Questioning religio-secular temporalities: mediaeval formations of nation, Europe and race

Abstract

Though the flexibility of race is often acknowledged, race is still very often considered as not, or not primarily, related to religion. Such a notion of race is not only embedded in a distinction between religion and the secular (race as secular, disconnected from religion) but is also tied to a religio/secular temporalization: it excludes mediaeval (supposedly religious) discrimination from the analysis of modern (supposedly secular) race-making. This separation leaves unanswered the question of what role Christian vocabularies and religion have played in European racial formations. In this article, Westerduin aims to think together formations that are separated by the religio/secular: religion and race, and mediaeval and modern race. In doing so, she argues that a focus on ‘modernity’ and a disengagement with ‘pre-modern’ times hides from view intimate connections between Christian theology and supposedly areligious categories such as ‘race’, ‘nation’ and ‘Europe’. In the late Middle Ages, theology was not only fundamental with regard to the minoritization and racialization of non-Christians or non-proper Christians; Christian imageries were also intimately tied to the construction of ‘nation’ and ‘Europe’, thereby inserting religious/racial hierarchies in their very formation.