The introduction to the collection offers a theoretical overview of the relationships among race, nation, and religion as categories of collective identity formation. It argues, in brief, that these categories are always already inextricably linked and cannot be studied in isolation from each other—that they are, in fact, co-constituted categories, wholly dependent on each other for their social existence and symbolic meanings. It then explores some of the implications of this argument for our understanding of racial, national, and religious identities in the Americas and elsewhere. It focuses, above all, on a critique of the presumed secularity of racial and national identities and thus casts doubt on the popular equation of modernity and secularization.
Keywords: race, nation, religion, collective identity, co-constituted categories, secularization, modernity, the Americas,