Postsecular Ecology and the Global City in Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flames
摘要
The sacred and the city are pervasive themes in Chris Abani’s work, particularly in The Virgin of Flames (2007). The novel presents East Los Angeles as an entanglement of diasporic religions, international migrants, urban underdevelopment, and secular ideologies, which, I argue, constitute the postsecular ecologies of the global city. The global city brings peoples and cultures into asymmetrical contact, yet what has been largely overlooked in literary criticism are the ways in which varied religious traditions interact with each other as well as secular spaces, ideologies, and bureaucracies. This chapter, therefore, demonstrates the importance of bringing postsecular ecologies, the interactions of religious and secular spheres, into conceptions of the global city. As Chris Baker and Justin Beaumont suggest (2011), the late capitalist city is best understood as a “theoretical and epistemological nexus of the political economy of neoliberalism and religion.”). The point is not to present postsecularism as a new normative ideal or as an iteration of multiculturalism; rather, this chapter brings debates in Human Geography to bear on postcolonial urban fictions, articulating the ways in which authors, such as Chris Abani, depict the city as a node of postcolonial and postsecular entanglement where characters mediate between spiritual and secular experiences.