Religion and the Fabrication of Race
| Author | Mustapha Kamal Pasha |
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829817709083 |
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Conference Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829817709083
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2017, Vol. 45(3) 312 –334
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829817709083
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1. Jorge Cañizares-Esquerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). For an earlier formulation on the nexus between
spiritual and worldly conquest, see Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question
of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984).
Religion and the Fabrication
of Race
Mustapha Kamal Pasha
Aberystwyth University, UK
Abstract
This article questions recent critiques of Eurocentrism for silencing religion in favour of either
culture or race. Quite ironically, these critiques draw from a Eurocentric spatio-temporal horizon
embedded in Enlightenment thinking. A crucial element of that horizon is a tacit acceptance of
secularity as the ontological condition of differentiation, reflected in wholescale acknowledgement
of the ascendancy of Scientific Racism and the displacement of religiosity. International practice
increasingly manifests the confluence of religion and race and the difficulty of separating the two
in explaining processes of differentiation and exclusion. Without adequate recognition of religion
in critiques of Eurocentrism and sufficient appreciation of race in postsecular theorisation, the
two frames of capture are likely to remain apart. In the first instance, critiques of Eurocentrism
in IR cannot pretend to fully disown Enlightenment’s spatio-temporal horizon whilst wedded
to its secular commitments. In the second instance, postsecular thinking risks reproducing its
own version of Eurocentrism without recognising race as a crucial marker of differentiation,
not reducible to religious difference. A dialogical encounter and convergence between the two
registers of critique can provide new openings for understanding.
Keywords
race, religion, Eurocentrism
Introduction
In his brilliant account of the role of Puritanism in the colonisation of the Americas,
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra skillfully discerns the confluence of territorial and spiritual
conquest.1 Puritan Conquistadors offers a breathtaking portrait of how religious impulses
Corresponding author:
Mustapha Kamal Pasha, Aberystwyth University, Penglais, Ceredigion, Aberystwyth SY23 3FE, UK.
Email: mkp4@aber.ac.uk
709083MIL0010.1177/0305829817709083MillenniumPasha
research-article2017
Conference Article
Pasha 313
2. Serge Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and
Globalization, trans. Deke Dusinberre (New York and London: Taylor and Francis, 2002),
57. Gruzinski’s exploration of the instability of cultural encounters is a remarkable intel-
lectual achievement. His juxtaposition of contemporary cinema with colonial Mexican art
is outstanding. For a more recent study of the relationship between religion and race in the
articulation of difference across the 17th-century and early 18th-century puritan communi-
ties, see Heather Miyano Kopelson, Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the
Puritan Atlantic (New York: New York University Press, 2014).
3. Howard Winant, ‘Race and Race Theory’, Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 172;
169–85.
4. Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World,
1600–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 25. Kidd relies on the
pervasive presence of race in the allegorical imagery of the scripture in his analysis.
However, with the advent of Enlightenment rationality, religion and science forged an
alliance in making intelligible ‘the troubling intellectual consequences which flowed
from the discovery of the New World’ (Ibid., 61). The crucial effect of this alliance was
the consolidation of the notion of difference marked by a superior Aryan race over ‘infe-
rior’ native races. Also germane to the discussion is Craig R. Prentiss, ed., Religion and
the Creation of Race and Ethnicity: An Introduction (New York and London: New York
University Press, 2003).
5. ‘The relationship between the conquest of souls, conquest of bodies, and colonization of
land’, as one reviewer correctly notes, ‘exceeds IR debates’. This important point is a key
element in the discussion that follows regarding how this relationship has been interrogated,
but especially silenced, in extant critiques of Eurocentrism in IR.
and the colonising drive reinforce each other, shaping local, national, and transnational
cultural zones. The question of difference, for Cañizares-Esguerra, involves the making
of a cultural or racial Other as religiously-produced alterity, to be apprehended, man-
aged, or eliminated within a determinate theological context pitying the saved and the
damned, the true adherents of the Redeemer against Satan’s steadfast disciples. On
Cañizares-Esguerra’s vivid reading of colonial history it becomes apparent that it is reli-
gion that ultimately gives meaning to the fabrication of difference and differentiation in
the colonial project. ‘The conquest of souls’, as Gruzinski also records in the context of
16th-century colonial Mexico, ‘was accompanied by a conquest of bodies designed to
subject family, marriage, and intimate practices to the universal norms of the Church’.2
Religion and conquest were not only aligned in unholy harmony, but also unthinkable as
separate domains requiring different logics.
Similarly, as Winant emphatically puts it: ‘Yes, the Crusades and the Inquisition and
the Mediterranean slave trade were important rehearsals for modern systems of racial
differentiation’.3 With deep historical roots shaping the union of religion and colonial
subjugation, ‘between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries intellectuals con-
fronted race primarily as a theological problem’.4
This article takes Puritan Conquistadors as a point of departure to question recent
critiques of Eurocentrism in International Relations (IR) for silencing religion in favour of
either culture or race.5 Religion is not entirely absent as a marker of Eurocentric differen-
tiation of the Other in these critiques, but these speak primarily to the pre-Enlightenment
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