Religion and Postcolonialism

When eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western scholars turned their gaze toward the East they began fetishizing the wonders and mysteries of the “Orient”. This powerful myth of the Orient helped to reimagine the Jews of Europe as an “internal colony” and also helped justify the colonization of and Christian missionizing among peoples abroad. This course will examine the social, political, and scholarly representations of religious and cultural otherness of Jews, Muslims, and Hindus who experienced Christianity as both a colonizing force as well as a model for imagining the nationalist projects of their post-colonial states.