Race, Religion, and Ethics in the Modern/Colonial World

The concept of religion as an anthropological category and the idea of race as an organizing principle of human identification and social organization played a major role in the formation of modern/colonial systems of symbolic representation that acquired global significance with the expansion of Western modernity. The modern concepts of religion and race were mutually constituted and together became two of the most central categories in drawing maps of subjectivity, alterity, and sub‐alterity in the modern world. This makes the critical theory of religion highly relevant for the theory of race, and both of them crucial for ethics. It follows from this, not only that religion and race have been profoundly intertwined in modernity, but also that any ethics that seeks to take seriously the challenges created by modernity/coloniality has to be, at least to some extent, decolonial.