Postcolonial/Decolonial

Postcolonial and decolonial work engages colonialism and its aftermath or coloniality, which are also cyphers for peoples’ systematic repression and its lingering effects, in material resources as well as in knowledge, ideas and beliefs. Colonialism created a social imaginary that discarded Indigenous people’s beliefs, ideas, symbols, and knowledge deemed worthless to the colonial project, whose aim was global domination. The cultural production of the colonized served the double purpose of inhibiting Indigenous production, while ensuring constant, systematic control over cultural production. Colonialism refers to a political and economic situation with control and sovereignty exercised by an empire, while coloniality indicates the resultant, enduring relations and patterns of power flowing from colonialism. Coloniality and the effects of colonialism extend far beyond the formal structures of colonial governments, influencing and defining aspects of colonized societies like cultural practices, labor systems, interpersonal relationships, and the creation of knowledge. In the colonial project and subsequent coloniality, the role of religion, and the colonial dominance of Christianity more particularly, has been pronounced and implicated in colonialism’s ideological or theological justification. Herein, the Bible was an important mainstay for the confirmation and endorsement of colonial practice. While both postcolonial and decolonial theories examine the effects of colonialism, they have different roots. Postcolonial studies, drawing on thinkers like Said and influenced by Western theory, analyze colonialism from the nineteenth century onward. Decolonial theory, on the other hand, is grounded in Latin American ideas like liberation philosophy and focuses on the entire period of imperial expansion, starting in the fifteenth century, and drawing on Fanon, DuBois, and others. Decolonial theorists also tend to be more critical of using Western theory, arguing that it’s entangled with the very colonial structures they seek to dismantle. Notwithstanding tensions between postcolonial and decolonial emphases, scholars find them converging in biblical studies. Postcolonial criticism is a powerful tool for those seeking to understand how power is negotiated in hierarchical societies, often with decolonial goals in mind. Postcolonial work shows that—and often, how—power is not a one-sided flow from dominator to dominated, but rather a complex exchange. This exchange occurs in a liminal or third space (Bhabha), a heterotopia (Foucault) created by the interaction of all involved. The space is not impermeable but, to the contrary, porous like a membrane that allows for social and political struggles to unfold within the literary and cultural works produced by both the powerful and the powerless.