WHAT DOES MUMBAI HAVE TO DO WITH ROME? AND THEOLOGY S

Theological Studies
69 (2008)
WHAT DOES MUMBAI HAVE TO DO WITH ROME?
POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES ON GLOBALIZATION
AND THEOLOGY
SUSAN ABRAHAM
Does postcolonial theory that cogently presents postcolonial perspectives on globalization have relevance for theology? The article
argues that postcolonial theory’s emphasis on eschewing identitybased strategies for liberation is an urgent necessity in a globalized
and militarized world. Postcolonial theorists seek justice and care
for the poorest women and children of the Global South, arguing
that these concerns should be part of theological and religious
agenda.
ERTULLIAN’S QUESTION POSED
after his conversion sometime ca. 197
C.E., “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? What have
heretics to do with Christians?” identified the tension he felt between faith
and reason. Athens, the home of pagan Greek philosophy, seemed to be
diametric to Jerusalem, the center of Christian faith and revelation. Of
course, the nuanced and complex development of the Christian intellectual
heritage provided for the solution to the perceived problem between faith
and reason: from Augustine’s use of philosophy to grasp the deeper meaning of Scripture, to Aquinas’s synthesis of faith and reason, to Bonaventure’s braiding together the spiritual and intellectual quests, to Rahner’s
Thomistic framework for ontology, to Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s theological method of ideology critique and retrieval of egalitarian histories of
male/female social relationships, to John Paul II’s Fides et ratio, theological
endeavors have resisted facile polarization of reason and faith.
In the last half of the 20th century, however, the theological terrain has
been complicated by the history of decolonization and the formation of
new nation-states. The phenomenon led to an expansion of the scope of
religious studies and theology; “culture” seemed to provide a critical dimension to theological thought. Thus “faith” and “reason” could not be
removed from their embedded contexts, which demonstrated important
differences in their manifestation across cultural boundaries. The linking of
T
SUSAN ABRAHAM received her Ph.D. from Harvard Divinity School, where she
is currently assistant professor of ministry studies. Her recent publications include Identity, Ethics, and Nonviolence in Postcolonial Theory: A Rahnerian Theological Assessment (2007). Her current research agenda deal with Catholic and
feminist practical theology and Christianity between colonialism and postcolonialism.
376
POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES
377
imperial identity to colonized ones led to creative strategies for pointing
out and addressing the limitations of universalizing modes of theological
thought unable to deal with the painful memory of economic and cultural
enslavement from afar. The first wave of such theological strategies was
called “contextual theology” and presented nuanced analyses of theological ideas in relation to the contexts in which they appeared.1
They also revealed the particularity of history and culture in which universalizing theologies asserted their preeminence. Broadly, “place” and
“time” became preoccupations of the postcolonial mindset in so far as
authors emphasized the constructed nature of meaning ascribed to places
and times, constructions created by relating place and time solely to the
imperial totalizing vision of Euro-America. Consequently, a second trend
soon asserted itself, engendered by the rise of cultural studies in secular
universities and spearheaded by a new breed of postcolonial theorists.
Here the trinity of fabulous fame—Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, and Homi Bhabha—affected the reading, teaching, and production
of religion and theology in universities in the West by pointing out the
culturally saturated framework that creates and sustains the disciplines of
contemporary university and academic milieus.
The nexus of globalization theories, postcolonial theory, and theology
produces an oppositional discourse that challenges theological method in
the Western academy. Such a resolutely critical method does not yield any
unified methodology of application. Since theology produced in the academic centers of the West is implicated in neocolonial relations between
various geopolitical contexts, the emphasis on culture investigates theological production as a site tainted by power differentials. The claim of
religion and theology to be sui generis fields requiring protective strategies
such as excluding social, cultural, ethical, theoretical, or political methods
to verify the intelligibility of its assertions is being steadily assailed by
globalization and postcolonial theories. The assault on the self-proclaimed
“sui generis” constitution of the field of religion and theology has resulted
in the paradoxical contention that theology ought to become an integral
part of the study of religion.2 In other words, religion and theology are
disciplines to the extent that their boundaries are policed by those who
consider the frameworks to be thoroughly distinguishable from each other.
Postcolonial perspectives on globalization that point to the many ways
1
See Stephen B. Bevans, Models of Contextual Theology (Maryknoll, N.Y:
Orbis, 1992).
2
Sheila Greeve Davaney makes this perceptive insight in her essay “Theology
and the Turn to Cultural Analysis,” in Converging on Culture: Theologians in
Dialogue with Cultural Analysis and Criticism, ed. Sheila Greeve Davaney, Delwin
Brown, and Kathryn Tanner (New York: Oxford University, 2001) 12.
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THEOLOGICAL STUDIES
academic frameworks exacerbate Orientalist perspectives on times, places,
and cultures different from Euro-American Christianity resist and oppose
rigid disciplinary boundaries.
So what does Mumbai have to do with Rome? And what does culture
have to do with theology? The challenge of postcolonial thought today is to
work out of a different space of a radical politics of culture that differentiates itself from both right- and left-wing articulations of cultural as it
exists in the Euro-American academy. Both identity politics as well as
forms of triumphalist and celebratory responses to globalization from the
consuming elites which emphasize migratory flows to Euro-American centers are dismissed. Consequently, this essay explores one question: what
are the theological challenges and opportunities posed by globalization
theories and postcolonial theory? On the one hand, the question assumes
that a “commitment to theory” characterizes any form of sophisticated
theological thought in view of a global, postcolonial and neocolonial political context. On the other, its constructive move insists that the postcolonial context remains a contested but radically creative site for the
continuing reimagination of political, religious, and cultural communities.
In particular, theological imagination in the postcolonial context is characterized by a marked distance from doctrinaire positions on identity, ethics, and liberation. In its stead emerge the heterogeneity of multiple (sometimes contrasting and contradictory) positions that remain an opportunity
for creative revisioning. The practical context of postcolonial theology in
view of globalization does not provide for the unifying and homogenizing
visions of either liberal assimilation or conserving visions of “pure” or
orthodox identity or ethics.
THE COMMITMENT TO THEORY:
BEYOND THEOLOGICAL METHODISM OR VANGUARDISM
Postcolonial theory does not yield a simplistic method that can be
mechanistically applied. Mechanical application models lead to the problem of methodism. Neither should the theory be uncritically adopted as a
novel and unique perspective to bring to academic disciplines. However, it
does allow for a way of thinking that “disarticulates” power from the
centers that name spaces (e.g., contexts, national identity, religious identity, or communitarian forms of identity) or time (e.g., history, modernity,
epochs, eras, ages) by pointing out the way language and discourse operate
to impose a preferred order on the lives of subjugated people. Postcolonial
theory is also famously opaque and difficult to read, because it weaves
together multiple strands of Western theoretical perspectives—economic,
political, cultural, philosophical, and literary—in order to reconceive postcolonial spatialities and temporalities. The difficulty of reading postcolo-
POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES
379
nial theory to glean approximations for interdisciplinary thought leads
many either to read postcolonial theory selectively or to abandon it as
unintelligible. Lastly, the self-reflexive imperative of postcolonial theory
presents us with a field that does not possess any predictable, unified
structure.
Recent assessments of postcolonial theory, particularly in the context of
the rise of globalization theory, assert that the “intellectual power and
political clarity both of the colonial past and the new empires of our times”3
demands a commitment to theory, a commitment that takes into account
the manner in which globalization is reshaping the world with its global
systems of capital and labor. Consequently, the complex warp and woof of
postcolonial theory must incorporate economic theory, political theory,
critical theory, and literary theory. In fact, as the authors of Postcolonial
Studies and Beyond suggest, the damning critique of Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri in their volume Empire presents not the twilight of postcolonial theory, but a burgeoning responsibility to address through postcolonial analysis the creation of new imperial logics.4
Hardt and Negri asserted that postcolonial theory, in critiquing colonial
forms of power, circumscribed its critical force because power in its contemporary setting had mutated to take on very different forms. Thus Hardt
and Negri criticize the way power was presented in (early) postcolonial
theory as flowing top-down from colonizer to colonized. The mutated
forms include domestic nationalistic tyranny imposed on minority groups,
and collusions of nationalistic power with militarized global economic
power spearheaded by the United States. Such power, they argue, easily
co-opted postcolonial theory to ensconce it within the networks of power.
Thus, even as Hardt and Negri acknowledge that postcolonial theory is
useful in rereading history, they assert that it is “entirely insufficient for
theorizing contemporary global power.”5 For the authors of Postcolonial
Studies and Beyond, this criticism presents unique opportunities: (1) to
argue that postcolonial theory’s critical force avoids the “shallow global”
by pointing to the ongoing global relationships of transoceanic and transcontinental trade, travel, and conquest; (2) to attend to the particulars of
place and time to raise our consciousness about hidden, ignored, or silenced resistance of subaltern6 agency; and (3) to attend to the entrenched
3
Ania Loomba et al., “Beyond What? An Introduction,” in Postcolonial Studies
and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba et al. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University, 2005) 1–38.
4
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 2000) 137–59.
5
Ibid. 146.
6
“Subaltern” has a specific provenance. Edward Said, in the foreword to Selected
Subaltern Studies, ed. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Ranajit Guha (New York:
380
THEOLOGICAL STUDIES
academic and cultural hegemonies under which knowledge production
continues to function. In the first place, however, postcolonial studies remain committed to theoretical thought, which retains a “politics of the
theoretical statement.”7 Second, such a political and theoretical stance
rigorously investigates the spatial, historical, and legal frameworks that
construct ideologies of the other. Finally, in its constructive mode it engages disciplined thought in representative fields, whether theology or cultural studies, by pointing to the creativity, adaptability, and inventiveness
of subaltern agency in their engagements with imperial logics.
The commitment to theory highlights all of these tensions. In defining
what “postcolonial” signifies, Padmini Mongia explains its different registers, as a historical and temporal marker referring to the period after
official decolonization and also as an intellectual approach influenced by
post-structuralism and deconstruction.8 The term also became a substitute
for what used to be called Third World literature to describe the conditions
of migrant groups within First World states. Here the term emphasizes
oppositional reading practices, exposing the power relations constructing
meaning in a given text. Moreover, the meaning of “postcolonial” necessarily remains fluid and complex because those who use it continuously and
consciously attempt self-interrogation and self-reflexivity.9 Similarly, in
this regard Loomba et al. write of the nexus of globalization and postcolonial theory:
Postcolonial studies cannot abandon, and must raise with new urgency, the epistemological questions that have animated the field from its inception: questions about
the shifting and often interrelated forms of dominance and resistance; about the
constitution of the colonial archive; about the interdependent play of race and
class; about the significance of gender and sexuality; about the complex forms in
which subjectivities are experienced and collectivities mobilized; about representation itself; and about the ethnographic translation of cultures . . . Writing the
histories of unsuccessful or successful colonization, of anticolonial nationalisms,
and of the state of nations after independence—the history of empire and its
aftermath—requires an awareness of the struggles that define the present as much
as of those that characterized by the past.10
Oxford University, 1988), writes that its political connotation points to the class
system between the British and Indians in India during the British rule and that its
intellectual connotations hark back to Antonio Gramsci’s use of the word in his
Prison Notebooks, which underscores the ubiquity of class relations in history.
7
Homi K. Bhabha, “The Commitment to Theory,” The Location of Culture
(New York: Routledge, 1994) 19–39, at 22.
8
Padmini Mongia, ed., Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (New
York: Arnold, 1996) 2.
9
Ibid. 3.
10
Loomba et al., Postcolonial Studies and Beyond 13–14.
POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES
381
What is the value of theory? Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture
(1994) advanced the notion of cultural hybridity and the translation of
social difference beyond the polarities of self and other, East and West,
colonizer and colonized. In his chapter titled “The Commitment to
Theory” Bhabha argues that there is nothing as practical as good theory.
Good theory was a way to investigate how binary formations of contemporary political relationships simply play into the hands of exclusivist or
racist ideologies. As he asserts, global capital systems are deeply invested
in preserving the “comprador theatre,” that is, the preservation of primitive labor and environmental legislation and regulation for the profit of
neoliberal capital. Hence class and race modalities that advance and consolidate the power of neoliberal capitalism cannot but be the practical,
immediate, and urgent concern of postcolonial thinkers.
Another concern that Bhabha broaches is the context in which such
thinking should happen: the rise of Anglo-American nativist ideologies,
sustained by their aggressive economic and military engines, completely
disregard the independence and the cultural, economic, and political autonomy of the so-called Third World. More tellingly, the informationdisseminating institutions of the First World, including its media and academic institutions, are thoroughly complicit in this neo-imperial endeavor.
For Bhabha, the neo-imperial context demands the use of critical theory;
the diaspora political context of postcolonial thinkers occupying the inbetween spaces of the new imperial order is marked by a historical and
cultural hybridity. Such use of critical theory is to “intervene ideologically,”11 or, as Stuart Hall might say, it is to occupy a space between
political polarities.12 From this perspective, theory does not contain13 the
truth, but what is true is marked by ambivalence as theory attempts to
negotiate the truth between oppositional and antagonistic elements.14
Hybridity, then, is negotiation. It marks a discursive temporality of the
present. Bhabha explains: “In such a discursive temporality, the event of
theory becomes the negotiation of contradictory and antagonistic instances
that open up hybrid sites and objectives of struggle, and destroy those
negative polarities between knowledge and its objects, and between theory
and practical-political reason.”15 The notion of negotiation is not to be
confused, Bhabha declares, with a “syndicalist sense of reformism,” and
since negotiation emerges in colonial or neo-imperial relations, it marks a
present time rather than some eschatological time that requires a different notion of truth. In other words, Bhabha warns against defining “hybridity” as more than a negotiation. It ought not to be reified into a concept
11
Bhabha, The Location of Culture 22.
13
Ibid.
Ibid., emphasis original.
14
15
Ibid.
Ibid.
12
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THEOLOGICAL STUDIES
that marks some essentialist and eternal characteristic. In his self-reflective
writing, Bhabha’s emphasis on the temporal present intends to guard
against the excesses of identity politics. All sites of struggle, instead of
possessing primordial or naturalistic identities, only make sense as they
come to be constructed in various discourses. Theory’s conceptual vigilance
can never permit a simple identification between political objective and
means of representation. Hybridity, as Bhabha presents it, is a strategic
interruption of the manner in which cultural difference is constructed and
sustained in colonial contexts.
Raising the issue of representation leads to an emphasis on cultural
difference created by institutional frameworks, rather than on cultural diversity in Bhabha’s theory of hybridity. As it is enunciated in discursive
spaces, cultural difference makes problematic temporal binaries such as
past and present, historical ones such as tradition and modernity, spatial
ones such as East and West, and value categories such as pure and impure
or civilization and barbarism. Cultural difference in the space of enunciation is best represented as an in-between space and is firmly set against the
methodism or “vanguardism” of liberal politics of identity as well as the
racialized modes of imperial thought. Hybrid enunciations’ disruptive temporality confounds hierarchical claims of the inherent purity of any cultural
identity or, as some have argued, the purity of religious or theological
boundaries. Consequently, Bhabha’s theory of cultural hybridity is an
analysis of what happens at borders and boundaries. While a number of
thinkers who label themselves “postcolonial” draw on Bhabha to propose
various models of liberation for anthropology, subjectivity, or religious
identity, an even greater number are critical of the manner in which
Bhabha overemphasizes the positive aspects of hybridity of culture.16
Postcolonial theorists interested in border work in the context of globalization evaluate Bhabha positively and negatively. Demonstrating how disciplines can be transformed through doing postcolonial theory (rather than
applying it), Daniel Boyarin argues that the border revealed by hybridity
creates the boundaries of ancient Judaism and Christianity in Late Antiquity through heresiology.17 In other words, the theological category of
“heresy” is amenable to postcolonial analysis. Boyarin presents a historical
reading of how heresy functioned in the construction of the religious identities of Christianity and Judaism. Hybridity in Boyarin’s reading is no
16
See Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, 1988) as an example of the former; and
Corinne Dempsey, Kerala Christian Sainthood: Collisions of Culture and Traditions
in South India (New York: Oxford University, 2001), as an example of the latter.
17
Daniel Boyarin, “Hybridity and Heresy: Apartheid Comparative Religion in
Late Antiquity,” in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond 339–58.
POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES
383
longer just related to questions of identity. Instead, its presence reveals the
strategies that create and clarify boundaries of religious identity. Boyarin
defines the heresiologists as “religious customs’ inspectors”18 who sought
to definitively define and circumscribe behavior acceptable by members of
their respective groups. These early heresiologists were both Christian and
Jewish, and they assiduously sought to maintain and create the distinctiveness of Christianity or Judaism in opposition to the other. Thus the very
creation of the category of heresy “inscribes the borderlines”19 of religion
in Late Antiquity in as much as the category “heresy” determines what is
pure and what is impure in relation to the religious identity in question.
Anyone who attempted to cross the borders or to make the borders permeable, that is, any hybrid (e.g., a Jewish-Christian) was deeply threatening
to the “religion-police.”20 Hybridity, as activity at the border that separated
Christianity and Judaism in Late Antiquity, refers to syncretic forms of
religious belonging, a concept that is inimical to group membership in
trying times. Hybridity, therefore, is a theological and political category
that identifies beliefs and practices that challenge the unitary claims of
religious authority.
As a form of “apartheid comparative religion,”21 heresiology helps identify borders that demarcate groups such as “us” and “them.” Boyarin
points out that censure against Jewish-Christians climaxed just when
Nicene orthodoxy was consolidating. In other words, hybridity also aids
conservative action on part of authority to mark particular beliefs and
practices as “pure.” In contrast to Bhabha, Boyarin does not restrict the
use of hybridity to subjugated peoples. Authorities in power seek to identify and condemn hybridity even if they do not actually employ hybridity as
a subjugated people might. The strategy of identifying and condemning
hybridity, however, leads to misrecognizing its presence within the group.
As Boyarin comments, hybridity is a “double edged sword” since it certainly is a liberatory strategy of subjugated people.22 However, when hybridity is ascribed to one set of people by hegemonizing discourses, the
strategy externalizes hybridity to reinscribe highly problematic notions of
purity. Heresiology therefore points to the idea that hybrid identities in
religions do not just arise in the syncretic attempts to straddle multiple
identities, but that hybridity is also actively constructed by policing authorities at the border in order to affirm an originary and pure identity.
The significance of Boyarin’s essay for a postcolonial imagination is clear
in two regards. First, doing postcolonial theory, not just applying it, leads
to surprising and novel ways to understand activity at the boundaries.
18
19
20
21
Ibid. 339.
Ibid. 343.
22
Ibid. 343.
Ibid.
Ibid. 342.
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THEOLOGICAL STUDIES
Boyarin’s essay successfully demonstrates how theological boundaries define religious identity. Hybridity is negotiation at the boundary, revealing
the agency of subjugated people to transform the social position in which
power places them. Second, the editors providing the introductory comments to Boyarin’s essay point out that the historical time frame Boyarin
presents confounds the facile expectation of reading postcolonial theory
solely in relation to colonial and cultural histories.23 The temporal markers taken for granted in much academic thought are less stable than previously imagined. The implications for postcolonial thinking in the context
of present-day concerns with globalization are also clear. As Boyarin argues, Bhabha can be faulted for glossing over other types of activity that
happen at the boundary. For example, boundaries are also sites of control
by power to preserve officially sanctioned “pure” identity. Thus, boundaries and borders in the present day are famously impermeable, constructed as they are by nativist, racist, and religious ideologies obsessed
with keeping out “impure” elements from places to which these elements
have no legal right. Boyarin writes: “Borders are also places where people
are strip-searched, detained, imprisoned and sometimes shot.”24 Borders
are scary lines to cross as many migrant laborers finding their way to the
North American economic center can attest. Rigid borders constructed by
power feed the proclivity for wedge politics while systematically ignoring
the slave labor and sexual labor of women and children seeping through
these very same boundaries.
This section has presented the argument that the commitment to postcolonial theory has practical benefit in a globalized world reeling under a
newly sanctioned imperial ideology that continues to construct new forms
of colonial subjugation. Specifically, postcolonial theories critical of identity categories and revealing the power differentials that construct these
categories continue to have salience for reflective analysis. Most urgently,
of course, the commitment to postcolonial theory reveals the extent to
which neocolonialism and imperialism adversely affect the lives of the
weakest members of the global communities: the poorest women of the
Global South. The next section turns to that consideration.
THE COMMITMENT TO THE GENDERED SUBALTERN: SOUTH ASIAN
FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ON RELIGION AND THEOLOGY
South Asian feminist thought on religion and theology indicates a vibrant but contested field that seeks to argue for limiting the power of state
23
24
See ibid. intro.
Ibid. 343.
POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES
385
and religious institutions on the one hand and, paradoxically, for a limit on
Western liberal forms of feminism on the other. Feminist theory in all its
forms remains unassimilable to the agendas of state and religion. Thus it
retains its oppositional stance toward conservative, male elite power. Feminist postcolonial theory, however, also criticizes Western feminist theory
for its attempts to reinscribe racial and class essentialist positions on those
women who are perceived to be religiously and culturally “other” or different, that is, the gendered subalterns.
The term “gendered subaltern” is the coinage of Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, the most well-known feminist thinker writing in the context of
neocolonialism, globalization, and postcolonialism. Spivak first used the
term in her essay “Can the Gendered Subaltern Speak?”25 In asking her
(in)famous question, Spivak pointed to a specific relationship of power
engendered in the neocolonial context of knowledge production between
the first-world investigator and the third-world subject on whose behalf the
first-world investigator seemed to be acting.26 Spivak argues for a discursive space that postcolonial theorists seek to create for oppositional and
critical practices. The work of democracy is to guarantee this space for the
gendered subaltern without taking advantage of her relative powerlessness.
Spivak fiercely criticizes both leftist and rightist politics that seek to
circumscribe and constrain the freedom and agency of the gendered subaltern. Like Bhabha, she condemns the co-opting of postcolonial studies by
the liberal academic establishment as a form of doing a slightly more
complex form of marginality studies. When postcolonial theory functions
as a substitute for marginality studies, or as a more sophisticated version of
25
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: “Can the Gendered Subaltern Speak,” in Marxist
Interpretations of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke,
UK: Macmillan Education, 1988). The essay has engendered a veritable cottage
industry in books, essays, and other forms of critique and assessment with regard to
whether Spivak was right in asking the question. As Spivak has said many times
since then, she never meant that the gendered subaltern could not talk. However,
the speech of the gendered subaltern can be muted or silenced by both leftist and
rightist elements in the academy, culture, or politics, though in this essay her focus
is squarely on the Left.
26
Bill Ashcroft points to the provenance of Spivak’s question (Postcolonial
Transformation [New York: Routledge, 2001] 5). The question of whether the
subaltern can speak is a recalcitrant one most acutely expressed in Derrida’s
groundbreaking essay on Levinas, Violence and Metaphysics. As Ashcroft explains,
Derrida takes Levinas to task for arguing that there is a fundamental contradiction
between Athens and Jerusalem and that Greek philosophy could be challenged by
the Judaic tradition. Instead of such opposition, Derrida contends that Greek Philosophy ought to be opposed by reason. Ashcroft argues that such a move does not
mean the hegemony of reason or of Greek philosophy, but the Derridaean emphasis points out that opposition can take place within the discursive system, within its
language games and its intellectual and philosophical horizon.
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THEOLOGICAL STUDIES
identity-based proposals, the resulting model lends itself to the add-and-stir
model of much of liberal academic thinking. Of course, the space accorded
the postcolonial subject here, granted by liberal models of inclusivity, allowed speech from essentialized positions: the “African Woman,” the
“Asian Woman,” and the “Latin American Woman.” For example, in her
introduction to A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak points out that in
the late 1980s she began to notice that “a certain postcolonial subject had
been recoding the colonial subject and appropriating the Native Informant’s position.”27 Given the current context of globalization and its telecommunications machinery, it becomes very simple to “tap the Native
Informant directly.”28 Now, instead of the Asian Woman or the African
Woman speaking for herself, they have become passive subjects of investigation. It has become easy for first-world knowledge machines to investigate these subjects in situ, representing them to the West without need of
their direct participation. This trenchant criticism of academic policies that
either eavesdrops on indigenous knowledge to cannibalize it or attempts to
vulgarly ventriloquize the subaltern reduces “postcoloniality”29 to a vanguardist fad.
Whereas Bhabha foregrounds cultural difference as the basis of cultural
politics, Spivak nuances Bhabha’s agenda by asking in whose interests
differences are defined at all. Spivak is less interested in cultural questions
particularly because she is leery of all terms of identity creation and because her analytic focus remains class and gender politics. Her agenda is
“an old-fashioned Marxist one” with a twist—that is, Marx can be deployed
deconstructively in the context of globalization. Stephen Morton elucidates
this point:
Spivak is more concerned to re-articulate Marxism and deconstruction in such a
way that Marxism can account for the contemporary international division of labor
and the economic dependency of many nations in the global South on global
financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund. . . . These global economic concerns might seem a far cry from Marx’s account of industrial production in nineteenth-century western Europe. Yet this is not
27
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: A History of
the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1999), preface.
28
Ibid.
29
Spivak distinguishes between the terms “colonialism” (the European form
stretching from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries), “neocolonialism” (dominant economic, political and cultural maneuvers attending globalization) and “postcoloniality” (the contemporary global condition). Her italicized
emphasis of the last three letters of postcoloniality, which can be found in many of
her written materials points to the problem of presuming an existential condition
called “postcoloniality.” Her point is that there is no such existential condition, but
there is a constructed positioning of gendered subalterns within a system that codes
their value and dehumanizes them. See A Critique of Postcolonial Reason 172.
POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES
387
to suggest that the division of labor described by Marx has simply vanished. Indeed,
what is crucial for Spivak is that the conditions of industrial production and labor
in nineteenth-century western Europe, with which Marx was preoccupied, have
been gradually replaced by a flexible, non-unionized and casual form of work that
often targets women and children from the global South.30
However, even as Spivak disavows being a “professional postcolonialist,” she steadfastly refuses to speak for or represent the female proletariat
of the Global South. Her focus is on the structures that created, sustain,
and undergird the condition of subalternity. The gendered subaltern is one
who can never actually claim subalternity, for that would mean that she has
access to the language system that can characterize her condition as subaltern. Gendered subalterns are embedded deeply in a system that hides
the possibility of any social mobility. Anyone who claims subalternity is
really seeking privilege: “I don’t find it very interesting when an academic
from somewhere tells me that he or she is from a marginalized cultural
background. I hear it as a call for genuflection, as it were.”31 It is not
identity that marginalizes in the postcolonial and globalized context. What
marginalizes is oppositional and critical activity that seeks to illumine the
conditions of subalternity. To claim privileged knowledge due to cultural or
racial marginality is to betray the very strategy to counter imperial forms of
coercion in the academy. What is needed instead is the ability to engage
with multiple forms of liberation discourse such as Marxism and deconstruction. Here Spivak’s agenda converges with Bhabha’s in that hybridity
is less about assimilation in a cultural context and far more about opposition to binary forms of cultural identity in the neocolonial context. She
asserts that one’s theory can become practice when it leads to sympathy
and empathy with the lot of the subaltern, and the success of such practice
will be seen in how sympathy and empathy challenge the Orientalist framework in which subalterns are always seen as victims or subjects created by
hegemonic positioning of race and class.
Spivak’s methodological stance is evident in her words:
I am suggesting that U.S. women, if they are attentive to the importance of framenarratives, are in a unique and privileged position to continue a persistent critique
of mere apologists for their Constitution, even as they use its instruments to secure
entry into its liberating purview. Favorite sons and daughters who refuse to sanctify
their father’s house have their uses. Persistently to critique a structure that one
cannot not (wish to) inhabit is the deconstructive stance. Transnational feminism is
neither revolutionary tourism, nor mere celebration of testimony. It is rather
30
Stephen Morton, Gayatri Spivak: Ethics, Subalternity, and the Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2007) 73.
31
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Conversations with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(New York: Seagull, 2006) 66.
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through the route of feminism that economic theories of social choice and philosophical theories of ethical preference can be complicated by cultural material.32
The persistent critique of the systems we all inhabit, and indeed cannot
not wish to inhabit, requires the exercise of a critical faculty that is keenly
aware of how coercive frameworks seek to position subjects. Critiquing
frameworks allows us to constantly revision and revise the goals to which
emancipatory thought is directed: Spivak is a stern critic of the miseducation of subaltern women that leads them to perform in the visible violences
of a military, political, or cultural system. Social mobility does not mean
that the subaltern is educated to imitate or replicate the violence of the
systems she inhabits.
Spivak’s acquaintance with religion and academic theology is minimal.
Her insights are not applicable to theology precisely because she does not
engage with the categories, frameworks, or language systems of religion or
theology. Nevertheless, she is profoundly aware of the historied experiences of religiosity and piety resulting from globalization and colonialism.
Her insights in this regard have immediate and urgent ramifications for
transnational feminist theological and religious projects. Her most trenchant critique in this regard concerns the collusion of religious institutions with the violent mechanisms of the state. Her essay titled “Terror:
A Speech after 9/11” examines how terror/war targets women and children
in a never-ending cycle of violence. In this essay she categorically condemns religious and theological initiatives, even those of liberation theology by aligning the discipline’s claims with the philosophy that “rearranges
the desires of suicide bombers.”33
Her comments are directed to religious institutions that facilely align
themselves with the goals of the nation-state. Nothing is more important to
Spivak than education in critical faculties:
I am a teacher of the humanities. In the humanities classroom begins a training for
what may produce a criticism that can possibly engage a public sphere deeply
hostile to the mission of the humanities when they are understood as the persistent
attempt to an uncoercive rearrangement of desires, through teaching reading. Before
I begin, I would like to distinguish this [the uncoercive rearrangement of desires]
from the stockpiling of apparently political, tediously radical and often narcissistic
descriptions, according to whatever is perceived to be the latest Euro-US theoretical trend, that we bequeath to our students in the name of public criticism. Uncoercive rearrangement of desires, then; the repeated effort of the classroom.34
32
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York:
Routledge, 1993) 284, emphasis original. Note the emphasis in the book’s title as
well.
33
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Terror: A Speech after 9–11,” Boundary 2 31.2
(2004) 81–111, 93.
34
Ibid. 82.
POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES
389
Spivak makes these comments in response to the U.S.-led “war on terror.” She attacks not only the conserving modes of power that mask the
greedy reach of imperial desire, but also those co-opted left-leaning ideas
that rationalize the war as an attempt to “free” the women and children of
Afghanistan and Iraq. The left, also identifying itself as “secular,” is “quite
out of touch with the world’s peoples and have buried their heads in the
sand.”35 They unfortunately understand religion to belong to the private
realm. Instead, Spivak insists, when one looks at the deployment of Islam,
Judaism, Hinduism, and Christianity in the creation and maintenance of
imperial logics of control, mastery, and nation-building, one finds in religion the handmaiden of these ventures. Secular academics of the left cannot afford to ignore the calculating reason that deploys religion in such a
manner, nor the hard moral labor urgently required for multicultural and
multireligious worlds.
On the other hand, liberation theology draws deep cynicism and ire from
Spivak as well. Here, the litmus test for all liberation theories, philosophies,
and politics is the well-being of the poorest woman. Her aggravation
with certain forms of liberation theology is clear in her statement: “In the
heyday of the gender-compromised Latin American liberation theology,
I would often ask, Why can’t we have the liberation without the theology?”36 Nevertheless, the “sorry stereotype” of liberation theology may be
able to give rise to a liberation theology that resists being co-opted by
national and religious institutions that consistently marginalize women.
Such a concession marks a very significant move in Spivak’s thought, if she
is willing to consider that liberation theologies in Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, or Christianity may be able to fulfill their mandate to be truly prophetic.
Evidently, Spivak is a product of the modern West and its secularizing
academic culture. Her argument, however, is not an unnuanced attack on
religious institutions and an uncritical support for secularism. She emphatically dismisses the alignment of religious identity and power with nationalist agendas and the “sanitized” secularists, whose liberal, bourgeois, and
gluttonous standards fail to acknowledge the material effects of such systems in the lives of the gendered subaltern. However, she ends the essay
with a tantalizing question, one that has ramifications for the teaching and
study of religion and theology. The need for moral responses to contemporary militarized and globalized violence reinstates ethics as the focus of
religion and liberation theology. The function of ethics is not the “epistemological construction of the other” which is a species of identity politics.
Rather, the function of education in ethics is to rigorously focus on the
35
Ibid. 102.
36
Ibid. 88.
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THEOLOGICAL STUDIES
impossible work of empathy, even with regard to the terrorist: “if in the
imagination we do not make the attempt to figure the other as imaginative
actant, political (and military) solutions will not remove the binary which
led to the problem in the first place.”37 She attempts to illustrate this
agenda through an analogy with Kant’s theory of the sublime.38 When the
terrorist suspends rational and cognitive faculties, she or he (Spivak is
aware that some suicide bombers are female) has been thoroughly seduced
by the sublime. What is the alternative to such seduction by religious values
writ large for the complex world we inhabit?
Drawing on Kantian and Derridaean paradigms, Spivak queries why a
term such as “grace” must necessarily be transcendentalized in Christian
theology. “Grace,” rather than being a theological category, must be better
presented as the “effects of Grace.” “We have to run with the revolutionary force of the word ‘effect’, clear out of the theological into the aesthetic.”39 Detranscendentalized grace provides an alternative sublime, seducing participants into creating a world of grace in the concrete realities
of the world. In other words, similar to Kant’s condemnation of dogmatic
faith, which Spivak also condemns as the reason for the stupidity of the
suicide bomber, a reflective faith reveals a rhetorical topos (this from
Derrida40) from which religious and theological claims can be made. This
is what leads to detranscendentalizing grace. Examining the rhetorical topos of religious and theological claims is a manner of teaching reading,
which is what leads to the “uncoercive rearrangement of desires.” It is only
the humanities that can teach reading thus. More than just literary skills,
37
Ibid. 94.
Morton (“Postcolonial Critique/Postcolonial Reason,” in Gayatri Spivak 154–
59) argues that Spivak’s attempt to draw an analogy between Kant’s theory of the
sublime and imagining the space of the other does not quite work in the case of the
suicide bomber or terrorist. For Spivak, the terrorist has suspended cognitive judgment in the face of the sublime (not to be understood as an esthetic response but
more as the mind-numbing grasp of a totality of structure, a “big thing” that impacts
time and space forever). Morton wonders whether the analogy of the sublime to
account for the terrorist’s stupidity adequately explains how religious beliefs provide the structure for training human beings to be martyrs by mass killing. In other
words, the question here is Spivak’s assumption that terrorism is the result of “the
stupidity of religious belief taken to the extreme.” On the other hand, I do not think
that Spivak’s essay dismisses all of religion or theology.
39
Spivak, “Terror: Speech after 9–11” 108.
40
“Kant’s near-metalepsis of grace still has God in the offing, although Kant is
careful to bind this possibility in every way, one of the most important being the
discussion of the hypothetical use of reason. . . . Derrida’s argument would be that
to locate the effect of grace in texts would not necessarily invoke a causeless
cause. . . . This, put another way, is the de-transcendentalization of the radically
other, the causeless cause, the persistent effort of a training in the humanities”
(ibid. 110 n. 43).
38
POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES
391
it requires active immersion in the “singular and unverifiable” world of
others, including terrorists. The work of ethics is to forward as yet unimaginable responses to violence by dissolving those pernicious binaries of
church and state, public and private, and culture and religion, saturated as
they are with race, class, and gender exclusivist logics.
Detranscendentalizing grace may not be the highest priority for all South
Asian feminists. Saba Mahmood, for example, is less interested in detranscendentalizing grace and more interested in revealing how transcendent
theological categories inspire and vivify the lives of gendered subalterns in
Cairo.41 She thoroughly disavows the secular-liberal framework of much
contemporary forms of Western feminism, including Spivak’s postcolonial
analyses. Specifically, Mahmood wants to detach the notion of agency from
the goals of progressive politics by presenting a study of Muslim women’s
piety in Cairo, where this piety managed to put these women in conflict
with several structures of authority. The “women from the mosque movement,” as she calls them, engage in practices that cannot be understood in
relation to gender equality or resistance to male authority. Neither are they
reinscriptions of traditional gender roles. While the focus on a particular
form of highly circumscribed piety can hardly be presented as “agency” in
the usual (Western) sense, Mahmood argues that the binary terms of
resistance/subordination fail to capture the projects, discourse, and desires
of these women. Is feminism capable of conceding that, for women who are
not immersed in Western forms of “progressive” discourses, the language
of piety may function to fulfill their aspirations in ways very different from
those of Western women?
While Mahmood addresses 9–11 as well, her analysis focuses on the
construction of Islam in the secular-liberal framework that defines and
limits it in its Orientalizing representation. Globalization theories reveal
that the secular-liberal context in which the entire area called the Middle
East is now being influenced by international financial institutions, human
rights associations, and national and local administrative bureaucracies
simply cannot afford to construct the encounters they face in terms of “a
conflict between two historically distinct opponents.” Globalization also
demonstrates that such encounters promote the easy reconciliation
and assimilation handily referred to as “cosmopolitanism.”42 Like Spivak,
Mahmood argues that the encounter with the life-worlds of others requires
an immersion in and the cultivation of an empathy that comes from the
disciplined learning of language, customs, religion, and culture of these
41
Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, 2005).
42
Ibid. 198.
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life-worlds. Analytic feminism has to be in the form of conversations, but
not with the intention to objectify, to master, or to know.
OPPORTUNITIES AND PARADOXES: POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES
ON GLOBALIZATION AND THEOLOGY
This article has traversed the work of postcolonial theorists of Western
globalization. Bhabha, as we saw, complicates the static view of place and
time through his theory of hybridity. In this view, global culture makes its
home in the movement of peoples as they are displaced by the current
economic order. Boyarin presents the fluidity of postcolonial theory to
investigate the theological category of heresy, which he argued was directed at hybrids. Unlike Bhabha, Boyarin presents hybridity as a strategy
of both orthodox, ruling elites and subjugated groups. Spivak’s spirited
dismissal of nationalist and religious institutional responses to terror reveal
a plea to create immanent categories for theological ones such as “grace”
and “liberation,” while Mahmood’s critique of Western secular feminist
proposals seems to undercut the primacy of democratic anti-imperial feminist movements. Both Spivak and Mahmood, however, affirm the centrality
of theology and its meaning-making capacity in order to understand religious identity or religious representation.
On the surface, it might seem that Mahmood’s work deals a scathing
blow to liberal, Western secular analytic feminism. Postcolonial feminist
theory may seem to unfairly squelch the aspirations and hopes of thoroughly marginalized women whose religious and racial identity is markedly
negative in Western contexts. This need not be the case. In the first place,
Mahmood’s book, as a response to Western secular feminism, is concretely
situated in the Western academy. Second, since she ends her book with a
plea for “conversation,” it can be asserted that secular feminism’s oppositional stance may remain the last strategy of those hoping to curb aggressive masculine religious and national policies. Educating for democracy,
the challenge of which remains the space and time for women, continues to
be a critical requirement everywhere, not just in Mumbai, Cairo, or Kolkata. If the historied piety of religious women from “other” parts of the
world present a challenge to Western secular feminists, then the conversation must indicate how the historied struggle of some women in the world
challenges the meaning of “nation,” “religion,” and “community,” constructed as they are by masculine elite religious and academic power. Mahmood’s work, though, needs to resist more strongly its possible co-option
by religious and fundamentalist religiosity in the West, which simply reasserts its racial, class, and gendered privileges by delighting in the nonhomogenized perspectives forwarded by South Asian feminists on religion.
POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES
393
If what Spivak says is right (I believe it is), that the task of educating in
the humanities is to teach the “persistent critique of what we cannot not
want,” then what the women in Mumbai, Cairo, and Kolkata need is precisely education in analytical theory to question provenances, interrelationships, and presuppositions of religious or political claims. “Culture” is not
a reductive identity assignation; culture is a web of relationships and a
fecund source of moral visions responding to exclusivist ideologies. Comforting polarized binaries through which exploitative economic globalization fuels religious and racial hatred are to be challenged and dissolved
through ethical hybrid strategies confounding the disciplinary strategies of
power on the left and right. The heterogeneity of Mumbai, Cairo, and
Kolkata is not a threat to postcolonial theology in a globalized world.
When what is human in Mumbai confronts what is human in Rome, or
what is human in Cairo confronts what is human in New York, a rather
religious vision not inimical to the vision of postcolonial theory of the
world emerges: a community of care despite religious, cultural, and gendered differences.