A New Wave of Scholarship

I came to the United States in 1984 to begin my doctoral studies at Harvard Divinity School. It was an exciting time to do feminist theology and religious studies. Womanist ethics just began to emerge, as Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon had just completed a dissertation on the subject at Union Theological Seminary in 1983. I count it as a blessing that she was teaching at the Episcopal Divinity School, on the other side of the Cambridge Common.

The mid-1980s saw the paradigm shifts in feminist studies in religion, as womanist, mujerista/Latina, Asian and Asian American women began to articulate their own theological understanding. If Womanspirit Rising (1979) was a reference text for our field, which contains essays by white women, we had the first reader by radical women of color, This Bridge Called Our Back (1981).

We began to discuss multiple oppressions and multiple identities, and the need to integrate race, class, and gender into our analyses. We challenged white women who have universalized their middle-class, white experience as if women are all the same.

In the past several years, I participated in a group investigating the intersections among race, sexuality, and postcoloniality, since we were using critical race theory, queer studies, and postcolonial theory in our work. We wanted to see what are the commonalities and differences if we looked at the intersections through different racial lenses, sexual practices, and (post)colonial experiences.

I am glad to see many new works have been published that push us to see the intersections in radically new ways. The subtitle of Strange Affinities is worth paying attention to: “The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization.” The cutting-edge essays explore the production of racialized, genderized, and sexualized difference, and the possibilities for progressive coalitions or the “strange affinities.” Even the headings of the different sections make me think, “alternative identifications,” “undisciplined knowledges,” and “unincorporated territories, interrupted times.”

If you are one of those who think psychoanalysis is nothing more than a mind trick of middle-class Europeans, think again. Unconscious Dominions says, “By the 1920s, psychoanalysis was a technology of both the late-colonial state and anti-imperialism.” In Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism, Ranjana Khanna reveals “the psychical strife of colonial and postcolonial modernity.” The collection of essays in Unconscious Dominions pushes the envelope even further, with the ambitious subtitle “Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties.” The contributions touch on French West Africa, Algeria, Australian aborigine, India, Brazil, Indonesia, and Haiti. It is nothing less than “psychoanalysis writing back.”

If you are puzzled by why the police and officials used so much force to harass and arrest the peaceful Occupiers, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State will offer you much food for thought. Chandan Reddy examines “a crucial contradiction at the heart of modernity: the nation-state’s claim to provide freedom from violence depends on its systematic deployment of violence against peoples perceived as nonnormative and irrational.” Remember that Newt Gingrich told the Occupiers to “go get a job right after you take a bath”?

If I belong to the generation that has pushed against the boundary of the white canon and scholarship, I see a new wave of scholarship is on the horizon. This new wave radically interrogates assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, culture, national citizenship, global sovereignty and global futures. Brilliant and groundbreaking, these new works stretch our static concepts and methods, introduce the new vocabularies of globalized unconscious and fragmentation of sovereignties, and investigate the connection between violence and social formations of difference. It theorizes the nation and the global in ways much more sophistically than what our generation has done.

There is a time lag between religious scholarship and scholarship in other disciplines, usually about 10-15 years. Edward W. Said published Orientalism in 1978, and the first essay on postcolonial biblical criticism by R. S. Sugirtharajah was not published until 1994. The first book on postcolonial theology appeared in 2004.

I sincerely hope that the upcoming generation of religious scholars will catch up sooner and engage with this new wave of scholarship in earnest. 

Postcolonial Conversations in Canada

St. Andrew’s College in Saskatoon, Canada, invited me to be their speaker for their Winter Refresher 2011. St. Andrew’s is a theological school of the United Church of Canada, formed in 1925 by the amalgamation of the Methodist, Congregationalist, and Presbyterians. The Winter Refresher brought alumni, clergy, and lay leaders together for three days of worship, lectures, and discussions.

St. Andrew’s has a special place in my heart because my first theology professor Dr. Paul Newman became a professor of theology at St. Andrew’s after he returned from Hong Kong as a missionary.

I have never been to Saskatoon before and I know that it is cold. When I left Boston, the temperature was 27 degree (F). I checked the weather forecast for Saskatoon, and saw the temperature would drop to -17 degree (F) at night during my stay! Though the weather was harsh and unwelcoming, the warm hospitality of the people at St. Andrew’s made my visit very enjoyable.

Canada is a settler country and postcolonial conversations center on the painful history between the white settlers and the First Nation peoples. The First Nations’ peoples make up about 2.23% of the Canadian population.

The United Church of Canada, a progressive denomination in Canada, has apologized to the First Nations’ peoples for the church’s role in imposing European values. In 1998, the Church apologized for its complicity in the Indian residential schools system. The residential schools separated children from their families and many cases of sexual and physical abuse occurred in these schools.

In a panel during the Winter Refresher, Professor Geraldine Balzer of the University of Saskatchewan spoke about the importance of narratives in shaping our identity. She urged Canadians to revisit and re-tell their stories of origin and to recognize the sense of loss of the people of the First Nations. In recent years, First Nations peoples have moved to reclaim some of the indigenous names of their places. Geography and land shape their culture and sense of belonging.

The United Church of Canada in the last decade has expressed great concern over the impact of Empire and economic globalization. The report “Living Faithfully in the Midst of Empire” in 2006 analyzed the complicity of the church in empire and called the church to repentance and action. From 2009 to 2011, the church’s mission theme is “Living for the Earth: Choosing Creation over Empire.”

I had the opportunity of meeting some of the students who had studied my work. Some of them are preparing for diaconal ministry in the church. They are trained in Christian education and ministry for justice. We discussed issues such as hermeneutics of suspicion, interfaith dialogue, the emergent church, Christian identity in the modern world, the politics of multiple identities, and the postcolonial Jesus.

I enjoyed the music and worship and have made many new friends, since people came as far as Victoria and New Brunswick. It was an invigorating experience and I got to know more about the United Church of Canada.