Poison or Cure?

Abstract

Humanity is overwhelmingly religious. Yet the general Eurocentric presumption that we live in an almost wholly secularized world has prevented postcolonial scholars from engaging Christian discourses. Ironically, postcolonial scholars have reinforced paternalistic attitudes about Christianity, and to some extent religion as a whole, that are associated with the European coloniality and epistemologies which they are actually resisting discursively. In order to work towards the crucial task of subaltern subject restoration, this essay proposes that the (Christian) religiosity of subaltern peoples – both in discourse and practice – be rigorously engaged. To begin, the parameters of the non-engagement of Christianity in postcolonial studies will be outlined. Then, after sketching Derrida’s notion of pharmakos, its usefulness as a framework to illuminate the scapegoating of Christianity will be illustrated. The conclusion outlines recent convergences between postcolonial studies and other disciplines by scholars and activists which forge new engagements on these issues. In this new space, liberative and emancipatory religious praxes offer rich dialogue possibilities for postcolonial studies.

• Christianity
• counter-hegemonic praxes
• pharmakos
• postcolonial studies
• religion
• secularism
• subaltern peoples
• subaltern subjective agency

Notes

1 Consider, for example, the role of religious leadership in the Indian Independence Movement in the 1930s and 1940s, the US civil rights movement in the 1960s, Latin American liberation struggles in the 1970s and 1980s, and the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa throughout the twentieth century.

2 Recent debates include much more robust engagements with some religious traditions to which I return shortly, including especially Hinduism and Islam.

3 The religious map of the world is indeed diverse: in 2010, Christians made up 32 percent of the world’s population, Muslims 23 percent, Hindus 15 percent, Buddhists 7 percent, Jews 0.2 percent, various folk or traditional religions 6 percent, and other religions around 1 percent. Pew Research indicates that many of those who do not have a religious affiliation (16 percent) nevertheless “hold some religious or spiritual beliefs (such as belief in God or a universal spirit) even though they do not identify with a particular faith” (Pew Research Center 2012) The religious map is also complex – ranging within each religion from fundamentalist to radical expressions.

4 I note that some commentators speak about Protestantism as if it were a monolithic whole without taking into account the many trajectories, diversity of regions and histories, variety of manifestations, and range of ethnocultural differences.

5 Methodism, to use one example, was associated with movements of the poor and disenfranchised, and John Wesley was well known for his strong objection to the Atlantic slave trade and so was seen as subversive by some. However, the Wesleys’ advocacy on behalf of the poor and disenfranchised was primarily driven by evangelism (and a sense of charity) and not resistance to Empire or colonialism per se. It could be argued that in their focus on evangelism, the Wesleys were all the more complicit with the English imperial project as it was to emerge, embodying what we now understand as coloniality.

6 Interestingly, a recent book of previously unpublished writings by Fanon includes a letter to Iranian Ali Shariati in which Fanon admits the anticolonialist potential of Islam in revolutionary struggles (Fanon 2018).

7 Interestingly, Robbins (2013) documents a similar “lack” when it comes to the topic of secularism in postcolonial studies. Since secularism is understood to be part of the modern project, what he calls a “watchword of the West,” he wonders why it is largely absent from postcolonial discourses. Since both secularity and religiosity are still only traces in the discourse, the problem of a secular (European) bias and the reality of subaltern religiosity are not deeply engaged.

8 Young’s considered treatment of Mahatma Gandhi is framed, perhaps appropriately, as “cultural nationalism.” There is no doubt that the “politicization of Hinduism as an anti-colonial, national identity for India” and the “corresponding politicization of Islamic identity” contributed to and continues to inflame horrendous violence (325). Could it be argued that the disregard for the powerful religious influence and corresponding religious expressions of the “mass of the Indian population” as subaltern subjects is part of the root of the violence? Young himself makes this point, referring to Chakrabarty when he says “postcolonial theory, despite its espousal of subaltern resistance, scarcely values subaltern resistance that does not operate according to its own secular terms” (338). But the question remains to what extent Young is guilty of this tendency in this volume, since he identifies the problem but doesn’t really grapple with its implications. See Brown (2009, 7).

9 See, for example, Anidjar (2008), Mahmood (2005, 2016), Sugirtharajah (2003).

10 Derrida has dealt with metaphysical, even spiritual concepts like eschatology, transcendence, spectrality, the messianic, and the borders between life and death. See Cheah (1999) for an example of a postcolonial scholar engaging with Derrida on these issues. I also note that Derrida’s later works grapple more extensively with religion itself, as co-editor of Religion (1998), for example, or in his The Gift of Death (2008) and Acts of Religion (2002).

11 I note that other feminist postcolonial scholars do grapple with religion. For instance, in Rajeswari Sunder Rajan’s “Real and Imagined Women” her primary focus is on the misrepresentation and manipulation of women’s subjectivity in the media, often in the guise of building a nationalism which draws on fundamentalist Hinduism for inspiration (Rajan 1993).

12 Over the last twenty years, biblical scholars and theologians have begun to analyze biblical texts and theologies within the theoretical frames of postcolonial theory. See, for example, Sugirtharajah (2002). For another example, see Dube (2006).

13 For a comprehensive survey of key decolonial themes and their application in theological contexts, see Fernandez (2013).