Is the “Post” in “Postsecular” the “Post” in “Postcolonial”?
If it is one of the givens of postcolonial criticism that it uneasily shares radically different historical trajectories, it is another that whichever trajectory is privileged is likely to tell us as much about the practitioner as the practice, and as much again about the method of study as the object of study itself. One way of charting this history is to look at the shifting relations between the various "post" terms that—in what remains probably the most popular of its own institutional trajectories—have helped shape postcolonial studies as an academic subdiscipline over the last twenty-odd years. Thus, for many, postcolonial criticism will always be a child of poststructuralism and a close if distinctly quarrelsome relative to postmodernism, even though there is no shortage of evidence to the contrary and plenty more that this mediated battle of the "posts," never too likely to be attentive to the complexities of intellectual history, has only been ideologically effective insofar as it has been strategically misunderstood. More recently, however, a new "post" term, "postsecularism," has entered into the fray, encompassing a reawakened interest in the role of religion in world society and politics, some of the latest ethical developments in continental philosophy, and a recognition— inexorably shaped by the events and aftermath of 9/11—of the increasing politicization of religious attitudes, values, and beliefs in an unevenly developed late-capitalist world. Three important monographs, each published in 2009, signal what some claim to be a "post-secular turn" in postcolonial theory and criticism (Mandair,