Colonial subjects turned sacred geography into interior allegory via secularization.

Evidence

Imagination. (In a broader field it is seen as the transformation of Christianity into “secular” ethics, theology into philosophy.) Michel de Certeau and Michel Foucault, among others, have speculated about the relationship between these changes and the turn to capitalism. The dominant Hindu “colonial subject” in India came to terms with his Hinduism with the help of the epistemic trick allowed (often clandestinely) by this shift. At the colonial limit, sacred geography thus became an interior landscape. The problem of irrational faith was interiorized into allegory in the narrowest possible sense. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1968

Categorization

• XREF: Links to Foucault’s account of the secularization of sovereignty and Christianity’s pastoral power, relevant to the reader’s genealogy of strategic essentialism.