Postcolonial and decolonial paradigms are often seen as purely academic enterprises. But these paradigms in fact address concrete questions about how we can conceive of (and ultimately achieve) liberation from the throes of colonial modernity. Such projects are philosophically demanding: they require a critical self-examination of the ability of our narratives to adequately critique colonial modernity in the first place. One of the ways in which narratives of postcolonialism and decoloniality tend to fall short in this regard is in their failure to sufficiently engage questions of secularity or “the secular.” If postcolonial narratives are to succeed in critiquing colonial modernity and enacting the kinds of liberation they envision, they must interrogate the secular regimes of knowledge that legitimize their own theoretic projects. Such a critique necessitates reclaiming the place of the divine and transcendent in postcolonial and decolonial paradigms.
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