Globalization and the Gods, or the Political Theology of "Race"

Abstract

Globalization and the Gods, or the Political Theology of "Race"Modernity is getting modernized. In order to explain the world in the early twenty-first century-a transnational world from which religion shows no signs of disappearing-recent scholarship increasingly considers modernity in terms of a long history of globalization whose relativizing effects cannot be equated with "disenchantment."1 In this framework, the colonial Americas-as the bridge between Atlantic and Pacific worldsrather than Enlightenment Europe immediately take modernity's center stage insofar as globalization, by definition, became possible only with the European "discovery" of the Americas and the momentous transformations this enabled.2 Eurocentrism takes an unprecedented hit when we trace modernity to an incipient globalization that necessarily coincides with intercultural encounter in the Americas and beyond rather than to an Enlightenment that proceeds from intracultural European self-reflection. "The history of modernity" becomes genuinely "global and conjunctural . . . not a history in which Europe alone first produces and then exports modernity to the world at large" for either consumption or critique, as one scholar puts it (Subrahmanyam 28). This most recent globalist reformulation of modernity, it must be noted, outstrips-quite self-consciouslywhat is for many still the reigning retheorization of modernity, Paul Gilroy's massively influential "black Atlantic." Sibylle Fischer well articulates the common critique: insofar as Gilroy "equat[es] modernity with the Eurocentric regime of racial subordination and colonial exploitation that became hegemonic in the course of the nineteenth century" and then "oppos[es] that modernity with a counterculture that grows out of suffering," he retains Europe, in some sense, as the "original" producer of modernity if not its exclusive site of production. Instead, Fischer argues, we should take "heterogeneity" as the "congenital condition of modernity, and . . . the alleged purity of European modernity [as] an a posteriori theojared hiCkman Johns Hopkins University

Organizing Race

“…This misfit between the expectations and values of professional organizers and those of African American churches underscores the need to take race seriously in faith‐based community organizing. Given the deeply entwined histories of religion and race (Hickman ), and particularly of Christian theology and the subordination of African Americans (Carter ), such an account would need to think about how both categories, religion and race, can be taken seriously together, how both can refuse the bounds set on them by the ideology of neoliberal multiculturalism. From within the always already racialized tradition of Christianity, what meaning does organizing take on?…”

Introduction

“…Two further developments in the scholarship closely tied to postcolonial theory promise new approaches to thinking the postcolonial and the postsecular together. A scholarly conversation is emerging that examines the intersection of colonialism, Christianity, and raceparticularly race organized around categories of black and white (Carter, 2013;Hickman, 2010;Jennings, 2010). Colonialism and Christianity have long been linked -iconically, the missionary, the soldier, and the merchant working in coordination -but in recent years there has been particular attention paid to the way that religious and racial categories come into being at the same time, and how the colonial encounter is decisive for their formation.…”