This session will be an author-meets-critics forum featuring Mohamed Amer Meziane’s States of the Earth: An Ecological and Racial History of Secularization (Verso 2024). Engaging current debates in secular studies and political theology, Meziane theorizes secularism neither as de-Christianization nor the continuation of Christianity. In the face of failed mass conversion of colonial subjects, Meziane demonstrates that imperial powers turned efforts toward secular civilizing missions, pursuing eschatological perfection on Earth through industrialization and fossil fuel extraction. Meziane therefore offers an alternative to the fossil capital narrative of climate emergency, demonstrating fossil capitalism, colonialism, and the violence of the modern state as rooted in “imperiality,” or the ongoing afterlives of imperialism. Respondents Matt Smith, J. Brent Crosson, Nikki Hoskins, and Mary Jane Rubenstein have each theorized religion and extraction in their own work with intriguing points of overlap and distinction. Each of the panelists will offer reflections on States of the Earth, followed by a response from Mohamed Meziane.
Mohamed Meziane’s States of the Earth attends to the materiality of the phenomenon we’ve come to call “secularism.” Far from just a set of beliefs, orientations, or even behaviors, secularism performs literally dirt-y work, unearthing the treasures of Earth in the name of industrial paradise. Material as this work undoubtedly is, Meziane suggests it is framed by a cosmo-theological revolution. Cosmologically, the heavens are “sacrificed” or “dissolved” in favor of an increasingly disemboweled Earth. Theologically, the sovereign is (both numerically and geographically) fragmented and disseminated.
In appreciation of the author’s cosmotheomaterial account of the secular, this response turns to the recent techno-industrial recreation of human efforts in space. How might we understand the increasingly entrepreneurial storming of the “dissolved” heavens? As self-professed saviors design extra-terrestrial colonies built from lunar and asteroidal mines, are we witnessing an extension, transformation, or reversal of the secular-etractive paradigm? What do we make of the abandonment of heaven for Earth as the techno-prophets abandon Earth for the heavens?
In The States of the Earth, Mohamed Amer Meziane contends that “Secularization is not the decline of religion but the birth of a new climatic order” (xiv). Using Sylvia Wynter, I trace how antiblackness is a precursor to processes of secularization as well as that which organizes not a “new climatic order,” but an enduring Christian medieval geographic order that renders black spaces climatic to extract from the earth. Weathering black spaces unveils the “energic” function of black fungibility (Hartman 1997) in which blackness functions as an open state of energy which can be converted from one form to another (Lethabo King 2019). Black energic fungibility subjects black bodies to forms of extraction (Williams 1995) but also reveals possibilities for black life to transform and maneuver beyond “states of the earth.” Attention to the construction of blackness reveals a different story and emphasis on secularization, imperiality, energy extraction, and climate.
Meziane’s magisterial The States of the Earth ends with a somewhat mysterious subterranean provocation. “This work,” the final sentences read, “…calls for another…work that doubles its lines by its subterranean presence, a presence irreducible to that of the fossil states of the earth.” If the Secularocene and the “sacrifice of heaven” “overturn[ed] the earth” through the colonial dissemination of empire, as Meziane insists, then what was exposed when the earth was turned over? While drill bits penetrate the depths of the earth to fuel modernity, no one has traveled to these realms of intense pressure and temperature. If the heavens were “sacrificed” as a realm of divine difference, becoming instead a material realm that mortals could investigate and (eventually) travel to, then the same sacrifice has yet to occur for the realms below the earth. Even as speculation on the heavens continues to bring science close to religion, as Mary-Jane Rubenstein has suggested, speculation on the realms below the earth has received no comparable scientific/religious rituals. -cont-
One indelible mark of this era for fossil states was the confounding “problem” of Islam, which seemed to confound the disciplinary techniques of secularism—that is until the fateful fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1920. For John R. Mott, this combined with the discovery of oil in Persia (with the assistance of U.S. missionaries) and the larger crashing of the industrial West into “the Moslem world” signaled a Muslim downfall and an opportunity for “Protestant Powers” to finally remake the world. Meziane, too, has his finger on the pulse of 19th century Orientalism and the role of fossil fuel in the acceleration of 19th century imperialism. But rather than my Protestant, mainly Anglophone archives, Meziane offers an Arab/North African perspective on the colonial dimensions of the Anthropocene.