Metamodernism and the Study of Religion

Starting in the late 1980s, discussions of “postmodernism” and “postmodernity” were often seen as crucial to the study of religion. Aside from the manifold explicitly “postmodern” theological projects of philosophers of religion and theologians such as John D. Caputo, works like Ernest Gellner's Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (Routledge, 1992) and David Lyon's Jesus in Disneyland: Religion in Postmodern Times (Polity Press, 2000) traced and examined contemporary religious trends in terms of “postmodern” cultural shifts. Others, such as Carl Olson's The Allure of Decadent Thinking: Religious Studies and The Challenge of Postmodernism (Oxford, 2013) and Carl Raschke's Postmodernism and the Revolution in Religious Theory: Toward a Semiotics of the Event (University of Virginia Press, 2012), attempted to assess the theoretical and methodological impact that “postmodernism” as a scholarly model was having on the discipline. Part of what made postmodernism appealing to scholars of religion was a common sense of rupture from “modernity” and its putative commitment to various aesthetic projects, often yoked to a triumphalist and Eurocentric account of the advancement of knowledge. The theoretical canon of postmodernism (formulated in a bricolage fashion from various conflicting French and German theorists) also provided a cross-disciplinary set of theories about the nature of knowledge, ethics, and language, even as these were regularly deployed in a skeptical manner. For many scholars of the 1980s and 1990s, deconstruction was king. But, notwithstanding the occasional jeremiad, characterizations of the present in terms of postmodernism are currently on the wane. There are very few, if any, self-avowed postmodernists anymore. “French theory” is no longer at the height of its popularity and citations of most of the postmodern theoretical canon (which would include names like Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard) are on the decline. Postmodern novelists and artists like Alain Robbe-Grillet and Damien Hirst are now similarly passé. It would seem that the world has moved on from the cultural forms that gave the conversation life in the 1980s and 1990s and that many contemporary scholars feel the need to transcend inherited theoretical models. The last couple of decades has seen the bubbling up of alternatives, of which, one of the most compelling and promising is, as we hope to show here, metamodernism. This special issue of Religious Studies Review is the product of a collaboration between two scholars, Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, author of Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (Chicago, 2021), and Brian Collins, the editor of the journal's Method and Theory and Comparative Studies book notes sections. Collins was inspired to enlist Storm's help after virtually attending the Comparative Studies in Religion Unit's “Metamodernism: Emerging Theorizations for Studying Culture and Religion Beyond Postmodernism” session at the AAR's 2021 Annual Meeting in San Antonio, which included two contributors to this issue—Storm and Linda C. Ceriello. As this panel illustrated, there are several metamodernisms in circulation; accordingly, the editors thought it would be useful, to begin with an introduction to the concept and its history. The “meta” prefix was in certain respects merely the Greek rendering of postmodernism's “post” prefix, and when the term “metamodernism” first appeared in the 1970s it was only as one of postmodernism's various near-synonyms (see Zavarzadeh 1975). Then, in a pair of 1999 publications, the Nigerian art historian Moyo Okediji (interviewed by Storm in this issue's first themed essay) began referring to diasporic “metamodern” artists who “willfully transcend, fracture, subvert, circumvent, interrogate and disrupt, hijack, and appropriate modernity and postmodernity at nearly every available opportunity” and to characterize this metamodernism as an “extension of and challenge to modernism and post-modernism” (Okediji 1999). In the decades since then, metamodernism and related terms have come to be used in two overlapping but sometimes contradictory ways: Broadly speaking, it is used either to refer to our present historical periodization or to name some artistic, political, and/or intellectual project. In 2010, Robin van den Akker, Timotheus Vermeulen, and Alison Gibbons began using metamodernism to describe “a range of aesthetic and cultural predilections and as a notion to periodize these preferences” (28). This account of the concept, as found in their seminal volume Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect and Depth after Postmodernism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) has begun to serve a significant function in some religious studies circles as a way to characterize and periodize those cultural forms that seem not to fit into either modern or postmodern modes. The second essay connected to this issue's theme is Linda Ceriello's long review of this work. Starting in 2011, the British artist Luke Turner authored a “Metamodernist Manifesto” for the arts. Subsequently, a pair of Danish political activists writing under the pseudonym “Hanzi Freinacht” began promoting a metamodern politics. These disparate figures from very different domains were calling for metamodern shifts as an attempt to break free from modernist and postmodernist modes. In addition, viewing metamodernism as a project rather than a periodization and inspired by Okediji's original work, in 2021, Storm published his Metamodernism. Storm's intervention is not so much describing a paradigm shift as attempting to produce one and in so doing, to provide religious studies with a set of novel theoretical positions and methodological approaches. The remainder of the themed content in this issue consists of five responses to Storm's book by Collins, Jessica Zu, Sohaib Khan, Wouter Hanegraaf, and Kevin Schilbrack, followed by Storm's response to those responses

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Modernity · Postmodernism · Postmodernity · Skepticism · Sociology · Biblical Studies and Interpretation · Diverse Philosophical and Cultural Studies · Philosophy · Religious studies · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

• Postmodernism, Reason and Religion

  Ernest Gellner•Postmodernism, Reason and Religion•2013

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• Notes on metamodernism

  Open Access•Timotheus Vermeulen, Robin Van Den Akker•Journal of AESTHETICS & CULTURE•2010

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