ABSTRACT
The chapter lays the theoretical foundation for a postsecular reading of the poetics of the sacred in sub-Saharan African literatures. This is an interdisciplinary literary study and begins with an overview of the anthropological and sociological terms of this discussion – sacred, secular, postsecular – and the current critical thinking on postsecular, postcolonial literature. The chapter argues that the intermediary position of the sacred makes it the ideal conceptual tool for reading the intimate and entangled negotiations between the secular and religious. The discussion demonstrates how the sacred has been unmoored from religious conceptions, and is rather a process of meaning-making that can be found in secular spaces and in literature. The sacred operates in the literary realm, where writing creates a self-sufficient site of meaning and the writer produces a language through which the reader might experience a surplus of meaning. Putting the account of African cultural production in conversation with postsecular and literary scholarship, this chapter concludes that first, African literatures are already engaged in a process of meaning-making and sacralisation; and second, that a reading attuned to these strategies draws out the distinct postcolonial negotiations between ‘secular modernity’ and indigenous religious practice that can be read as postsecular poetics.
