My research is situated at the intersections of the study of religion, race, and empire in the hemispheric Americas, with overlapping interests in decolonial methodologies, gender and sexuality, and the environmental humanities. I pursue this constellation across fields and disciplines as part of a broader inquiry into “the human”—its colonial politics of signification, and the logics, languages, and performances that enable and foreclose otherwise modes of being and relating in the world. I follow the example of Black and anticolonial feminism in ascribing U.S. imperialism/colonialism and antiblackness not merely as events of the past but as structures or milieus that reverberate, contain afterlives, or remain ongoing facts of the present. In this sense, I join a growing scholarly conversation that probes co-constitutive nature of the liberal “human” with the “modern” settler colonial, racial capitalist, antiblack world. This includes in the critical study of religion and secularism, probing how “religion” has emerged as a disciplinary category within the secular logics and projects of racialized modernity.
My dissertation, The Age of Plastic(s): Race, Religion, Ecology and the Biopolitics of Conversion investigates the science of conversion for late 19th and early 20th century Protestant missions who utilized the racialized grammar of “plastic/plasticity” to signify the possibility and prerogative of Protestant Empires to convert the newly “moldable” populations of the world. I trace the entanglements between Anglophone missionary science, the ecological and imperial infrastructures of racial capitalism, and the aggrandizement of Man as signified by the invention of the first non-plastic plastic in 1906 by Leo Baekeland. Moving through three case studies, I articulate the “age of plastic” as a biopolitical grammar that appeared in a number of colonial geographies where Christian empire sought not merely to “exclude” racialized populations but to disintegrate, mold and re-shape. Intervening in the science of race and religion, I show how racial manipulability discourses operated on the level of a Christian biopolitics of life that was directly imbricated in environmental infrastructures of imperialism.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the urgency of the age was of heightened concern for Christian Statesman John R. Mott. The historic boom of Foreign Missions by the “Protestant Powers” at the beginning of the 20th century was in large part due to the leadership of Mott, whose ecumenicism helped form a transimperial network of white Protestant missionary organizations, perhaps best highlighted by the Edinburgh Conference in 1910. As Mott declared in his reflection on Edinburgh, “the non-Christian nations are just now in a plastic state… will they set in Christian or non-Christian molds?”
The rhetoric of plastic used by Mott reflected a broader explosion in the language of plastic in the human and non-human sciences. It was also the same years Leo Baekeland introduced the first ever synthetic thermosetting polymer, bakelite, a non-plastic plastic, whose promoters aggrandized human ability to take the earth’s hidden resources and shape them into the desires of industrialists. Even before bakelite, the plastics industry emerged amidst the extractive economies and increasing human dislocation of Anglophone settler colonialism and industrialization. At these same moments of imperial conversion, “plasticity,” was also critical to the science of evolutionary biology and developmental psychology, describing in its most popular uses as a period of time in which an organism was newly birthed, regenerated, or had entered a new environment. Plasticity described the capacity for adaptation, growth, or impressibility, and was often detailed as the condition of childhood. For Protestant missionaries, plasticity was central to its growing planetary vision in the late 19th century: the scale and speed of new global connections, they proffered, was enabling for the first time in history formerly rigid races to enter “a plastic state” toward the immanent possibility of a global Christian futurity.
The dissertation project moves through three cases : 1)Anglophone Protestant missionary discussions of the plasticity of the “Moslem World” at the fall of the Turkish Caliphate in 1924; 2) U.S. Women’s Home Missions archives who proffered the “home” as integral to national and racial development in the “plastic age” of the (birth of the) U.S. nation; and 3) the grammar of Black plasticity used by white and Black Christian reformers in the U.S. and in the Black Christian settler colony of Liberia. Crossing three nodes of Christian imperialism–the racialization of Islam, settler colonialism, and antiblackness (respectively)–I trace the discourse of “plasticity” as a transcolonial grammar that was central to the late 19th/early 20th century biopolitics of Christian missions.
My dissertation joins a scholarly conversation of the past two decades that analyzes the co-constitution of religion and race in the United States empire. In order to think critically about both a historical designation such as “plastic age” or “modernity,” I follow scholars in Critical Ethnic Studies whose work highlights Euro-American accounts of modernity as co-constitutive with anti-Black subjugation, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism. These frames push scholars to study racial distinctions beyond the somatic body to territory, culture, history, environment, and religion. Plasticity is especially relevant for this inquiry as it signifies not corporeal racial form, but form’s indeterminacy—its capacity to change or be converted. By centering “plasticity” within the racial imaginary of Protestant missions, I reveal that religious conversion was more than a spiritual or cultural process, but was also centrally biopolitical. In this sense, religions were understood to have the capacity to regenerate a racial population toward life, or alternatively, to degenerate a racial population toward death. I argue that central toward this biopolitical calculus were imperial infrastructures that were seen to reorganize the environmental impressions of modern races.