Genealogies

Chapter 1 further elaborates on the key themes, topics, and questions discussed in the introduction by locating the various decolonial interventions (different sites of enunciation of colonial secularity as well as sites of resistance) in religion that often go underrecognized and underexplored due to their presumably secular orientation. A review of a broad range of literature that extends across the twentieth-century Americas offers a glimpse of the diverse voices that emerge from different locations (North American, South American, Afro-Caribbean) and interrogate different issues (gender, poverty, Indigeneity, Blackness). The brief review of an ever-expanding cartography of struggle reveals the complex topography of power in which religion is inscribed. This cartography also hint at various points of possibility for exploring and further theorizing the nexus of modernity/coloniality/secularity.