An Yountae and Benjamin P. Davis each recently published books exploring decolonial approaches to religion and politics: The Coloniality of the Sacred: Race, Religion, and the Poetics of World-Making and Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights and Decolonial Ethics, respectively. Their books share a focus on the Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, drawing on his work as a resource to think anew about political theology. In this exchange, the two scholars consider what Glissant could have meant by his call for “a modern form of the sacred” in his 1990 book Poetics of Relation.
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Benjamin Davis (BD): Why is it important to think about the future of religion from the perspective of the Caribbean?
An Yountae (AY): In many ways, thinking about the future is a question of reckoning with the afterlives of colonial modernity. Enrique Dussel, Sylvia Wynter, and Walter Mignolo remind us that the Americas constitute “the dark side,” the Other, of European modernity. Modernity cannot be (dis)articulated from its colonial underside—what we might call colonial modernity—which provided Europe not only with material resources but also with its political, epistemological, and theological foundations. In this sense, the Americas emerge as the negative reflection, the antithesis, of modernity’s central tenets.
The Caribbean is at the heart of this history. It was a central site of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, a crucible in which Europe’s modern world-system was forged. I’m drawn to Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s claim that the Atlantic is “the painfully delivered child of the Caribbean” and to Paul Gilroy’s suggestion that the slave ship marks the point of departure for any critical reflection on modernity.
Much of Caribbean thought, in turn, is animated by a double movement: reckoning with the ongoing legacies of colonial and plantation modernity while imagining futures disarticulated from them. These reflections, distinctive and profound, have remained peripheral to Western academia and public discourse until recently.
BD: In The Coloniality of the Secular,you argue that the project of decolonization requires an effort to “resignify the sacred” (2). The decolonial theorists you think with—Édouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, and Sylvia Wynter—do not “signal a move toward depoliticizing and privatizing the sacred” (51). What, then, does this political and public sacred look like?
AY: This is perhaps the most loaded or daunting question for a scholar of religion. Even though the book reads the figure of the sacred, and to a certain extent even rethinks the sacred, I try to stay away from any hint of prescribing or defining it. Any answer I might give regarding the political and public sacred must remain partial and tentative. It is especially important to make this clarification considering that the decolonial theorists I engage are not “religious” thinkers invested in theorizing the sacred, perhaps apart from Glissant, who evokes the sacred but in a rather unsystematic way.
Still, I appreciate your use of the phrase public sacred. “Public” rightly captures the direction these thinkers are signaling with the sacred. A big part of the reason why many scholars of religion avoid discussing the sacred is because of its historically essentializing nature. For critics, the sacred attributes a sui generis character to religion in an ethnocentric and essentializing way; it dissociates religion from history and power. It is privatizing, making religion a question of an individual who is not conditioned by political forces. It attributes to religion an atemporal character.
By contrast, the murky figure of the sacred I see emerging in Caribbean poetics is fundamentally public or communal in character. In these writings, the sacred is not dissociated from social (and political) life. The most insightful reflections on religion in Caribbean poetics surface in discussions of “secular” topics such as history, politics, memory, community, and the future. This use of “the sacred” rejects the reductive binary conception of the sacred that confines religion within the private, atemporal realm of mind and belief, which are somehow unmediated by power. Rather, the sacred in Caribbean poetics is inseparable from public, collective practices oriented toward the common good.
For Glissant in particular, the sacred seems to play a dual function. He frequently uses the word “sacred” to signify a placeholder or parameter for a creolized sense of wholeness. This sense of wholeness, in turn, mobilizes the creative force that animates world-making. In Glissant, the sacred also gestures toward an animating force that secular modernity often fails to capture.
BD: Your method in this book brings together areas of inquiry that are often held as separate in academic studies of religion: politics, ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and theology. You write, “Aesthetic inquiry becomes an ethical duty in the aftermath of catastrophe, where what is left is deemed unworthy” (140). Reading this line, I was reminded of your previous book, The Decolonial Abyss, which argued in favor of a unglamorous politics of solidarity from the “ruins” of colonialism. Such an ethics, you suggested there, involves “an openness to the mystery and the abyss of the other” (139). Amidst wildfires, floods, climate migrations—and US bombs reigning down on Iran and Palestine as we correspond—what are some ways the authors you read help us pursue a new aesthetics and ethics, that is, a new system of value?
AY: One central and common thread I see among the thinkers I engage is the imperative to disentangle knowledge from coloniality. To do so, it is crucial to fully revisit the conceptual and methodological frameworks employed in knowledge production.
Pursuing new grounds for ethics and aesthetics has been undertaken by numerous North Atlantic thinkers both prior to and contemporaneous with these decolonial thinkers. The limit of such critiques is that they often reproduce what Walter Mignolo has highlighted as a critique from within the colonial/modern paradigm. These forms of inquiry reproduce a different iteration of the current system of value so long as the West’s monopolization of theory remains unchallenged. What I see my interlocutors doing is wrestling with meta-theoretical questions from a different place—and I mean this quite literally: from their actual locale without reverting thought back into the Western epistemic framework.
For instance, Glissant’s writings suggest important insights regarding the climate and migratory crises we are facing. Glissant’s thought is geared toward rethinking our modality of existing in the world.
For Glissant, the land(scape) and its materiality are key ontological markers that inspire new modalities of becoming. Spatial/geographic markers such as the mangrove, the island, the ocean, the beach, the river, and the rocks are ontological references that actively inform our participation in the journey of becoming.
Glissant writes in Poetics of Relation, “Every poetics of our days signals its landscape. Every poet, his country: the modality of his participation.” Both the human other and the non-human other (including the landscape) signal absolute alterity in that they constitute the greater Whole; the broader web of Relation to which we all belong.
As you also explore in your recent books, Choose Your Bearing and Another Humanity, Glissant offers an understanding of the human that is much broader than that familiar to modern Western thought. He does not separate the human from the environment.
BD: Let’s talk more about the idea of a new human. Another author you engage is Frantz Fanon. How does Fanon help us think about a political and public sacred and their role in a new humanity?
AY: At the center of Fanon’s thought is the question of the human. Fanon sees the existential question of the human as a much larger symbolic and theological issue constitutive of racial-colonial modernity. For Fanon, undoing the racial-colonial concept of the human (which operates on the notion of Blackness as its antithesis) means reclaiming the very notion of the human as a movement and a dialectic struggle for liberation.
In Fanon, too, the sacred is connected to the self’s wholeness. For the Martinican existential humanist, the sacred is somehow associated with alterity, with the indestructibility of the other, which is also a question of the human.
Commenting on Fanon’s sociogeny, Sylvia Wynter spells out the implication of understanding the human not only as bios but also as mythoi: “Humannessis no longer a noun. Being human is a praxis.”From Fanon’s concrete standpoint, being human is about the capacity to say no, the dialectic struggle to make oneself known to the oppressor who refuses to recognize the humanness/existence of the oppressed. This speaks volumes to the violence in Palestine, an event that leaves one baffled not only by the sheer scale of injustice in Gaza and the West Bank but also by the collective liberal silence that enables and facilitates the unthinkable.
This is precisely the point that your new book Another Humanity probes. You explore these questions with much more rigor in your book than I do, and I deeply appreciate the work you are doing. You incorporate the personal into the ethical by blending your interlocutors’ biographic elements with their thoughts and your own personal reflection. In your reading of the human and your reflections on the politics of solidarity, you also pay attention to the sacred that emerges in the writing of your interlocutors, particularly Glissant. How does the sacred play out in your reading of the human? In what ways is it helping you think about questions of ethics, the human, and the global politics of solidarity? In other words, might I turn this question back to you and learn what some of your authors have to say?
BD: My partner recently sent me a photo from a church sign in Calgary. It said, “‘Justice is what love looks like in public’ – Dr. Cornel West.”
I loved how the church kept West’s title in the attribution and that the church was pushing a message about public engagement. It is not a coincidence that Cornel West, a long time ago now, tried to bring more critical attention to the role of religion in progressive politics with the article “Religion and the Left” in The Monthly Review. For a long time, I have been trying to think about what a public sacred would look like, what it would mean to organize across societies on the basis of dignity and care.
Reading Glissant was important to me because he not only asks us to think about political life in terms of public speech and activity, but he also reminds us always to situate that politics within the landscape and the seascape, as you noted. For me, when I reflect on the movements of the 21st century in the US, this is one of the key differences between Occupy Wall Street and Standing Rock: Standing Rock started from and maintained the importance of orienting ourselves in right relations to the land. In other words, it foregrounded the question of land in larger questions of dispossession.
Then I started reading Glissant in dialogue with Edward Said. Said is a decidedly secular thinker in many ways, but this does not mean that he discounted the value of religion. Rather, he was seeking criticism that was always worldly. There are political reasons for this orientation. For example, as he argues in The Question of Palestine, keeping one’s views private prevents collective consciousness-raising, which must be public. In that book Said asks, “How many ex-politicians or actively engaged intellectuals still say privately that they are horrified by Israeli military policy and political arrogance, or that they believe the occupation, creeping annexation, and settlement of the territories is inexcusable, and yet say little or nothing in public, where their words might have some effect?”
The question for me remains how we could bring together Glissant’s wide sense of sacred Relation to landscape, of listening to the cries of the earth, and Said’s secular call for public engagement. What would it look like to make this connection?
It is precisely this question that you engage in The Coloniality of the Secular. You argue that “political life is a theological problem as well as a colonial problem” (101).Can you help me understand what theological orientations you see guiding decolonial politics today?
AY: Thinking about the sacred and the public with Glissant and Said draws an interesting contrast because Said’s secularism reflects what many critics, such as William Hart and Gil Anidjar, have noted as his misled and narrow understanding of religion. Said separates public or worldly criticism from religion. Glissant is also not invested in religion as an organized concept and institution, but this does not prevent him from exploring the political possibilities of the sacred.
The unmarked theology that underlies the secular and its politics that I see today, as in the past, is the ongoing colonial theology of whiteness that Fanon denounced amidst the struggles of the twentieth century decolonization movement. Fanon’s critique of (colonial) political theology is often overlooked since he is viewed as antagonistic to religion. Yet through Wynter’s work, we see how Fanon’s important, yet underdeveloped, theological insight is brought to light.
Fanon’s critique of colonialism in “Concerning Violence” is unabashedly theological. He diagnoses colonialism as a worldview founded on a Manichean theological foundation that divides Good from Evil. This theological reference justifies the dualistic hierarchy that reinforces unjust conditions of the everyday colonial reality: “The serf is essentially different from the knight, but a reference to divine right is needed to justify this difference in status.” Carl Schmitt suggests that political theology reveals the true governing mechanism of supposedly secular modernity—not contract or reason but sovereign decision deciding on the exception. Similarly, I read Fanon’s claims in “Concerning Violence” as a critique of the colonial political theology of whiteness.
Viewing coloniality as a problem of political theology is an insight further developed in Wynter’s oeuvre, where she shows how the (enchanted) colonial Other is fundamental to the genesis of the modern Western imaginary and its secularized notion of the human. Among contemporary voices, J. Kameron Carter has described whiteness in terms of anti-blackness, that is, as a form of religion that structures the present. The convergence of white supremacy and religion in contemporary American politics is an extreme example of this kind of whiteness, though these critics would agree that the colonial theology of whiteness also pervades the everyday life of ordinary people far beyond extraordinary circumstances.
BD: For those of us who teach, there is the question of how we can talk about this new form of the sacred as well as these iterations of white supremacy in the classroom. If your students are horrified about the crimes of colonialism, you note that equally they express relief at liberal gains in the past century. They feel they are part of “a redeemed present” (178). How can we teach in a way that shows the connections between colonialism and liberalism? And can we do so in a way that still empowers students to act in their context of student loan debt, cuts to the public and humanitarian sectors, and so on?
AY: This is where I find the works of contemporary decolonial thinkers especially useful. The Modernity/Coloniality analytic in addition to many studies on the co-constitution of modernity and coloniality provide incisive critical perspectives that help students recognize the unmarked innocence of modernity and its taken-for-granted normative values. Similarly, scholars of religion who investigate the making of modern religion alongside the axis of race and colonialism helpfully deconstruct the supposed neutrality of the secular by showing how both religion and the secular emerge as colonial categories.
You can also say that the overall genre of critical theory we teach—whether in race, gender and queer studies, disabilities studies, or Marxist class analysis—reminds us of the colonial complicity embedded within the liberal apparatus. I emphasize to students that systems of oppression are not simply external, a “them” apart from “us.” Rather, they form the very foundations of the modern/secular/liberal present. The “dark side” of this present is not an anomaly but constitutive of it.
Understandably, this realization can be discouraging for students who feel caught within an omnipresent order that continues to reproduce the very violence they condemn. Yet it’s important to remind them (and myself) that such awareness should motivate us to be even more vigilant critics and citizens.
For Fanon, what makes us human is our ability to question and to say no to power. In Toward the African Revolution, he asks, “Have I not, because of what I have done or failed to do, contributed to an impoverishment of human reality? Have I at all times demanded and brought out the man that is in me?” Humanity in this sense is not a given but an action.
The classroom, then, is where we continue to question what it means to be human, even and especially in an age where systemic destruction and dehumanization of lives funds the present.
