Postcolonial Theory and Theology: On Educating Ourselves to be Planetary Subjects

Abstract

Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Homi Bhabha have demonstrated to us the importance of reading differently. They have revealed to us the ideological, political, and economic matrix within which the cultural texts of a specific period take shape. Reading could never be considered as a straightforward activity after Said published his Orientalism.2, 1994). Said has taught us that the text, the context of its production, the processes of its circulation, and the contexts within which it is read, are all crucial to its meanings. Hence, we can say that the colonized played an important role in Europe’s literary imaginations. To put it simply, Edward Said made the process of reading European literature a discomforting activity by reminding us that fantasies about the Oriental subject sustained and justified political aggression in colonized spaces.3 And yet, to say that postcolonial theory only brought in the perspective of the Third World reader would be too simplistic an explanation that reduces this form of questioning to some kind of identitarian politics, or a mere representation of the voices of the silenced. The other postcolonial critic, Homi Bhabha, is interested in the interstitial spaces, or the “in-between” hybrid identities that make up minorities.4 He is right in pointing out that those who occupy the margins of a society, those who are in the periphery of the Empire, are not necessarily natural allies of one another.