Can the Subaltern Feel? Socialist Secularism, “Colonial Nostalgia,” and A Double-Decolonial Reading of Cogency Theory

This article offers a postcolonial reading of Donovan Schaefer’s Wild Experiment to investigate the felt dimension of another form of secularism: state-socialist secularism rather than scientific secularism. This postcolonial reading of cogency theory examines the seemingly unreasonable colonial nostalgia in a “postcolonial” society under state socialism and reveals how such “unreasonable feelings” can be understood as a double-decolonial epistemology that challenges how an atheist socialist regime defines postcolonialism in demanding “postcolonial” loyalty, filiality, and gratitude to the nation-state. The postcolonial reading of cogency theory highlights the affective dimension of socialist secularism, builds new dialogues on (secular) affective governance, and decolonizes the manipulation of postcolonial affects within contemporary inter-imperialisms, providing a postcolonial dimension for discussing different secularisms and atheisms and their passionate dispositions.