Spirits of Extraction: Heterotopian Futures and the Limits of Religion

For this panel I will draw on my recent book, Spirits of Empire: How Settler Colonialism Made American Religion, to offer cautionary tales about the hazards of “religion” as a frame for building heterotopian futures. I argue that the category of religion (and, by implication, the discipline of religious studies) has historically served to (re)inscribe a series of binaries and distinctions characteristic of colonial modernity—religion/politics, religion/science, religion/superstition, etc.—that continue to enable economies of extraction. As a provocation to the field, I want to further suggest that both the category of religion and its most determined critics have operated within the logics of what I call settler secularism to ridicule, condemn, or render illegible Indigenous and other non-extractive ways of doing and being in the world.