A Postsecular Poetics of Dislocation: Secularism and Religion in the Indian-American Poetry of Meena Alexander
This article examines the work of Indian-American poet Meena Alexander (1951-2018), one of postcolonial India's foremost poets, and argues that Alexander's combination of religion and secularism in her poetry gestures toward postsecular possibilities and conditions, especially as such postsecularism emerges from the worldly crises and violence of the twenty-first century. The secularisms that inform Alexander's work include state secularism in postcolonial India, and political and philosophical secularism in the west, especially in the US. In addition to these senses of secularism, I explore the secular as worldly, material, and historical, all three of which include the embodiments of gender, race, migration, and dislocation, especially as Alexander describes them in her collection of essays Poetics of Dislocation (2009). How can postcolonial poetry gesture toward, explore, and search for—in highly personal, experimental ways—some sense of affirmative values in the wake of the dissatisfactions and disenchantments of philosophical secularism, while retaining the inclusive, democratic aspirations of political secularism (as non-establishment of religion in the state)? What values and aesthetic forms—however precarious, fragile, and tentative—emerge for the postcolonial, transnational, dislocated poet, values that cannot return to the ideologies of religions that have so fueled violence?
