Editorial Introduction: Religion and Postcoloniality (original) (raw)
Related papers
Postcolonial Philosophy of Religion
Postcolonial Philosophy of Religion, 2009
The present collection of writings on postcolonial philosophy of religion takes its origins from a Philosophy of Religion session during the 1996 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion held in New Orleans. Three presentations, by Purushottama Bilimoria, Andrew B. Irvine, and Bhibuti Yadav, were to be offered at the session, with Thomas Dean presiding and Kenneth Surin responding. (Yadav, unfortunately could not be present because of illness.) This was the first AAR session ever to examine issues in the study of religion under the rubric of the postcolonial turn in academia. Interest at the session was intense. For instance, Richard King, then at work on the manuscript of the landmark Orientalism and Religion, was present; so, too, was Paul J. Griffiths, whose subsequent work on interreligious engagement has been so noteworthy. In response to numerous audience appeals, revised versions of the presentations eventually were published, as a "Dedicated Symposium on 'Subalternity'," in volume 39 no. 1 (2000) of Sophia, the international journal for philosophy of religion, metaphysical theology and ethics. Since that time, the importance of the nexus of religion and the postcolonial has become increasingly patent not only to philosophers of religion but to students of religion across the range of disciplines and methodologies. The increased internationalization of the program of the American Academy of Religion, especially in more recent years, is a significant outgrowth of this transformation in consciousness among students of religion. Several other of the contributions to this volume grow out of work presented at the AAR in the past decade, including those of
'Displacements: Religion, Gender, and the Catachrestic Demands of Postcoloniality'
Journal of Religion and Gender, 2013
"In this paper I examine the uneasy intersection between ‘religion’, ‘gender’ and ‘postcoloniality’ as it is staged in the field of religion and gender. Noting the lack of sustained attention in the field to those postcolonial challenges that might question the prioritization of gender as the site from which critique should be originated, and suggesting that this neglect might compromise the assumption that, because of its alignment with the politics of the marginal, it is comparatively less implicated in colonial knowledge formations, I argue that scholars of religion and gender risk perpetuating imperialist figurations found elsewhere in the study of religions. I propose the figure of the catachresis, as theorized by Gayatri Spivak, as a step towards displacing those European concept-metaphors and value-codings that both derive from imperialist ideologies and sustain the fiction operational within much religion and gender scholarship of a generalizable or normative epistemic subjectivity. I suggest these ideologies ultimately prevent an encounter with the non-western women and men who exist beyond this mode of production and whose priorities may be configured entirely differently to those that seem currently to determine the intellectual itineraries of the field. Keywords: postcoloniality, religion and gender, catachresis, displacement, value-coding. "
The case for Postcolonial Theology
2021
This draft paper provides an introduction to postcolonial theology and makes the case for postcolonial theology as a genuinely global theology. It challenges the centrality and dominance of the traditional systematic theology of the West which it argues should be set in its cultural context. This is a draft paper for an article published in Modern Believing 62:4 (Autumn 2021) 327-348
Mapping Postcolonial Theory: Appropriations in Contemporary Theology
Hapág: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Theological …, 2008
Appeals to the past are among the commonest strategies in interpretations of the present. What animates such appeals is not only disagreement about what happened in the past and what the past was, but uncertainty about whether the past really is past, over and concluded, or whether it continues, albeit in different forms, perhaps.
This paper examines one aspect of post-colonial criticism-the relationship between culture and its representation-and considers the relevance of this for understanding children's spirituality in contemporary, global context. The paper provides particular focus on the now widely held premise in post-colonial criticism that domination within political and social systems is dependent upon the control and manipulation of cultural representation, with particular focus on the cultural representation of religion in British education. The crucial idea here is that such domination (including the disempowerment and subjugation of minorities) is dependent upon the creation of a culturally imagined 'other'. It is argued that this alienating socio-political and economic dimension of spirituality-and essentially colonial notion of 'otherness'-has largely been ignored in discussions of contemporary spirituality. The paper thus introduces into current debate the language of post-colonial criticism in order to demonstrate the inherent, if underplayed, politicization of spirituality. It concludes with a call to reexamine the representation of culture within a global, post-colonial framework through the characterization of a 'spirituality of dissent'.