Please join the Fordham University Theology Department for a book talk and conversation with Dr. An Yountae, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at California State University Northridge. In his new book, The Coloniality of the Secular: Race, Religion, and the Poetics of World Making (Duke University Press), Dr. An reconceptualizes religion to further clarify its relationship to decolonial thought. To do this, An begins by interrogating the categories of the secular and the religious and how they are leveraged to conceive of and maintain epistemic and racial domination in colonial modernity. The category of the secular and secularism, An contends, are “political theological” phenomena that have lasting implications for how race, religion, and coloniality impact human persons and their world-making processes. Drawing on the insights from Latin American Liberation Theology and the poetics and theory of Caribbean thinkers, particularly Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, and Édouard Glissant, An contends that decolonial thought and praxis are activities that provide alternatives to a political theology that enshrines the secular and its substantive link to anti-blackness and the coloniality of power, being, and knowledge. Join us for a night of engagement with this timely and challenging contribution to decolonial thought and the study of religion. Refreshments will be provided.  You can RSVP below. 

This event is generously sponsored by the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, the Center on Religion and Culture, the Comparative Literature Department, and the Racial Justice and Equity Committee of the Theology Department.