Introduction

Abstract

This article surveys the role of religion in postcolonial theory and the role of colonialism in studies of secularism. Despite a secularist image, postcolonial theory from its start has critically engaged with questions of religion. Similarly, despite secularism's Eurocentric image, some studies of secularism have reflected on the way the category of religion is constructed in colonial encounters. Bringing these conversations together, we examine the secular-modern-colonial conceptual knot. The article concludes that close study of specific examples of the intersection of the modern, the colonial, and the secular is the most effective method of answering the article's animating question.The postcolonial signifies a historical period, an oppositional stance, or both. It is the time after colonialism, or it is the struggle against colonialism. As always, the descriptive and normative intermingle. Colonialism does not simply end; it ends through struggle. That struggle shapes the time after colonialism: the institutions, values, and political landscape that remain once formal colonial control has ceased. Of course, colonial control itself is not so simple. It is not reducible to formal political mechanisms but is inextricable from the economic and the cultural. Struggle against economic and cultural hegemony is an aspect of postcolonial political struggle before and after the moment of independence, even as the terrain of struggle shifts. There has always been struggle, for colonial hegemony is never total. The postcolonial during colonialism names that spirit of struggle, that resistance encountered by the colonial order, and those lives animated by a future outside of the