.
Secular Christian power and the spiritual invention of nations
In the Americas, missionary colonialism prospered on the sharp edge of secular Christian power. Cutting up land with a blade…
The river is not a person: Indigeneity and the sacred in Aotearoa New Zealand
Earlier this year, the New Zealand Parliament passed a remarkable piece of legislation declaring the Whanganui River to be a…
Sacrality, secularity, and contested indigeneity
Indigenous peoples articulate their indigeneity within the political and legal language of secularism, even as it renders certain claims to…
Questioning territory: A Jewish reflection on holy land*
Thinking of territory as a patrie, a motherland or homeland, makes use of metaphors that hope to capture a primal…
America’s music
On December 4, 1987 both chambers of the 100th United States Congress passed a “resolution expressing the sense of Congress…
Fluid indigeneity: Indians, Catholicism, and Spanish law in the mutable Americas
In this forum, “indigeneity” faces off against European “settler colonialism.” If the twenty-first century mode of conceptualizing indigenous resistance to…
Indigenous protective occupation and emergent networks of spirited refusal
The spirited refusal of conceited and deaf forms of state secularity is on stark display in many contemporary protest movements. This is…
Secularism and the Animist Indigene
In the prompt that we sent to the authors participating in this forum, Vincent Lloyd and I asked a series of questions…