Postsecular Poetics: Negotiating the Sacred and Secular in Contemporary African Fiction (Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures) - Softcover

Cumpsty, Rebekah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1032316888 ISBN 13: 9781032316888

Publisher: Routledge, 2024

Synopsis

This book is the first full-length study of the postsecular in African literatures. Religion, secularism, and the intricate negotiations between the two, codified in recent criticism as postsecularism, are fundamental conditions of globalized modernity. These concerns have been addressed in social science disciplines, but they have largely been neglected in postcolonial and literary studies. To remedy this oversight, this monograph draws together four areas of study: it brings debates in religious and postsecular studies to bear on African literatures and postcolonial studies. The focus of this interdisciplinary study is to understand how postsecular negotiations manifest in postcolonial African settings and how they are represented and registered in fiction. Through this focus, this book reveals how African and African-diasporic authors radically disrupt the epistemological and ontological modalities of globalized literary production, often characterized as secular, and imagine alternatives which incorporate the sacred into a postsecular world.

About this title

About the Author

Rebekah Cumpsty is Assistant Professor of Anglophone World Literature at Weber State University. Her recent work includes articles for The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Interventions, and the co-edited project"The Body Now"(2020), a special issue of Interventions.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1032316888
• ISBN 13: 9781032316888
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 182