Asian Theological Summer Institute

“How can one develop a theological voice?” asked one of the participants at the Asian Theological Summer Institute.

“It is a lifelong process,” I replied.

The Asian Theological Summer Institute (ATSI), funded through the Luce Foundation, offered a four-day seminar for Asian and Asian American doctoral students at The Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia (LTSP) in the last week of May.

Dr. J. Paul Rajashekar, Luther D. Reed Professor of Systematic Theology at LTSP, saw the need to offer such a mentoring program because Asian and Asian American doctoral students often do not have the help and support of an Asian professor at their schools. The students came to present their dissertation proposals and work in progress and received feedback from a group of professors in different theological fields.

Just as in any art, developing your individual and unique voice in theological scholarship and style requires much learning, practice, coaching, and responding to feedback. But in many theological schools, Asian and Asian American doctoral students do not find the coaching they need to develop their scholarship and the community of discourse to try out new ideas.

Even though a student’s supervisor may be supportive, he or she may not know the social and cultural context of the student sufficiently well to give informed feedback. Worse, some professors treat the student as a “native informant”—the one to educate them about the particular culture or community.

One of the recurrent feedback from ATSI participants is that their work has been taken very seriously at the seminar. They do not need to explain their culture to people who have little knowledge about Asian and Asian American culture and history. The discussion can therefore move further along to explore the theological issues involved in the dissertation and the different theories and theological traditions to address them.

Developing your theological voice requires a lot of confidence in yourself. You need to have the courage to speak your mind, disagree with what has been said, offer a viewpoint that has not been tried, and/or suggest fresh new ideas.

Many educational systems in Asia are good at impacting knowledge, but not so good at encouraging students to challenge established authorities and think for themselves. Thus when Asian students come to the US to attend graduate schools, they often find the academic culture demanding and difficult to adjust to.

A dissertation needs to make some original contribution to the field. Where does that originality come from? Would it come from questions and issues arising from an Asian and Asian American context? Would it come from seeing a misfit of an established body of theories when applied to a new situation? Would it come from constructing new knowledge based on qualitative research? Would it come from developing new models that are culturally specific?

These are questions that beginning Asian and Asian American scholars often ask. In To Open Minds, Howard E. Gardner, an expert on multiple intelligences, compares Chinese and Western approaches to nurturing creativity, using learning Chinese painting as an example. He says that in China, one needs to spend years mastering the techniques and imitating great artists before developing one’s style. In sharp contrast, the American system values too much individuality and personal expression, sometimes at the expense of basic skills and training. He says that a balance between the two approaches will be beneficial.

The ATSI, now in its seventh year, has provided the space for more than 130 budding scholars to listen to themselves and others, hone their academic skills, and sharpen their theological thinking in a supportive environment. They have been encouraged to take the beginning steps, however tentative, to develop a life-long pursuit of scholarship and nurture a theological voice that is distinctly their own.

I wish I had such a seminar when I began. It has been a privilege to be able to accompany many of these students and play a small part in their journeys.

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.