Christianity as Anti-Colonial Resistance?

Abstract

Using post-colonial studies, this article considers the ways that Black Christian faith traditions enacted within The Black Church can be seen as a site of anti-colonial resistance. Further, the author argues that by framing the Christian religion (in all contexts) as fundamentally a tool of oppression, academicians are effectively missing the multiple and profound ways the Christian faith has been deployed for decolonizing and liberatory agendas, particularly in racialized spaces. In addition, these spaces that are rendered invisible not allowed and unrecognizable—can delegitimize the work and theorizing of religio-spiritual Black Christian scholars, serving as another method of raced marginalization.

Keywords:

• anti-colonial resistance
• Black liberation theology
• higher education
• post-colonial studies
• the Black church
• womanist theology

Notes

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bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress (New York: Routledge, 1994).

Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 19.

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Katie Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988); Gayraud S. Wilmore, Pragmatic Spirituality: The Christian Faith through an Africentric Lens (New York and London: New York University Press, 2004).

Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics; Julie Laible, “A Loving Epistemology: What I Hold Critical in My Life, Faith and Profession,” Qualitative Studies in Education 13 (2000).

Eric C. Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1990).

Marimba Ani, Yurugu: An Afrikan-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior (Washington, DC: Nkonimfo Publications),; Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001).

Mbembe, On the Postcolony.

Bill Ashcroft et al., “General Introduction,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, eds. Bill Ashcroft et al. (London & New York: Routledge, 1995), 1.

Marimba Ani, Yurugu: An Afrikan-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior (Washington, DC: Nkonimfo Publications), 154.

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Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 214–215.

Ibid., 214.

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Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

Ani, Yurugu (Washington, DC: Nkonimfo Publications); Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana; Mbembe, On the Postcolony; John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992/1998).

James Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (Minneapolis: The Seabury Press, 1969); Emilie Townes, “Roundtable Discussion: Christian Ethics and Theology in Womanist Perspective,” in The Womanist Reader, ed. Layli Phillips (New York & London: Routledge, 2006).

Katie Cannon, Katie's Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988); Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens.

M. Shawn Copeland, “Roundtable Discussion: Christian Ethics and Theology in Womanist Perspective,” in The Womanist Reader, ed. Layli Phillips (New York & London: Routledge, 2006).

Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008), xii.

Katie Cannon, Katie's Canon; James Cone, Black Theology and Black Power.

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Gayraud S. Wilmore, Pragmatic Spirituality: The Christian Faith through an Africentric Lens (New York and London: New York University Press, 2004).

Wilmore, Pragmatic Spirituality, 3.

Ani, Yurugu.

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Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 2.

Wilmore, Pragmatic Spirituality.

In James Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Theology a Documentary History Volume One: 1966–1979 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 37.

Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck, The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011); Cone, Black Theology and Black Power; Cone and Wilmore, Black Theology a Documentary History Volume One; Lincoln and Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1990).

Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 2.

Wilmore, Pragmatic Spirituality 5.

Ibid.

Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800.

Wilmore, Pragmatic Spirituality.

Ibid.

Cone and Wilmore, Black Theology a Documentary History Volume One; Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Wilmore, Pragmatic Spirituality, 201.

Ibid.

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bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1991).

Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, xi.

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