Postcolonial Studies and New Testament Criticism

The beginning of what is now known as postcolonial studies is generally associated with the publication of Edward W. Said’s Orientalism in 1978. Pointing out the geopolitical West’s ability to subject the Orient or the Arab world by making it the object of all kinds of study since the eighteenth century, Orientalism leads to the development of colonial discourse analysis that scrutinizes how texts, meanings, knowledge, and power are all intertwined and implicated in the colonial enterprise. Because Said offers few if any alternatives for or accounts of resistance in that groundbreaking book, questions about the agency of colonized people became important in postcolonial studies, and postcolonial scholars began to look at what colonized people do, including their cultural and textual productions, to examine the complexities of colonial rule and resistance (such as the insecurity of colonizers about their rule and the internalization of colonial ideologies by the colonized). In addition to confronting and contesting colonial dynamics of the past, postcolonial studies are also concerned with the legacies of imperial domination: namely, how imperial dynamics may continue even when official colonialism is over. While Said’s Orientalism focuses on racial difference, other postcolonial scholars such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak point to other factors of power differentials, such as gender and class, that are also important to consider in colonialism. With these other factors of power differentials, postcolonial studies begin to realize that neither colonizers nor the colonized should be understood in monolithic terms. This realization leads, in turn, to other new questions, such as if and how shared experiences of colonialism might lead to solidarity across differences. If there is a connection between culture and colonialism, then there is also a link between literary criticism and liberation struggles against imperialism. As such, postcolonial criticism is an oppositional reading practice that seeks to challenge colonial culture and control. One of the basic assumptions of postcolonial criticism is that textual practice, both reading and writing, is inseparable from the realities—particularly, imperial realities—of the world in which such practice takes place. A postcolonial critic thus seeks to read a text not only in light of the text’s entanglement in and engagement with a colonial world, but also in light of the critic’s own involvement and investment in a different world and/or a related world of empire, whether the text in question is by Shakespeare or in the Bible. The New Testament becomes an important object of postcolonial criticism for two main reasons. The first has to do with the Roman imperial contexts in which the New Testament writings initially came into being. The second concerns the ways in which people have used the New Testament to justify, support, or resist colonialism.