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
