UNDERGROUND EMPIRES: ***SOLD***

AN ECOLOGICAL AND RACIAL HISTORY OF SECULARIZATION

Mohamad Amer Meziane

(La Découverte, 352 pages, 2021)

*** RECIPIENT OF THE ALBERTINE TRANSLATION PRIZE 2022***

A key component of Western modernity is the separation between church and state, a process later called secularization and undergone by Europe over the last three centuries as a way of emancipating itself from the yoke of religion. But if modernity has brought upon us the new era of the Anthropocene, and if secularization is a defining feature of modernity’s birth, then philosopher Mohamad Amer Meziane asks: Did secularization engender climate change? And what if the African and Asian territories colonized and exploited by an evangelizing Europe were the first steps in the destruction of the global ecosystem? In this radically interdisciplinary and original first book, Meziane brings to light the subterranean links that unite secularization, colonial domination, and the destruction of nature.

Meziane argues that secularization should be reconceptualized not only as an imperial and racial set of processes but also as an ecological one. It presupposes a critical understanding of what has been called “the secular” as a name given to the transformation of the Earth itself by industrial and colonial powers. Meziane opens a new space in the study of both secularism and the Anthropocene, of religion and climate change, by creating a philosophical bridge between the critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism and Talal Asad’s anthropology of secularism and Islam, and the literature on the Anthropocene influenced by scholars such as Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour.

Underground Empires is not so much a critique of secularism as it is a groundbreaking philosophical history of secularization. It lays the foundation for a promising author whose work is likely to continue opening up new horizons of thought.

Mohamad Amer Meziane is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life and the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University. He also serves as a member of the editorial board of the journal Multitudes.