Fantasies of Sovereignty: Civic Secularism in Canada

Critical Research on Religion 3 (1):41-56 (2015)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

To ask whether the postcolonial is postsecular demands asking for whom, where, and when? To that end, what follows is a reflection situated in two Canadian contexts, separated by time and place, but both connected to the ‘colonial secular’. Engaged in the public deliberation and storytelling of civic secularism, through which political legitimacy is achieved through comparing religions, these two contexts are twenty-first century Québec and early-twentieth-century British Columbia. More specifically, I consider two moments in which the state exerted its authority in order to reshape bodily practice and stories of place: the debate over the ‘secular charter’ in Québec and the founding of the railway town of Prince Rupert on Tsimshian land. These acts of negotiation and law-making turned to religious forms of legitimation in a way that was at once ambivalent, comparative, and forgetful of the historical founding of the state’s own power. That is, in forming their ‘natural sovereignty’ over others, states often forget that their claims to power are, in part, acts of pretending.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,593

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Is Secularism Neutral?Rex Ahdar - 2013 - Ratio Juris 26 (3):404-429.
Pluralism to-come and the debates on Islam and secularism.Badredine Arfi - 2015 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 41 (7):655-677.
The crisis of secularism in india.Javed Majeed - 2010 - Modern Intellectual History 7 (3):653-666.
“Secularism” From the Last Years of the Ottoman Empire to Early Turkish Republic.Tuncay Saygin - 2008 - Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies 7 (20):26-78.
Hegemonic Sovereignty: Carl Schmitt, Antonio Gramsci and the Constituent Prince.Andreas Kalyvas & Nicole Darat Guerra - 2017 - Las Torres de Lucca: Revista Internacional de Filosofía Política 6 (11):193-248.
Secular Powers: Humility in Modern Political Thought.Julie E. Cooper - 2013 - London: University of Chicago Press.
The Secular and Secularisms.José Casanova - 2009 - Social Research: An International Quarterly 76 (4):1049-1066.

Analytics

Added to PP
2020-11-20

Downloads
2 (#1,634,744)

6 months
1 (#1,040,386)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?