Secularism as Misdirection

In Secularism as Misdirection, Nivedita Menon traces how the discourse of secularism fixes attention to and hyper-visualizes women and religion while obscuring other related issues. Showing how secularism is often invoked to serve capital and antiminority politics, Menon exposes it as a strategy of governance that is compatible with both democracy and authoritarianism, capitalism and socialism. Secularism also delegitimizes the nonindividuated nonrational self, Menon argues, and exploring this aspect, tracks the journey of psychoanalysis in the global South. Menon further examines the interconnectedness of religion, caste, the state, and women, showing how the discourse of secularism can also be mobilized by Hindu supremacist politics in India. Menon puts Latin American decolonial theorists in conversation with Asian and African thinkers to examine twenty-first-century global reimaginings of selfhood, constitutionalism, citizenship, and anticapitalist existence. Through a feminist and global perspective, Menon suggests that transformative politics is better imagined by stepping out of the frame offered by secularism and focusing on substantive values such as democracy, social justice, and ecological justice.

“Nivedita Menon is the leading feminist political science scholar in the Indian subcontinent.”, “This book’s two great strengths are that it places contemporary Indian debates in a comparative perspective with similar debates in the global South while bringing an original perspective on the contentious question of secularism and religion in India, with major implications for debates on caste, women’s property rights, and the rights of tribal communities. Nivedita Menon’s research on prehistory, ancient history, linguistic diversity, law, religious history, and ethnography is truly impressive.”, “This remarkable book brings together a wide range of concerns to show how we would assess them differently if we no longer approached them with assumptions grounded in secularist logic. Nivedita Menon argues that once one recognizes secularism as a mode of governance that operates by hiding important dynamics from public scrutiny, it becomes possible to trace the logic of this in political debates about issues as diverse as caste and the environment. Thought-provoking and a pleasure to read.”

Nivedita Menon is Professor of Comparative Politics and Political Theory at Jawaharlal Nehru University and author of Seeing Like a Feminist and Recovering Subversion: Feminist Politics beyond the Law.