Abstract
At the close of the nineteenth century, W. E. B. DuBois put the world on notice that “the color line” would be the defining issue of the twentieth century.3 It may not be too early to prophecy that issues of “religion” and “faith” will be critical issues for the twenty-first century. In his proposal for new approaches to studies of the colonial past, David Scott argues that if our task at present is to understand “the conceptual and institutional dimensions of our modernity” then we ought also to bear in mind “a fundamental crisis in the Third World in which the very coherence of the secular-modern project … can no longer be taken for granted”4 How does this affect our view of colonialism? What shape should colonial studies take in order to understand the history of our present? The crisis of secularism provides both the urgency and the conceptual space for studies that push the limits of current postcolonial criticism that has been stopped dead in its tracks at the specter of questions of religion and faith.
If the marginalization of belief in history is constitutively linked to the lack of an adequate vocabulary to deal with its worldliness, I suggest that by recovering this history one may also begin the search for corrective ways of talking and writing about belief in terms other than “fundamentalist,” “premodern,” or “prehistory.”1
Modernity was never itself the object of a nonteleological investigation, a nonteleological criticism. This is what the postcolonial present demands.2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), XVI.
David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcolonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 17.
W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (NewYork: Signet Classic, 1969), 54.
Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 205.
For example Tvetzan Todorov, The Conquest of Arnerica: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper Perennial, 1984);
Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991);
Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Exceptions include: Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000);
Enrique Dussel, “Beyond Eurocentrism: The World-System and the Limits of Modernity,” in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998) (although not interested in postcolonial theory per se, Dussel does address the question of modernity and colonialism);
Patricia Seed, “Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse,” Latin American Research Review, 26:3 (1991): 181–200; “More Colonial and Postcolonial Discourses,” Latin American Research Review 28:3, (1993): 146–52.
Mitchell Dean, Critical and Effective Histories: Foucault’s Methods and Historical Sociology (London: Routledge, 1994), 36.
John Beverly’s assessment of postcolonial and subaltern studies in a Latin American context discusses how the disintegration of the Nicaraguan Revolution affected his own research and reformulated the questions that seemed pertinent for Central American countries: Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). In fact, when postcolonial approaches have been adopted among Latin American historians, it has been most widely in reference to issues pertaining to nineteenth- and twentieth-century development of the nation-state and nationalism, e.g., Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)
and Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
Nicholas Dirks, Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992).
Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity, ed. Peter Van Der Veer (New York: Routledge, 1996), 5, my emphasis.
Max Weber, Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 1992), 119, 120–1.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 20–1.
Asuncion Lavrín, ed., Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989)
and Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau, Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989) each discusses the History of Sexuality as inspirational to a new line of inquiry in Spanish and Spanish American history.
Serge Gruzinski, “Individualization and Acculturation: Confession among the Nahuas of Mexico from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century,” in Sexuality and Marriage, 96–117, at 98. See also his The Conquest of Mexico: The Incorporation of Indian Societies into the Western World, 16th–18th Centuries, trans. Eileen Corrigan (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993).
John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 37, 47.
Michael Maher, Reforming Rome (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1997), 139.
Martin E. Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises: Early Jesuit Manuscript Directories and the Official Directory of 1599 (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1996), 11.
Jonathan Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York: Viking Penguin, 1984), 132–4.
Ignacio Iparraguirre, Historia de la Practica de los Ejercicios de San Ignacio: Vol. III, Evolucion en Europa Durante el Siglo XVII (Roma: Institutum Historicum S.I., 1973).
Joseph de Guibert, The Jesuits: Their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice, A Historical Study (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1986), 154.
The best treatments of this phenomenon are Louis Chatellier, Europe of the Devout: The Catholic Reformation and the Formation of a New Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and Iparraguirre, Historia de la Practica.
Louis Chatellier, The Religion of the Poor: Rural Missions in Europe and the Formation of Modern Catholicism, c. 1500–c. 1800, trans. Brian Pierce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997);
Jennifer Selwyn, “Planting Many Virtues There”: Jesuit Popular Missions in the Viceroyalty of Naples, 1550–1700 (Ph.D. Dissertation: University of California at Davis, 1997).
Jerome V. Jacobsen, S J., Educational Foundations of the Jesuits in Sixteenth-Century New Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1938), 6.
Instruction 11 in The Letters and Instructions of Francis Xavier, ed. and trans. Joseph Costelloe, S.J. (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1992).
Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Sabine Patricia Hyland, Conversion, Custom and “Culture”: Jesuit Racial Policy in Sixteenth-Century Peru (Ph.D. Dissertation: Yale University, 1994), 35–41, 158.
Cited in Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 267.
Andres Perez de Ribas, Historia de los triunfos de nuestra santa fe entre gentes las más bárbaras y fieras del Nuevo Orbe, 1642, ed. and trans. Daniel T. Reff, Maureen Ahern, and Richard K. Danford (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1999), 91.
Charles W. Polzer, Rules and Precepts of the Jesuit Missions of Northwestern New Spain (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1976).
Laura Alarcón, Educación y evangelio en Sinaloa: Siglos XVI–XVII (Sinaloa: COBAES, 1996), 95 (quoting the Annual Letter of 1624).
Peggy K. Liss, “Jesuit Contributions to the Ideology of Spanish Empire in Mexico, Part II,” The Americas, 29.4 (1973), 314–33, at 323.
Phillip Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2003 Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Molina, J.M. (2003). Spirituality and Colonial Governmentality: The Jesuit Spiritual Exercises in Europe and Abroad . In: Ingham, P.C., Warren, M.R. (eds) Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980236_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980236_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-52626-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-4039-8023-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)