Review: _Beyond Man: Race, Coloniality, and Philosophy of Religion_

Beyond Man: Race, Coloniality, and Philosophy of Religion, the recent collection edited by An Yountae and Eleanor Craig, expands the typical archive and methods for scholarship within philosophy of religion. The book’s contributors draw on an array of source materials, ranging from medieval legal discourse to contemporary photographic technology, in order to study coloniality—defined here as “the epistemic dominance of western and European modernity” (3) —within current religious and philosophical studies. In their skillful and cogent introduction, An and Craig explain that they intend for this collection to serve as both an intervention and an experiment for philosophy of religion under the guiding assumption that “it is possible and valuable to apply the categorical designation philosophy of religion to decolonial and anticolonial projects that rearrange the epistemological assumptions of much of the work carried out under that heading” (1). In accordance with this assumption, An, Craig, and the book’s contributors use a decolonial framework to approach critical debates and core concepts in philosophy of religion, such as violence, theodicy, the human and human rights, the sacred, modernity, capitalism, and the Eucharist. Across the collection’s introduction, nine chapters, and concluding essay, the collection shifts the grounds for argument within philosophy of religion by expanding the canon, re-interpreting canonical texts in new ways, and re-historicizing key ideas in the field. This volume expands the canon by treating 20th-century anti-colonial thinkers, particularly the Afro-Caribbean intellectuals Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and C.L.R. James, as philosophers of religion. For example, Mayra Rivera lucidly maps out several epistemes regarding modern “Man” in Wynter’s oeuvre before suggesting that readers can locate a site of “embodied counterpoetics” within the performance practices detailed in the author’s fiction, and J. Kameron Carter provocatively riffs on Aimé Césaire’s simile connecting the Eucharist to excrement to explain how colonialism operates via rituals of sacramentalization. Like Rivera and Carter, Filipe Maia looks to the body as a site for philosophy and action in his chapter theorizing the cannibalistic encounter between a Caeté warrior and a Portuguese Bishop in colonial Brazil. In a different vein, Vincent Lloyd uses autobiography as a tool for critically analyzing the sense of “tragedy” in James’ political and aesthetic thought. More specifically, Lloyd foregrounds James’ late-in-life confession that he had committed sexual assault when sixteen to explicate James’ “puritan” take on middle-class positionality within liberationist politics. By putting decolonial writers in conversation with thinkers like Augustine and Michel Foucault, who are more often encountered in philosophy and religion survey courses, Beyond Man illuminates how epistemological assumptions regarding logic, universality, and order have served to elide philosophy of religion’s normative, Eurocentric parameters. An, for example, contrasts Job’s epiphanic encounter with the sovereign God with Frantz Fanon’s “decolonial epiphany,” and Joseph Winters uses Wynter and Fanon to deconstruct the colonial epistemes present in Mircea Eliade’s concept of the sacred. By examining those often-elided assumptions within philosophy of religion, Beyond Man contends, we can identify the traces of hierarchical, ontological valuations that promoted and legitimized the material and conceptual regimes underlying racist and colonial violence. Because the book often invokes concepts of embodiment and incarnation, prioritizes Afro-diasporic thinkers, and seeks to illuminate and unsettle colonial modernity’s oppressive ontologies of the human, it is in direct conversation with Joseph Drexler-Dreis and Kristien Justaert’s 2019 edited collection Beyond the Doctrine of Man: Decolonial Visions of the Human (Fordham University Press), which was its