I can think of no other way to begin discussion of Andrea Jain's Peace Love Yoga than to say that this book is profoundly challenging. Reading as a scholar of religion, I found the author's analysis of the ways contemporary spiritual practices such as yoga are implicated in neoliberal capitalism to be compelling and convincing. Reading as a person who practices yoga and also values engagement with issues of social justice and political change, I found myself concerned about where I and other practitioners might be left at the end of this analysis.
In the book's introduction, the author addresses contemporary spirituality in terms of its relationship with neoliberalism, which assumes “the importance of self-governance and individual responsibility” (4). Jain suggests that spiritual practices have an ambiguous relationship with the neoliberal capitalist context in which they exist. They are commodities produced for profit, and yet “they also serve transformative and liberatory ends and reflect discontents with and subversions of the dominant culture” (6). Central to Jain's discussion is the concept of gestural subversion, with which she interprets neoliberal spiritual texts, such as those emblazoned on yoga clothing (e.g., the peace love yoga of the book's title). These texts speak a message of challenge but do not represent any move toward real social transformation: “Although they gesture toward wanting to resolve the real devastating social and environmental conditions that neoliberal capitalist structures create and perpetuate, they put the burden for resolving those conditions on individual consumers, as opposed to supporting collective dissent and radical policy changes” (8). This is an insightful analysis of how contemporary spirituality functions vis-à-vis neoliberal capitalism.
In the chapters that follow, Jain addresses various examples of this gestural subversion in neoliberal spirituality. These include analysis of commodification and Orientalism in the marketing of spiritual products, sexual violence and heteropatriarchy in global yoga culture, the alignment of a public yoga demonstration with right-wing nationalism in India, and the teaching of yoga in the US prison system.
Throughout this book, Jain critiques neoliberal spirituality while also taking the persons who engage in spiritual practices seriously. She offers a nuanced picture of these persons as having agency in their complex relationship with neoliberal capitalism. She also moves beyond the view, often found in scholarship on spirituality, that sets up a false dichotomy between a supposedly authentic religious tradition and a contemporary spirituality that deviates from it. Given these strengths in its analysis, this book would make a good addition to university libraries and is well worth consideration for upper-division undergraduate or graduate courses in areas such as global religion, colonialism and religion, or contemporary spirituality.
What remains, then, is to explain why I found this book to be so challenging. My comments here are admittedly idiosyncratic, but they reflect a response that might be shared by some other yoga practitioners. I wondered if there is any possibility of meaningfully bringing together a spiritual practice such as yoga with engagement in the struggle for social justice. It is not until the book's concluding remarks that this possibility is given any consideration. There, Jain asks, “Is it possible to combine yoga, mindfulness, or other spiritual disciplines, discourses, or institutions, and their peaceful, loving, liberating gestures, with righteous anger and revolutionary, disruptive political action?” (171). The author acknowledges that she is only asking this question, but also says she hopes her analysis of neoliberal spirituality will be a step in the search for an answer. Andrea Jain's dedication at the beginning of Peace Love Yoga reads, “For my dear friends. Connections are everything” (v). This is perhaps the book's profound challenge, to ask how spiritual practice today might serve to connect one more fully with others, not just gesturally, but in a way that demands radical action for real social change.
