Religion and memory on the land
To ask whether the postcolonial is postsecular demands asking: for whom, where, and when? It is necessarily a local and a comparative question, in which the ‘post’ prefix suggests less that colonialism or secularism are ‘over,’ but that their enduring effects must be named, questioned, and denaturalized.
Christianity — based not only on the crucifixion but also on the incarnation — is a complex social imaginary whose power depends on the combined control and celebration of the maternal body. Reading blood — conceptual or otherwise — through death without also reading it through birth has profound political consequences that reassert and even revitalize the violent innocence of Christianity that Anidjar seeks to critique.
For Blood: The Element of Christianity. A Forum on Gil Anidjar’s Blood: A Critique of Christianity, edited by Nina Caputo, I wrote a response entitled ‘Fertile Blood’; find it here.
Though law may tame public prayer, scrubbing its specificity or divine referents, there is still something in its performance that is worthy of consideration as a particular kind of political action.
In response to “Law’s Prayer: Town of Greece v Galloway” by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, I wrote a contribution to the SSRC Forum Reverberations: New Directions in Prayer; find it here.