Beyond Man: Race, Coloniality, and Philosophy of Religion

Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study

by Yountae An (Editor), Eleanor Craig (Editor)

Beyond Man reimagines the meaning and potential of a philosophy of religion that better attends to the inextricable links among religion, racism, and colonialism. An Yountae, Eleanor Craig, and the contributors reckon with the colonial and racial implications of the field's history by staging a conversation with Black, Indigenous, and decolonial studies. In their introduction, An and Craig point out that European-descended Christianity has historically defined itself by its relation to the other while paradoxically claiming to represent and speak to humanity in its totality. The topics include secularism, the Eucharist's relation to Blackness, and sixteenth-century Brazilian cannibalism rituals as well as an analysis of how Mircea Eliade's conception of the sacred underwrites settler colonial projects and imaginaries. Throughout, the contributors also highlight the theorizing of Afro-Caribbean thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter, C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire whose work disrupts the normative Western categories of religion and philosophy.

Contributors: An Yountae, Ellen Armour, J. Kameron Carter, Eleanor Craig, Amy Hollywood, Vincent Lloyd, Filipe Maia, Mayra Rivera, Devin Singh, Joseph R. Winters

Genres: Philosophy

312 pages, Paperback

Published June 11, 2021

Reviews

[Neal Spadafora · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rather than just broadening the scope of philosophy of religion and aiming to include within the discipline previously colonized and marginalized voices that subsequently expand or develop the canon, this collection uses the frameworks of coloniality, black studies, and critical theory to undergo a wholesale reexamination of philosophy of religion. Engaging with a host of thinkers not commonly cited in collections on philosophy of religion—Franz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, C.L.R. James—these essays use and betray philosophy of religion as a method and as discipline. For the authors, this means refashioning concepts in philosophy of religion, such as theodicy and phenomenology, to better understand modernity and its unequal distributions.

This collection highlights how problems within philosophy of religion have long since been ignorantly unaddressed or joyfully repeated. Two junior scholars bring together significant contemporary philosophers of religion to use the many discourses on coloniality, capitalism, patriarchy, and modernity to unground and, perhaps, reground philosophy of religion as a discipline. In other words, this collection illustrates how the discipline should not progress with its ad nauseum talk of subjectivity, givenness, and being without understanding how such talk has signified a Christian universal that excludes in its inclusion.