Sun Worship in the Early Modern English Colonial Imagination

abstract: This article presents a decolonial analysis of the figure of the Indigenous sun worshipper in early modern literature. Drawing on a wide range of ethnographic sources, I show how the sun worshipper emerges as a privileged figure in discussions of Native religious practices. Sun worship was frequently condemned and ridiculed in contemporary discourse, but this analysis of plays such as Shakespeare's The Tempest and Fletcher's The Island Princess offers a more nuanced view. These texts alert us to the violence of colonial encounter and the literary dispossession of Indigenous practitioners of their spiritual connections to the cosmos and the celestial bodies. abstract: This article presents a decolonial analysis of the figure of the Indigenous sun worshipper in early modern literature. Drawing on a wide range of ethnographic sources, I show how the sun worshipper emerges as a privileged figure in discussions of Native religious practices. Sun worship was frequently condemned and ridiculed in contemporary discourse, but this analysis of plays such as Shakespeare's The Tempest and Fletcher's The Island Princess offers a more nuanced view. These texts alert us to the violence of colonial encounter and the literary dispossession of Indigenous practitioners of their spiritual connections to the cosmos and the celestial bodies.