Full Description
In Secularism as Misdirection, Nivedita Menon traces how the discourse of secularism fixes attention to and hypervisualizes women and religion while obscuring other related issues. Showing how secularism is often invoked to serve capital and antiminority politics, Menon exposes it as a strategy of governance that is compatible with both democracy and authoritarianism, capitalism and socialism. Secularism also delegitimizes the nonindividuated nonrational self, Menon argues; exploring this aspect, she tracks the journey of psychoanalysis in the global South. Menon further examines the interconnectedness of religion, caste, the state, and women, showing how the discourse of secularism can also be mobilized by Hindu supremacist politics in India. Menon puts Latin American decolonial theorists in conversation with Asian and African thinkers to examine twenty-first-century global reimaginings of selfhood, constitutionalism, citizenship, and anticapitalist existence. Through a feminist and global perspective, Menon suggests that transformative politics is better imagined by stepping out of the frame offered by secularism and focusing on substantive values such as democracy, social justice, and ecological justice.
Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: Thinking Secularism from the Global South 1
1. State, Religion, and the Bodies of Women 35
2. Hindu Majoritarianism and the Construction of Religion 91
3. The Failed Project of Creating Hindus 126
4. The Self and Psychoanalysis from the Global South 198
5. Capitalism as Secular Science 261
6. Insurgent Constitutionalism and Radical Frames of Citizenship 315
7. Reshaping Worlds-Beyond the Capitalist Horizon 351
Bibliography 389
Index 443
