RELIGION AS WEAPON: CHRISTIANITY AND COLONIAL DOMINATION IN LITERATURE

Abstract

Christianism, in Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe (2017), Purple Hibiscus, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2017), and The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert (2019), is portrayed as a notorious Soft Power strategy, which facilitates processes of colonial domination and capitalist expansion. Mirroring a historic cultural process of inferiorization of difference (SAID, 2003; FANON, 2008), presented here from the novel Robinson Crusoé [1917], the aforementioned works demonstrate that proselytism, understood as the obligation to convert, morally justifies the civilizing missions and enables the expropriation of original communities, through the production of fissures in their social fabric and cruel epistemic processes that, even in the contemporary world, continue as coloniality (QUIJANO, 2005), determining the modes of intersubjective relationship.