Abstract
This article aims to point out two seminal reflections on interlocution: Frostin’s insightful late-1980s (1988) analysis of ‘Third World’ liberation theologies and his contention that the decisive question for liberation theologies was the question of who the primary dialogue partners of liberation theology have been and should be, and Vuyani Vellem’s more recent millennial (2012) reflection on how South African Black Theology after liberation has grappled and should grapple with the notion of interlocution. My choice of these two scholars is not idiosyncratic, for Vellem uses Frostin’s work as one of his starting points. I build on this conversation, reflecting with Vellem on how we might understand the issue of interlocution within black and kindred liberation and prophetic theologies today. My particular emphasis is on biblical hermeneutics; therefore, my contribution to the conversation frames my reflections within a particular phase of Black Theology in which the Bible is most significantly problematised, what Tinyiko Maluleke refers to as the second phase of Black Theology. The conundrum Itumeleng Mosala poses for Black Theology is how the recognition of the Bible as itself – intrinsically, inherently and indelibly – ‘a site of struggle’ reconfigures interlocution. Mosala, I will argue, forces us to not only ask who we interpret with when we do Black Theology, but also ask which biblical texts we read, for not all biblical texts offer resources for liberation.Contribution: This article makes a contribution to the VukaniBantuTsohangBatho – Spirituality of Black Liberation collection in which the work of Vuyani Vellem is celebrated and critically engaged. Specifically, the article interrogates and contributes to Vuyani’s Vellem understanding of ‘locution’, and asks how this concept impacts our understanding of biblical text.
Highlights
In the midst of the struggle against apartheid, in the mid-1980s, the Swedish theologian Per Frostin (1988) compiled and published his seminal analysis of Third World liberation theologies in general and two African liberation theologies in particular: Liberation Theology in Tanzania and South Africa: A First World Interpretation
The fine-print endnotes and bibliography make up one-third of the book, providing a rich archive from which Frostin established the arguments he made about Third World liberation theologies
We work with biblical texts that have been sociohistorically recovered from redactional co-optation, and we offer these texts of kin voiceless sectors in the ancient world to contemporary organised sectors of the voiceless, using both literary narrative and socio-historical analyses
Summary
In the midst of the struggle against apartheid, in the mid-1980s, the Swedish theologian Per Frostin (1988) compiled and published his seminal analysis of Third World liberation theologies in general and two African liberation theologies in particular: Liberation Theology in Tanzania and South Africa: A First World Interpretation. The poetry that Mosala refers to is the capacity of future contexts of struggle, such as the South African post-1994 struggles, to provide avenues of access to the fragmentary presence of ideologically co-opted social sectors How is this to be done, considering the deliberate redaction of marginalised voices in the production of almost any biblical text and the Bible as a whole? The sectors we interpret the Bible with, as part of locally controlled emancipatory projects (West 2016), readily identify ‘glimpses of liberation and of a determinate social movement galvanised by a powerful religious ideology in the biblical text’ (Mosala 1989a:40) Because these ‘glimpses’ are embedded http://www.hts.org.za within dominant sector discourse, having been redactionally co-opted, there is the danger, as Mosala warned, of embracing the ideo-theology of the dominant as we attempt to appropriate such liberatory ‘glimpses’. We work with biblical texts that have been sociohistorically recovered from redactional co-optation, and we offer these texts of kin voiceless sectors in the ancient world to contemporary organised sectors of the voiceless, using both literary narrative and socio-historical analyses
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