Utilizing postcolonial Affect Studies and indigenous religious traditions, Asha Sen argues that emotional affect moves the liberal humanist reader beyond mere character identification, to an active reconceptualization of the ways in which we think about agency, indigenous religions, and social justice.

The rise of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism in the United States have made the role of religion in public life too dangerous to ignore. Through a combination of postsecuralism, religion, and affect, this book examines the work of marginalized writers who reconsider religious tradition in order to reclaim agency and express bodily affect, emphasizing the pacifist possibilities embedded in secular/religious collaboration. Sen attests that while first and second generation postcolonial women writers, like their male counterparts, were influenced by secular modernity and often referenced religion as the perpetrator of gendered violence against women and children, third generation writers are actively revisiting and reclaiming indigenous religious traditions as a way of manifesting bodily autonomy. By focusing on the reconfiguration of indigenous traditions by women and LGBTQIA+ authors, Sen argues that these authors are representative of a wider trend in postcolonial literature: marginalized writers claiming religious traditions as means of self-identification and as a way to insert themselves into their country's (trans)national histories.