ABSTRACT
The long history of modern European colonization is widely known. What is not so widely known and acknowledged is that the colonial aftermath led to the process called decolonization, a condition that has been engaged by theologians widely in the past twenty years.1 Decolonization is an uneven process that has brought ambivalent gains to the newly ‘independent’ nation-states of the world. Among the academic responses to decolonization has been the development of a form of critical thinking in the academy called ‘postcolonial theory’, which not only investigates the colonial archive (the literary records reflecting on the experience of colonialism) but also tracks the effects of post-colonialism2 on newly independent nation-states. Postcolonial theory is a sustained reflection on the modern colonial encounter between Europe and the rest of the world. The aim of postcolonial theory is to decolonize Western modes of knowing. That
is, it operates as an ongoing major critical discourse within the Western academic division of the humanities in colleges and universities. One might think that decolonization happened automatically and as a matter of course when various parts of the world emerged from under modern European colonial rule. However, decolonization does not mean the simple uncoupling of colonizer and colonized. In contemporary postcolonial theory, decolonization is a complex and intellectually strenuous activity spurred by varieties of political, cultural, and critical interventions in a number of disciplines. These efforts have encountered various difficulties and resistances, but they have also made important inroads and effected significant changes in how we in the Western world see things. One of the ongoing challenges of postcolonial theory is to communicate these
insights to a wider audience than the academy alone. An inherent feature of this critical discourse, which has given rise to much specialized writing in the academy, is that any attempt to define it remains difficult and elusive. It has no single, organized methodology nor even an originating moment since academic postcolonial theory ranges far beyond the historical legacy of the modern European colonial encounter. For example, as world histories of colonialism show, European colonial projects are
not unique or singular. One can argue that the Rome of Christian antiquity was a colonial power3 as was the colonization of Ireland by England or the colonization of Korea by Japan.4 However, what goes by the name ‘postcolonial theory’ refers to the European colonization of various parts of the world in the past five hundred years and the continuing form it takes in neo-colonial globalization. As a number of postcolonial theorists have indicated, postcolonial theory is also
complicated by its twin methodological convictions – that of Marxism5 on the one hand, and poststructuralism6 and postmodernism7 on the other. Thus, a distinction can be made between the Marxist-based political convictions of postcolonial theory which analyze class issues, and the postmodern and poststructuralist theoretical allegiances that advance a compelling critique of Western forms of knowing, thinking, and doing. The emphasis on Marxism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism also reflects the academic disinterest in religious or theological ideas. In a manner of speaking, therefore, one can say that academic postcolonial theory is largely a ‘secular’8 enterprise. In a similar vein, for postcolonial Christian theology, the question of how to decolo-
nize theological knowledge leads to critical and constructive engagement across a number of methodological and political commitments. For example, some postcolonial theologians engage in a historical critique of postcolonial contexts by way of race, class, gender and sexuality analyses. Others are more concerned with the manner in which certain theological ideas such as freedom, liberation, or religious identity and belonging are constructed in, and gain their intelligibility in relation to, a particular cultural framework that often goes unnoticed. Another approach has been to constructively rethink the grammar of theology. For example, reflecting on the manner in which many Christians presume the cohesiveness of theological terms such as God, Christ, Human Being and Church, postcolonial theologians wonder if the symbols operate in culturally distinct frameworks. Could a Christian theologian who is doing theology in an Arabic-speaking context, for example, use the symbol ‘Allah’ for God?9 Or, when Christians consistently use male pronouns when referring to the transcendent divine, are they naïvely borrowing from culturally specific patterns of gender superiority? Or, when Christian churches around the world are styled in the line of Gothic cathedrals in Europe, which are themselves abstract reflections of European natural beauty, are they simplistically reinscribing European cultural norms of architectural beauty? In postcolonial theology, these three approaches – the materialist, the conceptual
or symbolic, and the grammatical – are certainly not exclusive of each other. Thus, postcolonial theology, in its critical attention paid to traditional symbols, argues that there is a connection to be established between how we think about God, Christ, the Human Being, and the Church and how imperial systems of domination are created and sustained. Theology cannot be seen apart from the cultural, political, and economic systems it presumes or in which it is unavoidably embedded. Consequently, any postcolonial constructive proposal that is advanced is cognizant of and attentive to the complex contemporary context. Finally, most postcolonial theologians will point to the limits of Western ways of knowing when it comes to articulating theological ideas such as freedom, liberation, and religious identity and will advance instead cultural proposals which are largely ignored or unknown in traditional Western theology.
