Vaya con Dios: Religion and the Transnational History of the Americas

Abstract

Over the past decade, the transnational turn within US academic history has won recognition from the country's key legitimating professional institutions, from journals of record to first‐tier search committees and major conferences. For historians of Latin America, as for scholars of diaspora and others who have long worked to historicize the nation‐state, this is familiar territory. Their work has always challenged imperial hubris and debunked claims to national autogenesis. World systems theory, dependency theory, the Atlantic World tradition, border studies, the historical record seen from the vantage of the invaded – these insured that simply telling the truth about history was an inherently anti‐imperialist act. What has yet to be thoroughly integrated into this tradition, however, are recent questions raised by scholars of religious developments in the global south or the margins of first‐world nation‐states. As arguably the most successful transnational movement in history, religion commands our attention. Moreover, despite the unease it arouses, the study of transnational religion has much to offer to even self‐consciously anti‐imperialist scholarship. Since the Enlightenment, secular states and rational subjects have proclaimed themselves the rightful tutors of their counterparts mired in magical religion and primitive superstition. Because many anti‐imperialist theories share some of the Enlightenment assumptions animating this particular civilizing mission, they cede key ground to imperialism. Recent scholarship on religion challenges a series of dichotomies at the heart of imperialism and some anti‐imperialisms as well: religion and secularism, faith and reason, tradition and modernity, obedience and free will. These interventions suggest that to win the debate over Empire, transnational history must change its terms.