The Postcolonial Secular Imagination

Book Summary

Through an intimate, literary conjunction of religion and politics, this book theorizes the emergence of a "post-secular" condition of the contemporary world, in which organized, conventional religion has failed politically. Nationalism has had its failures after decolonization in the postcolonial world, marked especially by ethnic violence, civil war, partition, and communalism. In the wake of such crises, however, we have still retained within us the need for faith, wonder, and enchantmenta "which must now find its expression without the political constraints of organized religion, nationalism, and ethnic majoritarianism. Ratti discusses recent Anglophone novels that reflect the multireligious nature of the Indian sub-continent, including such religions and forms of belief as Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, Buddhism, Christianity, and tribal animism. The main emphasis being on the work of Michael Ondaatje and Salman Rushdie, it will address a breadth of writers, including Mahasweta Devi, Amitav Ghosh, Allan Sealy, and Shauna Singh Baldwin.

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