Tim Cresswell writes, “When humans invest meaning in a portion of space and … become attached to it … it becomes a place.” Ascribing sacrality to a locale is a key means of such placemaking. This seminar focuses on Asian literary and cultural forms to understand the various ways Asian authors and other cultural producers have drawn upon notions of sacrality, religiosity, and worship to engage in the production of sacred geographies in the colonial and postcolonial eras. In the colonial era, for instance, they have often inscribed sacrality to (or reaffirmed an earlier notion of sacredness of) spaces under colonial regimes. In so doing, these writers and cultural producers have also negotiated with, and disavowed, the epistemic violence embedded in the introduction of new discourses on “superstition,” “science,” and “technology” through literary and cultural forms such as travel writing, poetry, science fiction, songs, and more. While some have imagined these settings as a sacred, unscathed haven from a reality of colonial extraction and devastation, others have sought to portray these settings in light of new infrastructural possibilities, such as the modern steam engine or contemporary practices of islanding. From the Himalaya to the Taiwan strait, to Manchuria, Okinawa, Jeju-do and elsewhere, these experiences of land, colonino zed and decolonized, transforms the literary and cultural worlds by reimagining the relationship between humans, non-humans, and the universe. In this seminar, we invite papers that draw on colonial and postcolonial Asian literary and cultural texts to illuminate how religious placemaking is shaped by, and in turn, reciprocally shapes, the colonial and postcolonial conditions.