Reading in the absolute night: Re-evaluating secularism in illiberal democracies

ABSTRACT In this article, I engage with Manav Ratti’s book The Postsecular Imagination: Postcolonialism, Religion, and Literature (2013) through three frameworks. First, I consider the book within two historical phases, 1989–2014 and post-2014. I argue that reading Ratti’s book through the latter phase has implications for the problem of enchantment in populism. Second, although postsecularism is the central concept in his book, I draw attention to how Ratti, subtly, provides a capacious and emancipatory conception of secularism itself that is particularly productive for the post-2014 phase we inhabit. Third, I turn to Dalit literature as a site where rationalism is evoked in a way that is not reductive and bureaucratic in the Weberian sense. Might Ambedkar-inspired Dalit texts help us rethink rationality more capaciously?