Secularism As Misdirection

Nivedita Menon examines how the discourse of secularism directs attention to women and religion, making them intensely visible while leaving related issues in the shadows. She shows that secularism is often invoked in the service of capital and anti-minority politics, and argues that it works as a strategy of governance that fits equally well with democracy or authoritarianism, and with capitalism or socialism.

Menon also argues that secularism delegitimizes the nonindividuated, nonrational self. Pursuing that point, she follows the course of psychoanalysis in the Global South. She then looks at how religion, caste, the state and women are interconnected, including the ways Hindu supremacist politics in India can draw on the language of secularism.

The book brings Latin American decolonial theorists into conversation with Asian and African thinkers to consider how selfhood, constitutionalism, citizenship and anticapitalist ways of living are being reimagined worldwide in the twenty-first century. From this feminist and global standpoint, Menon suggests that transformative politics is better imagined outside the frame secularism provides, by focusing on substantive values such as democracy, social justice and ecological justice.