Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine

Description

How does a man become a God? It can happen by accident, or by prophesy, or through an article found in an oldmagazine. It can be a means to absolute power, or a radical form of resistance. A newgod can be a conqueror, a young anthropologist, or a government official charged withdoing his job. Making a man into a god is as old as time itself, but even today, in ourdisenchanted age, you might find yourself worshipped against your will. Unorthodox devotions have seen Prince Philip deified on a small island in the SouthPacific, while a National Geographic article elevated Haille Selassie from Emperor toMessiah. Unlikely Gods blossomed in India, where British officers and bureaucratsfound themselves at the centre of new religions. When Spanish explorers landed in theNew World they spoke with the natives and heard the word 'God' on their lips. Thesetransformations have attended on moments of emancipation and rebellion; they haveexcused enslavement and fuelled revolution. Spanning the globe and five centuries, Accidental Gods is a revelatory history of theunwanted divine, which tells the stories of the men and women who have profited andsuffered from these curious apotheoses. In its bravura final part, Subin traces thecolonial desire for deification through to the creation of 'race' and the white powermovement today, and argues that it is time we rid ourselves of the White Gods amongus.

Anna Della Subin is a writer, critic and independent scholar born in New York and now living in Dublin. Her essays have appeared in Harper's, the LRB, New York Times and New Yorker. A senior editor at Bidoun, she studied the history of religion at Harvard Divinity School. Accidental Gods is her first book.

Often colourful and bizarre, Accidental Gods opens new perspectives, shines light on overlooked corners of our global history, and conveys its powerful messages at first quietly, in subtext, and then more and more explicitly... Always enlightening and engrossing -- Lydia Davis, author of Essays One and Two Rich, witty, acerbic and often astonishing, Accidental Gods reveals how terror and divinity are intertwined - in the colonial enterprise, in present-day strong leader cults and nationalist statecraft. A highly original, revelatory study, entertaining and sobering at once as it identifies a persistent danger: the mythopolitics that fails to distinguish between men and gods. -- Dame Marina Warner, author of Stranger Magic and Fellow of All Souls', Oxford Accidental Gods relates, with tremendous intellectual ingenuity and resourcefulness, a new history of the modern world: how the quest for divine sanction and spiritual transcendence remain at the center of our ostensibly rational and secular political and economic struggles. -- Pankaj Mishra Why do some people become gods? This is the question that Subin asks in an impressive study that travels from the Caribbean to the British Raj and back to the New World. This is no summary analysis, but rather a provocative and innovative study of imperialism, race, and decolonisation. -- Ruth Harris A bravura performance... a searching study of the relation between the political and the divine written with great panache. Subin returns us to fundamental questions about human beings, their capacity for tyranny and violence, and their desire for transcendence... A book to relish and to argue with, and a writer to watch. -- Alison Light, author of Mrs Woolf and the Servants The best new non-fiction book I read this year... A stylish, playfully rigorous intellectual performance worthy of Marina Warner or Roberto Calasso -- Mark O'Connell, Books of the year * Irish Times * Anna Della Subin has lit upon a startling strand in the history of the sacred... The book's strength lies in the sensitivity of her analysis, which homes in on the inter-relations of power and powerlessness, colonialism and nationalism: worship as a response to terror, and a desire to propitiate -- Books of the year * TLS * Phenomenal - erudite, provocative, scandalous, and comic and tragic by turns * Sunday Times * A fascinating slice of history * The Times * Accidental Gods is a playful, ironic and ambiguous book about religion, at a time when religion - outside of Dealey Plaza - has grown as solemn as an owl ... [it] leaves us hankering, like QAnon's unlovely faithful, for a wider, wilder pantheon * Telegraph * A fascinating tour through the endless diversity of the divine... * Spectator * Engaging * The Times * A beautifully written, subtly crafted history... [An] inspiring book * TLS * Fascinating... thoughtful and subtle * The Irish Times * A subversive history * Guardian * Remarkable... exceptional... -- James Hamilton-Paterson * Literary Review * [Subin writes] with a poise and lucidity that allow full play to the comic aspects of her subject, while considering the frequently disastrous consequences... -- Rosemary Hill * London Review of Books * Inventive... Subinexpertly brings out the nuance and ambivalence of deification -- Lola Seaton * New Statesman * So eloquently portrayed... With her sense of the uncanny, the ironic, the profane and the weird, Subin is a charming guide... What Subin helps us to see is that at the very core of modernity lies the white god, sweating in his pith helmet -- James Robins * New Humanist *