RELIGION,

THEORY,
CRITIQUE
Classic and Contemporary
Approaches and Methodologies

EDITED BY
RICHARD KING

Columbia University Press

New York
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since I893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2017 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: King, Richard, 1966- editor.
Title: Religion, theory, critique: classic and contemporary approaches and
methodologies I edited by Richard King.
Description: New York: Columbia University Press [2017]1 Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 20160586091 ISBN 978023II45428 (cloth: alk. paper) 1
ISBN 978023II45435 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1ISBN 9780231518246 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Religion.
Classification: LCC BL41 .R367 20171 DDC 200'7-dc23
LC record available at https:lllccn.loc.govhoI6058609

8
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent
and durable acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

Cover design: Jordan Wannemacher

 49
Religion, Modernity, and Coloniality
NELSON MALDONADO-TORRES

T he concept of religion most used in the West by scholars and laypeople alike is
a specifically modern concept forged in the context of imperialism and colo-
nial expansion. l Postcolonial theory has made some contributions to the under-
standing of the links between religion, modernity, and coloniality, but it has tended
to side with modern secularism in its characterization of religion, and it has equally
privileged conversations with European and, to some extent, Third World secular
authors. That is, the views of religious thinkers themselves, and experiences grounded
in religious practices, rituals, narratives, or forms of organization, tend to be less
present than the perspectives of se~ular authors in the understanding of the mean-
ing of religion, modernity, or coloniality.
Another tendency in postcolonial theory, due in part to the collective impact of
renowned theorists such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, has
been to identify sources for postcolonial theorizing in the specific histories of
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and French colonialism and in the re-
gions of the Middle East and South Asia. Less attention has been paid to fifteenth-
to seventeenth-century formations of coloniality, and to colonies in the West, where
the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, and more recently the United States,
among other imperial powers, have had enduring influences. One of the conse-
quences of this is that religious studies scholars who are in conversation with post-
colonial theory tend to be well versed in the postcolonial critique of Orientalism,
but much less informed about the theorization of Occidentalism or Americanity.
"Occidentalism" is a term coined by the Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando
Coronil to refer to Western conceptions of the West that are presupposed in the char-
acterization of the non-West. "Occidentalism," he states, "is ... not the reverse of
Orientalism but its condition of possibility, its dark side (as in a mirror)."2 For Wal-
ter Mignolo, Occidentalism is important for the understanding of the West and its
conceptualizations of the non-West, particularly Latin America, since, from the very
emergence of the "Indias Occidentales" (West Indies) to the very idea of Latin Amer-
ica, the entire region has been casted as an ambiguous zone that must always see
itself in relation to the West but without never obtaining that stature. 3 The relation