Manav Ratti's The Postsecular Imagination in the context of African literatures

Abstract

ABSTRACT Manav Ratti's The Postsecular Imagination (2013) situates secularism and religious discourse within national and colonial contexts. His literary critical approach, which brings postcolonial critiques of nationalism to bear on the literary registration of secularism, has informed my own work in sub-Saharan African fiction. I focus on Ratti's postcolonial analysis of the secular; his conceptualization of the postsecular as an imaginative and recuperative humanist ethic that foregrounds ‘powerful modes of living together in spite of the divides of religion and nation’ (Ratti 2013, xviii); and finally how the Nigerian writer, Okey Ndibe, engages with the secular, religion, and the nation as flawed, incomplete projects.