Edited by Yountae An and Eleanor Craig, Beyond Man: Race, Coloniality, and Philosophy of Religion will be published by Duke University Press in June 2021. In this collection of critical essays, a number of contributors highlight the theorizing of Afro-Caribbean thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter, C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire, “whose work disrupts the normative Western categories of religion and philosophy.”

Mary-Jane Rubenstein (author of Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters) writes: “Beyond Man is an important, unique work. It transforms philosophy of religion by insisting that the field be constitutively informed by religious studies, critical race theories, and decolonial, postcolonial, and Black studies. If our discipline has any future at all, this is it.”

Description: Beyond Man reimagines the meaning and potential of a philosophy of religion that better attends to the inextricable links among religion, racism, and colonialism. An Yountae, Eleanor Craig, and the contributors reckon with the colonial and racial implications of the field’s history by staging a conversation with Black, Indigenous, and decolonial studies. In their introduction, An and Craig point out that European-descended Christianity has historically defined itself by its relation to the other while paradoxically claiming to represent and speak to humanity in its totality. The topics include secularism, the Eucharist’s relation to Blackness, and sixteenth-century Brazilian cannibalism rituals as well as an analysis of how Mircea Eliade’s conception of the sacred underwrites settler colonial projects and imaginaries. Throughout, the contributors also highlight the theorizing of Afro-Caribbean thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter, C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire whose work disrupts the normative Western categories of religion and philosophy.

Contributors: An Yountae, Ellen Armour, J. Kameron Carter, Eleanor Craig, Amy Hollywood, Vincent Lloyd, Filipe Maia, Mayra Rivera, Devin Singh, Joseph R. Winters.

Beyond Man: Race, Coloniality, and Philosophy of Religion, Yountae An and Eleanor Craig (Eds), Duke University Press, June 2021 (312 pages)
ISBN 978-1-4780-1402-7 (pb), 978-1-4780-1188-0 (hc)

For more information, see https://www.dukeupress.edu/beyond-man