Beyond the secular Anthropocene: Locke’s self-owning body, protestant translations of indigenous world-making, and the settler-colonial plantation economy

ABSTRACT

This paper introduces a post-secular genealogy to the debates on the Anthropocene. Focusing on how colonial-capitalist geosocial relations are dependent upon processes of secularization that mistranslate Sacred Indigenous forms of world-making, this paper examines the reorganization of Christian theological discourses via the progressive temporality of Eurocentric rationality and notions of embodiment this entails. I advance this analysis through the epoch shaping early modernist thought of John Locke, whose labour theory of property shaped settler-colonial and capitalist forms of human-nature relations through his profound reorganization of Protestant theology. In effect, this paper unearths how the current ecological crisis is underpinned by a racialized, secularized, and externalized conception of the environment that is punctuated by ‘progressive’ settler colonial processes of appropriation and capitalist processes of commodification.

KEYWORDS:

• John Locke
• Anthropocene
• Secularism
• colonialism
• Indigenous

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This process of individuation, as mentioned above, does not so much ‘free’ the individual, but rather puts in place new forms of discipline and relations of power through the discursive rearrangement of Protestant Christian theology (Asad, 2003, p. 25).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zahir Kolia

Dr. Zahir Kolia’s research broadly examines how Indigenous and racialized communities have been organized under settler colonial and secular forms of power with particular interest in the theological political.