Abstract
Postcolonial theory or postcolonial theology and radical theology share important characteristics in common. Broadly speaking, there are two key elements: First, both theologies take a deconstructionist approach to theology that implies these theologies’ emphases on change and their rejection of rigid dichotomies. Second, radical theology shares a non-dualistic orientation with postcolonial theology. However, postcolonial theology does not reject transcendence itself. It does not advocate immanence without transcendence, the former over the latter. Rather, it challenges the binary separating the two. Such binary is still somewhat maintained in the early proponents of death of God theology as they tend to affirm immanence over transcendence.
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Notes
- 1.
In their Postcolonial Geographies (New York: Continuum, 2002) Alison Blunt and Cheryl McEwan define the critical aftermath of colonialism as “cultures, discourses and critiques that lie beyond, but remain closely influenced by colonialism” (3).
- 2.
Arif Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura,” Critical Inquiry 20.2 (1994): 328–356; Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000), 209; Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000), preface.
- 3.
The most notable and active voices associated with this school of thought are Anibal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, Fernando Coronil, Linda Alcoff, Maria Lugones, Raul Grosfoguel, Catherine Walsh, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres.
- 4.
Robert Young, Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), 6.
- 5.
Vine Deloria, Jr., God is Red (Golden, CO: North American, 1994); Vine Deloria, Jr., For this Land (New York: Routledge, 1998); George Tinker, Spirit and Resistance (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004); George Tinker, American Indian Liberation Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2008).
- 6.
Elsa Tamez, The Amnesty of Grace, trans. S. Ringe (Nashville: Abingdon, 1993); Ivone Gebara, Longing for Running Water (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999); Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology (London: Routledge, 2001).
- 7.
See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Frantz Fanon , Black Face, White Masks (New York: Grove, 1967); Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg , eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, IL: U Illinois P, 1988).
- 8.
Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000).
- 9.
Richard Rubenstein, After Auschwitz (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 153.
- 10.
William Hamilton, “The Shape of a Radical Theology,” Christian Century 82 (6 October 1965), 1220.
- 11.
Thomas Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (Louisville: Westminster, 1966), 101.
- 12.
Mayra Rivera, The Touch of Transcendence: A Postcolonial Theology of God (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 7.
- 13.
Mark C. Taylor, After God (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007), 143.
- 14.
John Caputo, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 52. See also, Lars Sandbeck, “God as Immanent Transcendence in Mark C. Taylor and John D. Caputo,” Studia Theologica 65 (2011), 18–38.
- 15.
Rivera , The Touch of Transcendence, 3; Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics (London: Routledge, 2000).
- 16.
Jeffrey Robbins, Radical Theology: A Vision for Change (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 9.
- 17.
Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, 48.
- 18.
Marcella Althaus-Reid, The Queer God (London: Routledge, 2003), 2.
- 19.
Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, 48.
- 20.
Althaus-Reid, The Queer God, 39, 99.
- 21.
Jeffrey Robbins, Radical Theology, 4.
- 22.
Ibid., 9.
- 23.
Lisa Lowe, The Intimacy of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 120.
- 24.
Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs, 44.
- 25.
Aijaz Ahmad, “The Politics of Literary Postcolonialism,” Race & Class, 36 (3), 12.
- 26.
Referring to the emerging literary field of Third World literature and Colonial discourse analysis, Aijaz Ahmad writes, “There appears to be in both these subdisciplines far greater interest in the colonialism of the past than in the imperialism of the present.” See, Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Class, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), 93.
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Yountae, A. (2018). Postcolonial/Decolonial Theology. In: Rodkey, C., Miller, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96595-6_51
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