Introduction
The last criticism to be discussed in the paper is postcolonial reading of the New Testament. Since the publication of Edward W. Said’s Orientalism (1978),[1] many writings about postcolonialism have come into existence (especially since 1990s) effecting the interpretation of the Bible including the Gospel of Matthew (which is the area of interest for the present researcher).[2] Therefore, it is important that this section examines in a nutshell the presuppositions, diverse proponents who are selected on the basis of their relevance to the researcher’s work, and give a critical evaluation on the basis of its contributions and limitations. As such, the discussion of this section will skip the historical development of postcolonial biblical criticism, and other related issues.
1. Presuppositions
1.1. Postcolonialism does not think in terms of the ‘end of colonialism.’ It is not the same as “after colonialism”[3] for such literal understanding would be inappropriate for biblical studies. Rather, postcolonialism assumes that the realities and modes of representation common to colonialism are still very much present today[4] and such imperial situation can be found in the experience of “power over” the other (i.e., the power of one group dominating another).[5]
1.2. The West is taken as the “model, content and form for knowledge production”[6] in postcolonial criticism.
1.3. It is closely related to but differs from liberative reading in the way “it combats the West’s textualizing defamation of the colonized and redresses cultural and political catastrophes caused by Western civilization.” [7]
1.4. Postcolonial biblical criticism assumes that colonialism dominates and determines the interest of biblical texts.[8] The Bible is taken as a collection of documents which came out of various colonial contexts like Egyptian, Persian, Assyrian, Hellenistic and Roman. Therefore, postcolonialism attempts to expose colonial/imperial attitudes, assumptions, representations, and ideologies embedded in the Bible.[9] It is comparable to the work of Warren Carter who sees Matthew as the product of an interaction between imperial culture and local cultural experience and practices, and that the text emerges as the discourse of a subjugated, imperialized person/group who ‘writes back’ to challenge the Roman power.[10]
1.5. Postcolonial biblical criticism also assumes that biblical interpretations from the colonial western frame of references are unconcerned with colonialism.[11]
1.6. Postcolonial biblical criticism takes “biblical narratives, not as a series of divinely guided incidents or reports about divine-human encounters, but as emanating from colonial contacts. It will revalue the colonial ideology, stigmatization and negative portrayals embedded in the content, plot and characterization.”[12]
1.7. Furthermore, postcolonial biblical criticism assumes that the biblical text is used by the colonizers to justify their control. Its task therefore includes approaching the texts (used by the colonial powers) with “hermeneutics of suspicion” so as to respond to such colonial/imperial tendencies and as well interrogate the effects of colonization and colonial ideologies on biblical interpretative works.[13]
2. Select Proponents
2.1. Homi K. Bhabha: Bhabha forms a tripartite with Said[14] and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak[15] in developing a postcolonial theory. However, only Bhabha is selected among the three for discussion may imply that his concept has some role to play in the researcher’s methodological interest. Some of his conceptual proposals are given as below:[16]
The first of which is called ‘hybridity’ which can be understood in the light of a migrant’s dual nature of culture, i.e., between the original culture and the culture of the new land. Taken this way, ‘hybridity’ can simply mean the mutual cross-cultural exchange between (or trans-culturation of) the colonizers and the colonized in that “negotiation” takes place in-between the space (i.e., the liminal space).[17] Such new transformation is considered anti-colonial as it replaces the “original culture” with a “mutual and mutable” representation of cultural difference.[18] It is taken to function as a bridge between the West and the East, between the colonizer and the colonized by way of narrowing down their distance, and in creating the “third space of enunciation.”[19] It also reveals that the colonizer and the colonized are culturally interrelated and interdependent, and also comparable to a “partial culture” that Bhabha talks about in his essay “Culture In-Between” which functions as “the contaminated yet connective tissue between cultures.”[20]
However, the hierarchical nature of the imperial process is not negated in such suggestion of cultural hybridity;[21] rather, it calls for the colonized subject to contentiously negotiate with the mixing of traditions and cultures.[22] As such, both parties will have certain forms of share and exchange.[23] One example of the way in which such reading can open up a space of negotiation is given by John W. Marshall in his article “Hybridity and Reading Romans 13.” He argues that when Romans 13:1-7 is read as Paul’s stance towards the then Roman imperial world, one recognizes that Paul was an in-between (hybrid) man because “the man who writes ‘Do not be conformed to this world’ (Rom. 12.2), the man who styles himself as the prime ambassador of the true king—writes that the existing authorities have been placed in power by God, are servants of God, and deserve an obedience to which he offers no qualification.”[24] Furthermore, Paul’s use of Greco-Roman rhetoric in writing the letters can also function as a means through which communication takes place between the two contexts.[25]
Another point Bhabha talks about is the importance of ‘liminality’ for postcolonial criticism. He takes Renée Green’s[26] characterization of a stairwell as a “liminal space, a pathway between upper and lower areas, each of which was annotated with plaques referring to blackness and whiteness”[27] to indicate how the liminal space can become a place where an interaction takes place. It represents the transitory or an in-between space where the potential for change can take place. As such, liminal space can help bridge one’s tendency to differentiate the identity of one person to the other – such as that of a tendency to differentiate between the upper and the lower, the black and the white.[28] He argues that the interaction in the interstitial passage can open up the way for “cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy.”[29] Besides, it also questions the polarities of imperial rhetoric on one hand, and national or racial characterization on the other. Therefore, to descend into that space of liminality “may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity.”[30] However, such identification cannot simply be a change of identity from one to another but is a process which requires constant “engagement, contestation and appropriation.”[31]
Bhabha also discusses the concept of ‘mimicry’ which, according to him, is the process by which the colonized subject is reproduced as “almost the same, but not quite” like the colonizers.[32] In other words, ‘mimicry’ refers to the imitation of the colonizers by the colonized by way of adopting their “cultural habits, assumptions, institutions and values…”[33] Such mimicking behavior however is not a complete harmonization or a reproduction of the same, but a form of (metonymic) resemblance, a repetition of the colonial practices with a slight difference.[34] ‘Mimicry’ can therefore be very threatening (or disruptive) to the dominant group because by imitating the colonizers and by becoming almost like them, the power of the colonialism is undermined. Besides, ‘mimicry’ is also helpful in revealing “the limitation in the authority of colonial discourse, almost as though colonial authority inevitably embodies the seeds of its own destruction.”[35] As such, the concept of ‘mimicry’ undermines notions of cultural essence or hegemony.[36]
While Bhabha’s reconstruction of identity may be positive and empowering, terms like ‘hybridity’ is disputable as it has a racist legacy (tone).[37] Besides, the concept of overcoming cultural differences and creating an international culture can be a distant dream. If at all that kind of culture is ever created, will it not in the long run only create another form of dominancy? Besides, it can also give false hopes to people because the contemporary world itself is unable to overcome problems related to racial prejudices, cultural biases and social hierarchies which are still very much prevalent today.[38] Bhabha also seems to have overemphasized the importance of culture whereby limiting culture as the only possible way to bridge the gap between the colonial and the colonized. It would be worth exploring other possibilities of negotiation especially at the level of humanity rather than limiting it to a cultural level alone.
2.2. R. S. Sugirtharajah: Sugirtharajah introduces postcolonial reading to biblical studies on two assumptions: (i) that colonialism dominates and determines the interest of the biblical text, and (ii) that biblical interpretations from the colonial western frame of references are unconcerned with colonialism. Therefore, a postcolonial biblical criticism aims to – (i) open a new era of academic inquiry which brings to the fore the overlapping issues of empire, nation, ethnicity, migration and language, (ii) scrutinize and expose the colonial domination embedded in biblical texts, (iii) ‘overturn colonial assumptions’ inherent in western interpretations (iv) search for alternative hermeneutics, and (v) interpret the text in our own terms and read them from our own specific locations.[39]
During the initial stage of introducing postcolonial studies to biblical studies, Sugirtharajah almost purely treated postcolonialism as a “resistant discourse, which tries to write back and work against colonial assumptions, representations, and ideologies.”[40] As such, his postcolonialism takes “the yearnings of the poor take precedence over the interests of the affluent; the emancipation of the subjugated has primacy over the freedom of the powerful; and that the participation of the marginalized takes priority over the perpetuation of a system which systematically excludes them.”[41] Therefore, its aim also includes retrieving “the sidelined, silenced, written-out, and often maligned biblical figures and biblical incidents and restore their dignity and authenticity.”[42] However, such a very binary opposition has been considered to be sounding like a liberation theology.[43]
His current postcolonial resistant reading, however, goes beyond the ‘essentialist and contrastive ways of thinking’ in the way it “seeks a radical syncretizing of each opposition … while challenging the oppressive nature of colonialism it recognizes the potentiality of contact between colonizer and colonized … tries to integrate and forge a new perspective by critically and profitably syncretizing ingredients from both vernacular and metropolitan centres.”[44] Here, he recognizes neither a reversal to ‘nativism’[45] nor opposition to Eurocentrism in its totality but assumes that a postcolonial reading takes into account the relationship between the ruler and the ruled. For doing this, he borrowed Said’s ‘contrapuntal reading’ which reads a colonial text with a ‘double consciousness’ in order to trace the gaps/silences in the text.[46] This could include
articulating together the works of the margins with those of the mainstream, the marginal texts are treated no longer as interesting and informative ethnographic samples valuable only to a few experts but as a challenging and resisting alternative. Such an act of reading brings these texts out of the neglected and minor status to which they were unfairly consigned for all kinds of political and cultural reasons and positions them in a global setting.[47]
He also takes into account Said’s ‘philological studies’ which involves “getting inside the process of language already going on in words and making it disclose what may be hidden or incomplete or masked or distorted in any text we may have before us.”[48] The investigation of philology is important not only for revealing the meaning of ancient texts but also for knowing how words are used in contemporary public discourse.[49]
It may thus be concluded that Sugirtharajah’s postcolonialism is multifaceted with the inclusion of resistant, multi, interfaith/hybrid to relate postcolonial criticism to biblical studies. Therefore his approach is difficult to categorize under one single model. But his emphasis on resistance, opposition, anti-Eurocentrism, liberative approach and others make his approach “a resistant/recuperative” postcolonial reading model.[50] A keen observer may also find that his postcolonial resistant reading model “initiates a postcolonial contextual theology.”[51] However, his understanding of postcolonialism in the light of Eurocentrism may sometimes limit the scope of his approach.
2.3. Simon Samuel: Since current postcolonialism is seen as engaging exclusively with “modern European colonialism, its economic and cultural impact on the colonial ‘self’ and the colonized ‘others,’ and the counter-discursive, decolonizing artistic, literary, etc.,”[52] Samuel in his book And They Crucified Him: A Postcolonial Reading of the Story of Jesus expresses his concern that there is a need to stretch the scope of this approach “to include the discourse of biblical and postbiblical antiquity.”[53] In this process of stretching the scope of postcolonial studies, few things are considered important.
The first is to do with finding “whether or not the prominent trends in current postcolonial approach have any relevance or potential applicability in studying the social formations and cultural discourses emanating from an ancient colonial/postcolonial context.”[54] In this, a question such as this is asked: “Were there any pro- or anti – or postcolonial discursive, literary, religio-cultural strategies in the ancient world?”[55] Samuel is of the view that Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe is a postcolonial novel which was written as a response to Rome.[56] Secondly, there is a need to
examine whether the biblical discourses have had their origin in colonial contexts and contacts and from among the colonized subject peoples of biblical antiquity. If they are produced and proliferated from colonial contexts, contacts, and subject peoples then it is important to consider the nature of these discourses, and also the extent of their representation or response (appropriation and abrogation) to aspects relating to imperialism and colonialism.[57]
Thirdly, since most postcolonial critics in literary and cultural studies read the Bible in the light of a European colonial context and treat the Bible as “a colonialist, colonizing western discourse,”[58] Samuel asserts that a postcolonial approach to biblical studies needs to take a much more cautious stand than this while not abandoning such view completely.[59] Questions to be asked are: “Whether the biblical discourses are western discourse at all in the first place? Where do they originate? … In what context or contexts do they live and write? Is there any colonial/imperial situation when a particular biblical discourse originated? If so what role or roles does it play in that situation? …”[60] Lastly, he expresses the need to look at Christianity and biblical discourses from “eastern perspective.”[61] Such a suggestion of reading Christianity/Bible from the eastern perspective is tantamount to reading Christianity/Bible from a colonized/persecuted minority perspective. In other words, it is a suggestion to read the Bible from a particular context like India. For doing this, Samuel proposes two novels as a tool for reading from Indian perspective, they are: Draupadi (by Mahasweta) and The God of the Small Things (by Arundhati Roy).[62] Postcolonial studies, according to Samuel, then
need not necessarily be confined to dealing exclusively with the economic, political and cultural issues emanating from the modern European colonialism in ‘other’ parts of the world. One can expand the horizon of postcolonial studies by undertaking a transhistorical view of colonial histories within the framework of postcolonialism, i.e., by considering modern colonialism to be in some measure similar to, say for instance, the Hellenistic or Roman colonialism, and the discursive responses to modern colonialism to be similar to the discursive responses of the colonized communities (Greeks, Jews and others) of biblical and post-biblical antiquity.[63]
Thus, Samuel emphasizes on the context of the interpreter rather than on the Eurocentrism (as in the case of Sugirtharajah). He must also be praised for not completely doing away with the historical context of the text. However, it would not always be easy to find the first century novels or literatures which write back at the colonial Roman Empire, for he thinks that finding such literature/novels as these is important for doing a postcolonial reading.
2.4. C. I. David Joy: Since postcolonialism involves a lot of deconstruction of the past, says Joy in his book Hermeneutics: Foundations and New Trends, it can be defined as “a critical and reflective reading strategy based on particular ideological and theological positions.”[64] He states that in a pluralistic country like India where cultures, religions, races, communal identities and the like, are the characteristics of a society, a reading strategy is needed to evaluate the society. For this, Joy suggested a “postcolonial historiography” to look into “the inner- and intra-dimensions of society in mind.”[65]
He is of the view that assessing postcolonial context from “a historical perspective, including missionary engagements” can reveal many hidden truths and can also function as a test case for analyzing the viability of the methodology. Such reading does not neglect the context completely. Rather he assumes that a proper understanding of the context is important for liberation to take place. Such contextual postcolonial studies should take into account the history and culture very seriously as he states: “A postcolonial reading of the Bible with the right understanding of the context would certainly throw more legitimate light in which the gravity of exploitation can be seen and a way out of the situation be proposed.”[66] His theory is close to postmodernism in the way culture plays an important role in biblical interpretation, apart from history.[67]
Joy also opines that postcolonial theory is ‘interdisciplinary’ in the way it has brought challenges in the field of literature, politics, history and sociology. As such, feminist reading does play an important role in the process of postcolonialism as it can provide an “alternative reading space in a postcolonial context because the feminist mode of resistance empowered many resistance movements in India.”[68] Especially, the native women’s voices are considered important in this reading as they represent the real life experiences of the other localized women (in religion and society). Similarly, the history of a localized woman becomes a determining factor for interpreting the scripture. It is also important that a postcolonial-feminist reading addresses “the intersections between race, class, ethnicity, status and gender.”[69]
Hence, Joy’s postcolonialism is “anti-polemic” in the way it entails many streams of thought such as feminist, postmodernism, contextual and historical readings.[70] His reading is also helpful in giving a critique to both historical and discursive types of colonization.[71] However, his interdisciplinary approach to biblical interpretation may not always be suitable for interpreting every scriptural text, whereby making the theory difficult for a hermeneut to employ except for few/selected texts.
3. Critical Evaluation of Postcolonial Criticism
3.1. Contributions
3.1.1. Postcolonialism can be seen as ‘liberatory’ as well as a constructive project. As to the former, it provides visibility and an entry point into the Western academic discourse. And to the latter, it helps “retell the story of the indigenous subjects of past colonialism and the victims of current neo-imperial policies” especially at the time when there is a loss of faith in history.[72]
3.1.2. It provides a better understanding of how the dominant hermeneutics operates, and also helps one to engage with a new way of dealing with the so called the “other.” That is to say, postcolonialism helps one “to unlearn the subtle ways the dominant discourse operates and to relearn how to confront and reshape it.”[73] As such, it functions as a tool to unmasking “the past textual production of colonialism and to dislodge its legitimizing strategies.” [74]
3.1.3. Postcolonialism also offers a space for those who have once been colonized. It provides a location for the other voices, histories and experiences to be heard. This way, it tends to resurrect the marginal, the indigene and the subaltern.[75] However, one must not limit the task of postcolonialism to speaking the truth to the powerful alone but also in speaking to the poor about the powerful (including the media, multinationals, and the church).[76]
3.1.4. Postcolonialism is also useful in creating awareness about the existence of “colonial legacy” as it continues to have an impact on people, communities and culture.[77]
3.1.5. It also has a role to play in reconciling the past with the present. Until that time when some sort of an end to colonialism is reached (if ever that is possible), postcolonial criticism will have a role to play.[78]
3.2. Limitations
3.2.1. Since postcolonialism has taken more importance to issues related to identity, it is said that terms like “capitalism, casteism, land rights, and class struggle” are missing from its literature even though the scope of postcolonialism may be much larger to the aforementioned terms.[79] The study of postcolonialism also tends to be obsessed with issues related to “diaspora, migrancy and border crossing.”[80]
3.2.2. Sugirtharajah argues that some popular terms in postcolonial criticism like ‘hybridity’ is concerned with metropolitan issues only. Therefore, it overlooks the local issues, “the internal cross-fertilization that takes place within vernacular and regional traditions.” [81]
3.2.3. While hybridity appears to be two-way traffic, in reality it is “one-way traffic” because immigrants are asked to accommodate themselves to the cultures of their new home in the same way as most European governments would require “the immigrant to absorb and integrate into Western ways of life.”[82]
3.2.4. There is also a tendency in postcolonial biblical criticism to treat biblical texts “no longer as moral or spiritual reservoirs, but as a system of codes which interpreters must disentangle in order to reveal the hidden power relations and ideologies lurking in supposedly innocent narratives. Texts were analyzed not to seek spiritual nourishment but to reveal the reactionary and hegemonic values encoded in them – though there may be spiritual nourishment in that.”[83]
3.2.5. It is difficult to measure the extent to which postcolonial theory can have an influence on outside of the academy.[84]Another reservation about postcolonialism is the notion it may give towards people that “colonial relationships no longer exist.”[85]
3.2.6. It is also said that postcolonialism is guilty of “constructing its own canon and privileging certain texts and championing certain theoreticians.”[86]
3.2.7. Sugirtharajah further posits that the danger awaiting postcolonialist in academies is that the universities are increasingly becoming collaborators with corporate capitalism rather than being their critics.[87] It also fails to uncover other voices which lie outside western universities and publishing houses.[88]
Conclusion
The discussion shows that postcolonial (biblical) criticism is a resistant way of reading by which one criticizes the dominant view as well as the powerful rulers (colonizers). One such example is seen as Bhabha’s proposal of a hybrid culture which intends to challenge the dominant culture (of the colonizers). Likewise, Sugirtharajah’s postcolonialism attempts to write back to the tendency of Eurocentrism, while Samuel and Joy’s approach is both contextual and historical. The reading must be applauded for the way it challenges the tendency of one-sided biblical interpretation by uncovering the silenced voices in/of the biblical text. However, postcolonial reading does not seem to be able to stand alone. It needs contributions from sociological and historical criticisms in order to gather information about the biblical times. Therefore, it functions almost like a multidisciplinary approach.
[1] Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, 2003 [1978]).
[2] For examples: R. S. Sugirtharajah, Voices from the Margins: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1991); Laura E. Donaldson, ed., Postcolonialism and Scriptural Reading, Semeia 75 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996); R. S. Sugirtharajah, Asian Biblical Hermeneutics and Postcolonialism: Contesting the Interpretations (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1998); Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited and introduced by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 67-111.
[3] John McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 33.
[4] McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, 33.
[5] As such, postcolonialism indicates “the investigation of the whole of imperializing experience in its diverse forms from its imposition to its aftermath.” Warren Carter, “The Gospel of Matthew,” in A Postcolonial Commentary on the New Testament Writings, edited by Fernando F. Segovia and R. S. Sugirtharajah (New York: T & T Clark, 2009), 70-71.
[6] R. S. Sugirtharajah, Exploring Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: History, Method and Practice (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 25.
[7] R. S. Sugirtharajah, The Bible and the Third World: Precolonial, Colonial and Postcolonial Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 271.
[8] R. S. Sugirtharajah, “Biblical Studies After the Empire,” in The Postcolonial Bible, edited by R. S. Sugirtharajah (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 15-6.
[9] Philip F. Esler, “Rome in Apocalyptic and Rabbinic Literature,” in The Gospel of Matthew in Its Roman Imperial Context, edited by John Riches and David C. Sim (London: T & T Clark, 2005), 10.
[10] Warren Carter, “The Gospel of Matthew,” 70-71.
[11] Sugirtharajah, “Biblical Studies After the Empire,” 15-6.
[12] Sugirtharajah, Bible and the Third World, 251.
[13] Sugirtharajah, Bible and the Third World, 255.
[14] Said, Orientalism. Said presents the vast tradition of Western’s (Occident) construction about the east (Orient). He believes that the presentation of the East in Europe by the western writers, statesmen, political thinkers, philologists and philosophers has created a dichotomy between Europe and the ‘Other’ (the East). He also shows that the West is considered a place of scientific progress and development, while the East is remote, unchanging, primitive or backward. The Orient is also strange, fantastic, and bizarre; while the Occident is rational, sensible and familiar. In other words, the West is considered culturally sound and civilized; while the East is uncivilized. Besides, the eastern Arabs are considered representatives of violent and murderers; while Indians laziness and Chinamen/women inscrutable. Their (oriental) men are not manly, and their women are nude (as an object of sexual desire). Thus, the West became a parameter for which the East is to be measured.
[15] Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In this article, Spivak denounces the harm done to Women/Third World women and non-Europeans. She also criticizes the Eurocentric attitudes of the West. She holds the view that “knowledge” is never innocent. It is always operated by western economical interest and power. It (knowledge) is like any other commodity or product that is exported from the west to the Third world. And the western scholars always present themselves and their knowledge about the Eastern cultures as objective. And their knowledge about the third world is always constructed with the political and economical interest of the west. As such, her aim is to give voice to the subalterns who cannot speak or who are silent. And she also wanted to restore the presence of the women writers who have been submerged by their male peers. Besides, her investigation includes Women’s Double-Colonization (whether Dalit or Black women), and speculations made on widow sacrifice. She, having agreed with Foucault and Deleuze, expresses the view that the oppressed, if given the chance, can speak and know their conditions.
[16] Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
[17] Homi K. Bhabha, “Culture’s In-Between,” in Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by S. Hall and P. Du Gay (London: Sage Publications, 1996), 53-60.
[18] H. K. Bhabha, “Frontlines/Borderpost,”in Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question, edited by A. Bammer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 269-272.
[19] Bhabha, Location of Culture, 36-9, 218; cf. Sugirtharajah, Bible and the Third World, 249.
[20] Bhabha, “Culture’s In-Between,”54.
[21] Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in Postcolonial Studies (London: Routledge, 1998), 118.
[22] John W. Marshall, “Hybridity and Reading Romans 13,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 31/2 (2008): 164.
[23] Marshall, “Hybridity and Reading Romans 13,” 166-67.
[24] Marshall, “Hybridity and Reading Romans 13,” 163.
[25] Marshall, “Hybridity and Reading Romans 13,” 166-67.
[26] She is an African-American artist who uses stairwell as a reference for interstitial or in-between space, the connective tissue that constructs the difference between upper and lower, black and white, and self and other. In her words, “I used architecture literally as a reference, using the attic, the boiler room, and the stairwell to make associations between certain binary divisions such as higher and lower and heaven and hell. The stairwell became a liminal space, a pathway between the upper and lower areas, each of which was annotated with plaques referring to blackness and whiteness.” Renée Green in conversation with Donna Harkavy, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Worcester Museum, quoted in Bhabha, Location of Culture, 3-4.
[27] Bhabha, Location of Culture, 4.
[28] Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts, second edition (London: Routledge, 2000), 117.
[29] Bhabha, Location of Culture, 4.
[30] Bhabha, Location of Culture, 38. This use of the term has been widely criticized, since it usually implies negating and neglecting the imbalance and inequality of the power relations it references. By stressing the transformative cultural, linguistic and political impacts on both the colonized and the colonizer, it has been regarded as replicating assimilationist policies by masking or ‘whitewashing’ cultural differences. There is, however, nothing in the idea of hybridity as such that suggests that mutuality negates the hierarchical nature of the imperial process or that it involves the idea of an equal exchange. Aschcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, Key Concepts, 119.
[31] Aschcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, Key Concepts, 130.
[32] Bhabha, Location of Culture, 86.
[33] Cf. Aschcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, Postcolonial Studies, 125.
[34] Cf. Aschcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, Postcolonial Studies, 125.
[35] Cf. Aschcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, Postcolonial Studies, 125.
[36] Homi Bhabha and Jonathan Rutherford, “The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 207-21. When applied such model to read Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem (Mk. 11:1-11), one realizes that the triumphal entry was ‘almost the same as but not quite’ an imperial triumph. Furthermore, the colt represents an ‘almost the same as but not quite’ a horse: “… an animal ‘on which no one has ever sat’—a telling image of the in-between space that is opened up by the entry story in its imitation and displacement of imperial and nationalist discourses.” Hans Leander, “With Homi Bhabha at the Jerusalem City Gates: A Postcolonial Reading of the ‘Triumphant’ Entry (Mark 11:1-11),” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 32/3 (2010): 323.
[37] Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 2005).
[38] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Massachusetts.,: Harvard University Press, 1999), 403-04.
[39] Sugirtharajah, “Biblical Studies After the Empire,” 15-6.
[40] Sugirtharajah, Asian Biblical Hermeneutics and Postcolonialism, ix-x.
[41] Sugirtharajah, “A Postcolonial Exploration of Collusion and Construction in Biblical Interpretation,” in The Postcolonial Bible, 113. Out of the 14 concerns and preoccupations he mentioned, few of them may be mentioned as below: “(1) Investigating the social, cultural, and political impact of colonialism on individuals and indigenous cultures… (3) Recovering the resistance of the subjugated. This looks not only at the dynamics of colonial domination but also at the capacity of the colonized to resist, either openly or covertly. (4) Identifying postcolonial conditions caused by a set of historical, political, and cultural contingencies – migration, diaspora, refugees, internally displaced persons, and hyphenated identities. It studies the process and effects of cultural displacement on individuals and communities and the ways in which the displaced have defined and defended themselves. (5) Decentering universal and transhistorical values of Western categories of knowledge. It questions the three mainstays of the Enlightenment: objectivity, rationalism, and universalism. (6) Transgressing the contrastive way of thinking. The binary categorizations include colonizer/colonized, center/margins, modern/traditional, and static/progressive. It queries the presences of such dualistic thinking, and applies deconstructive techniques to show that though the histories and orientations of colonized and colonizer are distinct, they overlap and intersect. It encourages productive crossings between the two. (7) Interrogating colonial and contemporary practices of representation of the “other” and the power relations that lie behind the production of such knowledge…. (12) Decentering of dominant forms of knowledge which envisioned the world from a single privileged point of view which simultaneously elevated the cultures of the colonizer – religions, arts, dances, rituals, history, geography – and undermined those of the colonized.” Sugirtharjah, Exploring Postcolonial Biblical Criticism, 14-6.
[42] Sugirtharajah, Exploring Postcolonial Biblical Criticism, 47.
[43] Cf. Simon Samuel, And They Crucified Him: A Postcolonial Reading of the Story of Jesus (Dehradun: Thadathil, 2012), 23.
[44] Sugirtharajah, “A Postcolonial Exploration,” 94.
[45] “The nativist reading provides an opportunity for buried painful secrets to be brought to light, silent hearts to be opened and a past to be shared among the natives. The native myths, religions, culture and history play a crucial counter-discursive role in essentialist postcolonial reading.” Samuel, They Crucified Him, 20.
[46] Sugirtharajah, Voices from the Margins, 352-63.
[47] Sugirtharajah, Exploring Postcolonial Biblical Criticism, 22. “Contrapuntal reading is an activity which leads to a larger world of texts and enables an interpreter to see connections. It unveils what might have been buried or underdeveloped or obscured in a single text. As an example of contrapuntal reading, I would like to look at the birth stories of the Buddha and Jesus. These have both considerable common features and considerable differences.” Sugirtharjah, Exploring Postcolonial Biblical Criticism, 143.
[48] Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 59.
[49] Sugirtharajah, Exploring Postcolonial Biblical Criticism, 23.
[50] Samuel, They Crucified Him, 24.
[51] Samuel, They Crucified Him, 25.
[52] Samuel, They Crucified Him, 15.
[53] Samuel, They Crucified Him, 15.
[54] Samuel, They Crucified Him, 15.
[55] Samuel, They Crucified Him, 15.
[56] Samuel, They Crucified Him, 46.
[57] Samuel, They Crucified Him, 15.
[58] Samuel, They Crucified Him, 16.
[59] Samuel, They Crucified Him, 16.
[60] Samuel, They Crucified Him, 16.
[61] Christians in the east, just as in the days of biblical antiquity, are still a ‘colonised’ minority in most Asian and African societies where they continue to experience ‘otherness’ in one way or another. Samuel, They Crucified Him, 16.
[62] Samuel, They Crucified Him, 100-06. ‘Draupadi’ functions more or less like a postcolonial mimicry in the way the protagonist Draupadi-Dopdi “camouflages and mimics the heroine of the dominant discourse. But this camouflaging is not to imitate (repeat) that heroine but to imitate with a difference and thus disrupt her discursive power.” Samuel, They Crucified Him, 102-03. Likewise, “Velutha… imitates and alters the aristocracy of color, beauty and strength of the dominant self (the Suriyani Christians and the Nair upper caste Hindus). He is a strong and handsome black star, but he is name Velutha (white). In and through his name he crosses-over to the space of the dominant and alters their discursive superiority of color (whiteness), beauty, strength, intelligence and fertility….He also ventures into the terrain of the Syriyani Christians, but was spotted and chased off to fly into a space of enunciation and emancipation beyond the reach of the dominant…Velutha … moved into a third space, which became a new and united, menacing space of ‘Untouchables,’ and the ‘Touchables,’ a space of enunciation and emancipation for the marginalia in the coming years in India.” Samuel, They Crucified Him, 104.
[63] Samuel, They Crucified Him, 5.
[64] C. I. David Joy, Hermeneutics: Foundations and New Trends (Delhi: ISPCK, 2012), 40.
[65] Joy, Hermeneutics, 54.
[66] Joy, Hermeneutics, 45, 61-2.
[67] Here postmodernism is compared with culture or popular culture. Joy, Hermeneutics, 59.
[68] Joy, Hermeneutics, 66.
[69] Joy, Hermeneutics, 68.
[70] He opines that “in the process of formulating a viable hermeneutical principle, a polemical attitude is not helpful. Any kind of polemic in hermeneutics may create further divisions within the society. For instance, Dalit theology, one of the powerful expressions of the nativist mode, is anti-Sanskrit due to its historical and religious origins…James Cone too warns native hermeneuts and theologians about the dangers of not being open to other streams of thought and having dialogue with various local and native traditions of hermeneutics. Joy, Hermeneutics, 74; cf. James Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1992).
[71] Joy, Hermeneutics, 75.
[72] Sugirtharajah, Exploring Postcolonial Biblical Criticism, 26.
[73] Sugirtharajah, Exploring Postcolonial Biblical Criticism, 27.
[74] Sugirtharajah, Bible and the Third World, 272.
[75] Sugirtharajah, Bible and the Third World, 250, 272.
[76] Sugirtharajah, Bible and the Third World, 274.
[77] Sugirtharajah, Bible and the Third World, 272.
[78] Sugirtharajah, Bible and the Third World, 273.
[79] Sugirtharajah, Exploring Postcolonial Biblical Criticism, 25.
[80] Sugirtharajah, Exploring Postcolonial Biblical Criticism, 24.
[81] Sugirtharajah, Exploring Postcolonial Biblical Criticism, 25.
[82] Sugirtharajah, Exploring Postcolonial Biblical Criticism, 25. One example can be given of France where burqa/burka is forbidden in public places, universities, and so on.
[83] Sugirtharajah, Exploring Postcolonial Biblical Criticism, 185.
[84] Sugirtharajah, Bible and the Third World, 274.
[85] McLeod, Beginning of Postcolonialism, 32; cf. Carole Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (London: Routledge, 2003).
[86] Sugirtharajah, Exploring Postcolonial Biblical Criticism, 26.
[87] Sugirtharajah, Exploring Postcolonial Biblical Criticism, 185.
[88] Sugirtharajah, Exploring Postcolonial Biblical Criticism, 26.
LAI-LEENG 