This essay examines the relationship between contemporary racialized subjects in Germany and the process of Holocaust memorialization. I ask why youths from these contexts fail to see themselves in the process of Holocaust memorialization, and why that process fails to see them in it. My argument is not about equivalences, but instead I examine the ways in which the monumentalization of Holocaust memory has inadvertently worked to exclude both relevant subjects and potential participants from the process of memorialization. That process as a monumental enterprise has also worked to sever connections between racialist memory and contemporary racism. The monumental display of what presents itself, at times, as moral superiority does not adequately attend to the everyday, mundane, repeatable qualities of racialized exclusion today, or in the past.

Religious authority and its relation to the mundane, and especially to the domains of politics and the state, is a perennial issue of sociological and theological concern. Within the Islamic world, my focus here, this issue takes particular form, inflected through the powerful trope of the shari‘ah (Arabic, sharī‘ah), most commonly glossed in English as “Islamic law,” although God's right “way” through life potentially addresses every aspect of human life. This comprehensiveness, conjoined with the “openness” that the shari‘ah's nominally divine and hence, in the final analysis, inscrutable source entails, has consequences for the ways in which one might imagine a state that grounded its legitimacy in following that right path. Brinkley Messick's (1993) monograph The Calligraphic State has provided a now classic exploration of such a polity in North Yemen, and its transformations under modernization. His analysis of these processes turns on a central image: the shift from a “calligraphic,” that is, personalized form of “textual domination,” drawing its authority from the endlessly open and interpretable field of “shari‘ah discourse” (1993: 1–3), to the rationalized, impersonal authority of modern legal texts, fixed and monopolized by state officials and symbolized, following the master metaphor, by uniform, rigid print.

Whether observed in French laïcité, Kemalist Turkey, Kantian political theory, Western Christian theology, or North Indian classical music, the presence of modern secularity has been demonstrably complex (Asad 2003; Bakhle 2008; Blumenberg 1985; Connolly 1999; Navaro-Yashin 2002). My purpose in this essay is to further examine the intricacies of the modern secular, specifically its relation with what it deems “religious.” My focus will be Edward Said, whose paradigmatic engagement in secular, critical, and comparative inquiry makes his work an ideal place to investigate the modern apparition of the secular. It is widely acknowledged that Orientalism (1979) led to a profound transformation of entire fields of inquiry in the humanities and social sciences, and even the creation of new ones. Said's work as a practice of criticism has been instrumental in addressing the affinities between forms of knowledge and domination, especially in their colonial variety. However, studies of his writings have only recently begun to address the topic of modern secularism in his work, which will be at the center of this paper (e.g., Mufti 2004; Hart 2000; Anidjar 2006; Apter 2004; Robbins 1994; Gourgouris 2004).

The image appeared on the cover of a Sunday bulletin, produced and distributed by one of Guatemala City's most conservative neo-Pentecostal mega-churches. The picture presented the face of a young teenage girl, her eyes closed, lips wet, and skin kissed by a soft, transcendent light; the young woman's head was even tilted to the side in what Jacques Lacan would call jouissance (1998). Across her pink lips read Psalm 4:6: “In peace, I lay myself down.” This image, stitched together by the church's media relations department, makes a sly reference to Gian Lorenzo Bernini's sculpture, St. Teresa in Ecstasy (1652). The statue in Rome presents one of Teresa of Ávila's (1515–1582) mystical experiences of God, which the sixteenth-century Spanish saint narrates with unblinkingly erotic imagery. In her autobiography, St. Teresa writes how “the great love of God” often left her “utterly consumed,” “penetrated to [her] entrails,” and made her “utter several moans” for both the “intense pain” and its “sweetness” (Peers 1927: 197). With St. Teresa in mind, my own reaction to the church bulletin parroted Jacques Lacan's response to Bernini's statue. “She's coming,” Lacan commented, “There's no doubt about it” (1998: 76).

After more than three hundred years of colonial rule, Filipinos began a revolution against the Spanish empire in August of 1896. By June of 1898, revolutionary forces had managed to overwhelm the Spaniards who were already reeling from the destruction of their navy in the initial days of their war with the United States and had been fatally weakened by the decade-long revolution in Cuba. In the Philippines, a Revolutionary government was formed under the dictatorship of Emilio Aguinaldo. It declared independence, convened a convention to write a constitution and briefly succeeded in forming a Republic led by the wealthiest men of the archipelago by January of 1899. But by February, Filipinos were engulfed in a new war against an emergent U.S. empire that was to last through much of the first decade of the twentieth century, leading to U.S. colonization of the Philippines until 1941.

In November of 1934, Algerian Governor General Jules Carde asked the Algiers Police Prefecture to investigate a rumor circulating through the French bureaucracy that “natives” in the Arab cafés (café maures) of the city were tuning in to biweekly Arabic broadcasts transmitted by an unspecified Italian radio station that featured “commentaries unfavorable to France” and “openly attacked France's Muslim policy.” As the governor of three overseas French départements, Carde had already received notification that the airwaves over North Africa were becoming dangerous. A few months earlier, Jean Berthoin, the director of national security, or Sûreté, in France's Interior Ministry, warned regional prefects, “In a number of cities a large portion of the radio-electric industry—sales and the construction of devices—is in the hands of foreigners.” Berthoin feared that the dominance of France's radio-electric market by large, multinational firms would allow enemy agents to mask radio transmitters beneath the cover of radio sales and report clandestinely on troop maneuvers and defense preparations. He therefore instructed prefects to begin “discreet investigations” into the civil status, political affiliation, and nationality of radio merchants and their personnel. While ostensibly directed at metropolitan prefects, these Sûreté directives resonated in Algeria—a strategic periphery of “Greater France” and home to a sizeable European population of German and Italian descent and to multiple garrisons of France's indigenous-based African Army (Armée d'Afrique). By 1935, rumors about radio espionage and subversive auditory propaganda circulating through the Algerian colonial bureaucracy compelled Governor Carde to construct a colony-wide surveillance web to monitor radio sales, investigate Algerian listening habits, and assess the effects of radio propaganda on the “native mentality.”

As the French conquered Muslim lands in their nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century quest for empire, they encountered multiple and sometimes mixed judicial systems among the native populations. In many places, legal codes were shaped by either fiqh, meaning Islamic law, one component of which is customary law, or by non-Islamic custom, or some combination of the two. To administer native justice in French colonies and protectorates, officials sorted through this multiplicity in order to standardize procedures, principles, and punishments. The standardization of customary law codes, whether written or oral prior to submission to the makhzan (the central Moroccan government, lit. “storehouse”) under the Protectorate, required that French officials both maintain pre-contact codes and create new institutions to administer and monitor them. Through new judicial bureaucracies, the French transformed indigenous law. Customary law was a “residual category” in the sense that it consisted of what remained after colonial powers ferreted out what they considered morally offensive and politically objectionable. Legal codification involved what Vincent calls “a compromise between those recognized as leading elements in indigenous societies and the colonial administrators who co-opted them.” Yet customary law, “if understood as allowing local people to do their own cultural ‘thing,’ should also be understood to have been a carefully restricted fragment of ‘tradition.’” This tradition when manifest as customary law “implies that there is a different kind of law with which it can be contrasted,” making customary law “the ongoing product of encounters between subordinate local political entities and dominant overarching ones.” In such encounters the distinction made between custom and law has long preoccupied legal historians, as well as anthropologists, colonial administrators, and importantly, lay people. Throughout French African colonies and protectorates, this distinction was key to the French usurpation of social institutions, as was true in British overseas territories as well.

It has become a nearly universal reflex to think about the contemporary Middle East as a region in which secularism is in decline. This is particularly true in countries like Egypt, where the modernist imagination of independence-era socialism seems to have been eclipsed by a grassroots vision of the future as a thoroughly Islamic place, and where the nature of the government's stance with regard to secularism and religion has long been an important question (Winegar 2009; Agrama, this CSSH issue). Since the late 1970s, a decade which saw the Iranian Revolution, the rise of televangelism in the United States, and the beginnings of an extraordinary wave of Protestant conversion in Latin America, it has become popular to produce histories of secularism that will help explain the failure of “the secularization thesis,” the idea that with economic development, the spread of education, and the advancement of Science, religion was a doomed commodity like pounce pots and butter churns. The moral vision of the popular long-running Star Trek mythology, in which humans as a species have given up religion altogether, seems ever more remote the closer its technological vision becomes. Surprisingly durable, religion refuses to wait quietly in the churchyard for people to visit. Instead, it stands on the street corner denouncing bad behavior and calling the world to salvation. But now the street corner is a television broadcasting satellite (or a cassette tape, or a website), and religion's call has succeeded in ways that no Cold War sociologist or political scientist could have imagined.

Efforts to theorize pluralism have often explored the challenges posed by the public visibility of ethnic, linguistic, and sectarian differences to modernist imaginaries of a homogeneous national body. In this essay, I examine a context in which public expressions of communal differences re-inscribe the categories of the nation they were meant to contest. The situation reveals what I call a paradox of pluralism.

In the fifteen years following World War II more was done to combat tuberculosis than at any other time in world history. On every continent, hundreds of millions received the BCG (Bacillus Calmette Guérin) vaccine and millions more benefited from newly discovered antibiotics. TB research and attempts to control the disease knit together disparate populations and places as a network of experts and a matrix of ideas spread out across the globe linking the world through a common vaccine, a battery of antibiotics, and a knowledge network. Medicine became internationalized as organizations like the WHO and UNICEF began to see diseases as global problems and not solely the concern of individual countries.

On 15 August 1902, a battalion of Chinese police officers under the command of Superintendent Zhao Bingjun marched into city center of Tianjin and toward the Yamen Complex, the ceremonial site where the Eight Power Alliance was handing back the city to Governor General Yuan Shikai after two years of occupation following the Boxer Uprising. As they approached the complex, allied officials and commanders, standing with Yuan Shikai and his entourage under a “Friendship Forever” banner, were shocked and dismayed. As one of the preconditions for its resumption of the control of the city, the Qing government had agreed to the allied demand that its troops would not enter the vicinity of Tianjin, and some allied officials had even thought that Yuan would be compelled to beg the allied forces to stay and continue to maintain law and order. Yuan Shikai's sudden show of forces was a slap in their faces and potentially a violation of an international agreement. “What is the meaning of this?” asked an allied representative with raised voice. “Look carefully. These are not troops,” Yuan replied with a smirk, “They are policemen.” Not knowing what to do, allied officials pointed fingers at each other, blaming the stupidity of those who had designed the agreement. “It is not we who are stupid,” one said, “It is Yuan Shikai who is so cunning.”

Ever the trickster, Tagaro appears and multiplies, disappears and reappears, across landscapes past and present in Vanuatu. His ancient adventures, deeds, and follies are deeply inscribed into the northern islands—on Maewo, Ambae, and Pentecost, especially—in rocks, caves, trees, and the shape of hills. In recent decades, Tagaro has journeyed more widely, by way of the conversations and texts of ni-Vanuatu religious scholars and early ethnologists, for the most part within the context of the Melanesian Mission of the Anglican Church. Like all good travelers, he always returns from his journeys transformed, carrying all of the burdens that are implicated in the engagement with otherness that journeying entails. For the Sia Raga of Pentecost Island (Taylor 2008), such fraught Oceanic crossings have split Tagaro into a seemingly contradictory figure. For some he is a benevolent God, for others a maniacal, murderous, axe-wielding foreigner. This radical ambivalence calls to mind Marshall Sahlins' description of those stranger-kings, so prevalent in the histories of neighboring Fiji and beyond, powerful figures who arrive from beyond society and who rule through acting beyond it morally, but in doing so are eventually encompassed by the people, “to the extent that their sovereignty is always problematical and their lives are often at risk” (1981b: 111). It also suggests the Deus absconditus of European Christian historiography: a largely unknown but always potentially dangerous “hidden God” that lies beyond human understanding of the covenant. In this paper I explore the troubled histories of Tagaro for what they tell us of changing local engagements with that ostensibly “Other” stranger, Christianity's God Almighty, and of the dynamics of sacred power within the continuing legacy of colonialism's culture. In doing so it demonstrates the ongoing vitality of indigenous Gods, ancestors, and culture heroes to the people of the Pacific region and beyond, and more especially their importance to understanding and negotiating social, political, and religious relations of power.

Political scientists in early-twentieth-century America who traced the nineteenth-century origins of their field pointed to the British theorist and statesmen, George Cornewall Lewis (1806–1863). His best-known work is An Essay on the Government of Dependencies (1841). Lewis defined the science of politics as comprising three parts: the nature of the relation between a sovereign government and its subjects, the relation between the sovereign governments of independent communities, and “the relation of a dominant and a dependent community; or, in other words, the relation of supremacy and dependence.” Modern writers, however, had not yet taken up the nature of the political relation of supremacy and dependency in any systematic way.

If we step back and consider the words around which critiques and debates have crystallized in recent years, some have been relatively clear, while others have been constantly in need of disambiguation. Even during the most drawn-out of debates over “nationalism” or “revolution,” and despite the arguments over definitions and typologies, we had the sense that we were all talking about the same thing—that is why the debates could move along, adding new perspectives, disputing whether this or that author had placed enough stress on class position, or industrialization, or ideas.

Ethnographers, historians, and linguists have argued for many years about the nature of the relationship between missionaries and their collaborators. Critics of missionary linguistics and education have pointed out that Bible translations were tools forged for the cultural conquest of native people and that missionary impacts on local cultures nearly always destructive and frequently overwhelming (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997; Rafael 1988; Sanneh 1989). Sociolinguistic readings of scripture translation have emphasized the cultural loss inherent in the act of translation and even seemingly benign activities such as dictionary making (Errington 2001; Peterson 1999; Tomlinson 2006). To make this point, Rafael (1988: xvii) notes the semantic links between the various Spanish words for conquest (conquista), conversion (conversión), and translation (traducción). Historians, on the other hand, have generally been more skeptical about the power of mere words to exert hegemonic pressure on colonized people and have emphasized the more tangible power of guns and commerce as agents of empire (Porter 2004). Few would deny the symbolic power of the Bible as a representation of colonial domination, as in the saying attributed to Archbishop Desmond Tutu by Cox (2008: 4): “When the white man arrived, he had the Bible and we had the land; now, we have the Bible and he has the land.”

Until recently, historians tended to think of government, the market, and the nonprofit sector as discrete entities. When they ventured into the voluntary sphere, they almost always focused on individuals and institutions, rather than the mechanics of government or the economy per se. Thus, the 1960s and 1970s saw a windfall of works on social control; scholars in the 1980s examined class relations; and those in the 1990s studied issues of political culture, nation building, and citizenship. With both Marxism and civil society paradigms now in retreat, a new crop of books has begun to reexamine the ties between the sectors in new ways, moving away from traditional “charity to welfare state” models that held that when the state moved in, philanthropy withered. Although written about very different geographical regions and times, each of the three books reviewed here delves into the jumbled “mixed economy” between markets, philanthropy, and the state, and combined, they provide a fresh lens for assessing historical developments.