Postcolonial Theology, Emancipation, and Comparative Religions:
Social Scientific Approach
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Abstract:
This article researches postcolonial theology as an umbrella term in which I take on religious ethics, liberation, and the significance of comparative religions. A global, critical position juxtaposes Christendom and Islamdom, and facilitates a social scientific approach toward the Eurocentric position and Edward Said’s Orientalism. A biopolitical theory of European colonialism in America provides a point of departure for reformulation of postcolonial theory and theology. An archeology of effective history is at work in appreciating the challenge of World Christianity and postcolonial mission. A comparative approach to Axial Age facilitates an attempt to conceptualize the constructive theology of comparative religions in postcolonial formation.
Keywords. Islamdom, Archeology, Effective History, Biopolitical Colonialism, and Axial Age
Problematization
Postcolonial methodology denotes a recent arrival to Asian/Asian-American feminists, who represent postcolonial deconstruction in the fashion of Jacques Derrida, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak. They take issue with Asian liberative theology or Asian feminist (modernist) theology, because the project of the latter is considerably built on poverty, religious pluralism, and Asian narratives. Asian liberative theology at large is accused of essentializing Asian religious-cultural resources in order to promote the Asian-ness of doing theology.
Transnational postcolonialists, such as Kwok Pui-lan, contend that such distinctive methodology is obviously seen in Aloysius Pieris’s characterization of Asian-ness in terms of multifaceted religiosity and poverty-stricken reality. Such position would be echoed in a fictional return of the colonized to one’s indigenous history and culture. Emphasis on the essential features of Asia and the search for the colonized past would be easily exposed to the trap of a self-Orientalizing exercise.[1]
A theology focused on Asian-ness is attacked as a nostalgia for a colonized past. An accusation of self-Orientalizing quest marks a regime of problematic and requires a clarification. What is the postcolonial theory underlying such passion of deconstruction?
Postcolonial Theory and Epistemology
Postcolonial theory is concerned with social cultural phenomena of the colonial aftermath, taking issue with the pathology of late modernity. It is to recover histories (or effective forms of histories and narratives concerned with the marginalized and the subjugated), while reviving cultural individual biographies in subversion of Western discourse of representation and hegemony.[2] The conception of postcolonialism, or postcoloniality can be invented as an umbrella term in order to discern political and social cultural events in constant flux onto postcolonial reality and condition. “Once colonized world” is fraught with contradictions, confusion, hybridity, and liminality. The mixed nature of postcolonial identities in hybridity comes to terms with stratification of postcolonial people in the metropolis, as well.
It is important to awaken the consciousness of the subalterns under the neo-colonial system of domination under Empire and to cope with their condition and hybrid nature of multitude in psychological, social-cultural, political, and economic realms.[3]
Edward Said made such groundbreaking work of Orientalism by initiating postcolonial critique and demystifying the cultural representation of the Oriental societies under Western episteme. Orientalism implies a style of thought, which is mainly built upon the binary opposition or hierarchical dualism between the Orient and the Occident. It is a western style of representation that subjugates the colonial other and establishes ideological justification in dominion over the Orient.[4]
Michel Foucault’s theory of discourse and genealogy of power-knowledge couplet becomes foundational for Said’s analysis of the European discourse of Orientalism. Edward Said, together with Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhaba, plays the catalyst in providing the postcolonial insights for theoretical sophistication and practice. Postcololnialism can be defined as a theory of reading strategy in terms of discourse of representation and power relations (Said) or deconstruction (Spivak, a translator of Derrida’s Of Grammatology), or a psychological condition of being embedded with ambivalence, hybridity, and resistance (Homi Bhaba).[5]
Under the influence of postcolonial theory, transnational deconstructionists denounces essential feature of Asia-ness to be illusion, because essential features are being incorporated into globalizing transnationalism.
Genealogy of Racism and Death Politics
In distinction from transnational deconstructionists, however, Vitor Westhelle provides the history of the Spanish empire as the initial stage to undertake his liberation theology in postcolonial formation. The Industrial Revolution was considerably indebted to European colonialism in Americas following Columbus’s conquest. A conflictual logic of colonialism can be seen in the relationship between the Spanish Empire and desire of the conquistadores. This combination unveils a binary juxtaposition between the oppressor and the oppressed as a naïve interpretive device. Indeed, the conquistadores served the interests of the empire, while bringing their own desires often to conflict with the crown.[6]
In the first phase of the capital power of Genoa, the Spanish conquest is characterized by the Christian character of capital accumulation (structural violence), through which biopolitical colonial governance involves plundering gold and silver (direct violence). The indigenous people were nearly extinguished. The second phase of early capitalism under Dutch hegemony was driven by the triangular trade. Slaves were captured in Africa and shipped to the Americas for plantation labor to produce raw materials, like cotton. These goods were shipped to Europe to be manufactured and sold all over the world. The transatlantic commerce and trade system continued its colonialist expansion and capital accumulation under the hegemony of the Britain.
The long twentieth century of capitalism [7] has developed in various European powers, which lead to the current combination of superpowers (USA, the EU, China, and Japan) underlying the neoliberal world system.
Each regime of capital accumulation is associated with political, military, territorial forces invested within power relations, hegemony, racism, and abolition of local indigenous culture. Capital globalization in the context of transnationalism comes to terms with increasing racism and homogenizing of the local culture into the neo-colonial phase. As Thomas McCarthy argues, postcolonial neo-imperialism continues along with post-biological neo-racism after the demise of formal colonies and scientific racism. This agenda of neo-racism is mediated by and invested in power structure.[8]
In the second historical stage of Christian character of capital accumulation we observe how Scramble for Africa was organized to avoid their possible conflicts in African colonies in Berlin Conference (1884-85); it was undertaken and disseminated through Eurocentric discourse of free trade and civilizing mission. King Leopold II of Belgium made a bid to persuade other European colonial powers for his civilizing project to eliminate the slave trade in Congo. The British, French, and German governments wanted to avoid conflict or skirmish with one another with their own colonial aspirations, so that they acquiesced to Leopold’s project in founding Congo Free State (CFS) in 1885, which should be his own personal property.
The borders of the CFS were outlined in the Berlin conference, in which Congo was to remain a free trade zone for individuals of all nationalities. However, when the pneumatic tire was invented in 1890, it required a dramatic demand for natural rubber.
Leopold finally exploited an opportunity for profits through concessions given to private companies. In fact, the collection of rubber or ivory did not require so much capital investment and training of the labor force, as compared with the collection of other natural resources (diamonds or minerals).
In 1891 and 1892, Leopold confiscated all lands and any raw materials for the property of the CFS and made division of the land into three areas; the domaine privé (the first area) became property of the state, in which concessions were given to private companies by precipitating the extractive form of colonialism in the combination between economic exploitation and biopolitical governance with militias.
Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company (Abir) and Anversoise were established and given concessions in the Upper Congo Basin, which had immense natural rubber resources. They lasted for 14 years (1892 –1906) until exhausting the natural resources. Most of a second area (“closed area”) was allocated to the Katanga Company in the southwest. In the rest of the country (a “free trade zone”) individuals of any nationality could engage in trade.[9]
Areas outside of the concessions remained free trade zones, whereas individuals trading in these areas were not allowed to have the same rights and resources, which were granted to the concession companies. Individual entrepreneurs of the European nations in the free trade zone in the Congo were allowed to have monopoly leases on anything valuable such as ivory from a district or for the rubber concession for 10 or 15 years.
As the rubber concessions were allocated, the companies established posts within the areas in order to collect rubber through cooption of local leaders with authority and leadership within communities. Villages were enjoined to provide food and supplies to maintain lives of the European agents in the posts. Compliance with the rule of coopted leaders was achieved by way of armed sentries recruited from outside and with the support of European agents.
In the combination of cooption and coercion, uncooperative leaders are replaced with submissive ones so that ruling lineage of local institutions is created by the rubber concessions. It characterizes the interaction between culture and institutions, which continues to dominate village politics today.[10]
The concession companies set up militias armed with rifles and guns, which comprised of sentries responsible for violence, while ensuring compliance with the rubber quotas and coopted leadership. The European agents or officers together with sentries were also involved in violence tactics (the imprisonment, torture, and killing).
Once companies set quotas for the collection of rubber, villagers were assigned to deliver every other week a required quota of about four kilos of rubber. When failed to fulfill the requirement, there followed punishment (including imprisonment, forced work, or whipping) and physical violence or death. its brutality and atrocity led to the deaths of an estimated 10 million people, which were perpetrated in its colonial social system of extractive economy with racism and death politics.[11]
Heart of Darkness in Debate
Joseph Conrad’s (1857- 1924) Heart of Darkness unveils how the heavenly civilizing mission in European colonialism is degenerated into heart of evil and horror in the Congo Free State. His novella is praised as one of the great works of English literature.
However, this changed in 1977 when Chinua Achebe criticized the novella for entailing thoroughgoing racism in terms of a distorted image of Africa. “The point of my observations should be quite clear by now, namely that Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist. That this simple truth is glossed over in criticisms of his work is due to the fact that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked.”[12]
In “Two Visions in Heart of Darkness” (1933) rather Edward Said defended Conrad’s literary work. Rather than racial limitation, Said considers the events of imperialism “as a network of interdependent histories that would be inaccurate and senseless to repress, useful and interesting to understand.”[13] Conrad assists us in comprehending the Europeans ferocity of imperial mastery in Africa.
Conrad’s narrative, in Said’s view, is bound as a creature of his time and place underlying his limitation. There is no alternative for Conrad to overcome imperialism, nonetheless, there is particular truth in Conrad’s way of demonstrating the discrepancy between his critical views of imperialism and European justification of colonialism. Thus, Said is concerned “to keep drawing attention to how ideas and values are constructed (and deconstructed) through dislocations in the narrator’s language.”[14]
Conrad’s view of African race is not so much tainted with bloody European racism unlike Achebe.
“They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity — like yours — the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you — you so remote from the night of first ages — could comprehend.”[15]
Europeans and others are originated in Africa. If not an anti-racist, Conrad is of anti-colonial sensibility in his affirmation of humanity of the natives, who are victims in the degenerative form of civilizing mission. They ate morally innocent in contrast to European perverted civilization.
European evil in the heart of darkness is seen in their greed as they loot and torture the Africans in their search for ivory, which is much worse than Africa in the place of darkness. There is a danger in Europe. Conrad retains a strong disdain for colonialism, while calling them conquerors. They just took what they wanted like violent robbers or murder on a comprehensive scale. “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves.”[16]
In the literary discussion of Conrad’s narrative, racial theory should come to terms with a critique of imperialism, which must be removed for the sake of independence and emancipation on the part of the colonized.
In travelling into the hinterland of darkness, Conrad finds it meaningful to state that London just like Africa has been “one of the dark places of the earth.”[17] The former is now benefited to live in a flicker, because Roman conquest is compared like a flash of lightning in the cloud (Caesur’s expedition in 55 and 54 BCE).
His cosmopolitan world would be differentiated from social Darwinist view at his time categorizing human life in terms of binary opposition between the savage and the civilized. Conrad is not convinced that culture and morality can be conceptualized on a continuum from savage to civilization.
Nonetheless, Conrad did not implement his critical voice for public campaign as organized in protest like Roger Casemann. Casement’s report (later known as the 1904 report as the document for dissolution of the rule of Leopold) included enslavement, kidnaping, chopping hand, physical mutilation, or and torture of the natives on the rubber plantations among others; these seem uneasy to Conrad.
Despite his critique of colonialism and exploitation, he remains at existential level, and his worldview of empire and imperial conquest appears still to be a good ‘Leviathan,’ despite his moral critique of colonial degeneration. He does not address international politics of Berlin Conference that granted the Congo Free State to the personal property of Leopold II for the benefits of civilization against horrors of slavery and cannibalism. An avaricious Leopold became the emperor of Congo, keeping Ivory trade as his major concern. When its profit began to decline, another natural source, wild rubber captured his greed to make money, while leading to mass murdering.
Leopold’s Congo Free State, which was built upon the madness of greed and atrocity, was denounced by Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness regarding the ivory enterprise in early stage. In 1891 and 1892, Leopold made an attempt to increase revenues by way of concessions given to private companies, which drove their economic extraction allied with biopolitical governance with militias. Despite his anti-colonial outrage of ivory system in 1890, Conrad has no serious concern with addressing political economic realm as driving force underlying imperial ideology.
If he began writing his novel in 1898, shouldn’t he have tackled the historical reality of European character of capital accumulation by way of critique of laissez faire capitalism and its colonial ideology?
If Conrad went up the Congo river in 1890, his experience has little to do with a colonial type of extractive rubber companies through indirect rule; it is set up in colonial social formation as coopted with local leadership and militias for exploitation of forced labor in the rainforest, punishment, and biopolitical genocide. This complex reality characterizes colonial theory of racism as inseparably bound to imperialism.
In fact, Conrad remains silent about what make imperialism feasible, real, and effective by turning the Congo Free State into Congo Slave state stained with African blood, victim, and death. Should such silence be condoned in his personal experience with Congo only in 1890? His literary interpretation of atrocity in Congo is mixed with his civilizing mentality of racism, though his racial prejudice needs not to be conflated with social Darwinian principle of the survival of the fittest in incessant struggle for existence.
It is allied with Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)’s in Memoriam (“Who trusted God was love indeed And love Creation’s final law—Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine, shriek’d against his creed —“). Social Darwnism was poular in the late Victorian era in England (1837-1901), which was bound to the British imperial expansion in the Scramble for Africa during the 1880s.
Spencer’s theory of Social Darwinism incorporated Darwin’s idea of natural selection into the mechanism of evolution for the phrase of survival of the fittest; it was accepted in the fifth edition of Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1869). In laissez-faire capitalism individuals are free to compete for survival so that only the fittest should survive in the natural order of things ‘red in tooth and claw.’ This perspective finds the government intervention to be irrelevant and failing.
Furthermore, there are affinities between Tennyson’s “The Two Voices” and the account of the mind in Spencer’s The Principles of Psychology. To earn Tennyson’s support of his psychology, Spencer wrote in 1855 to Tennyson by quoting the verse in the poem “The Two Voicies”: “Or if thro’ lower lives I came- Tho’ all experience past became Consolidate in mind and frame.” The phrase “lower lives” become a continuing factor of influence of the evolutionary theory in Tennyson.[18]
In the widespread conception of social Darwinism an imperialist poet Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” in 1899 (widely reprinted in American newspapers) became a call for competition of the races and triump in this competion and war in the Anglo-Saxon world. Such white supremacy is a bastion of imperial ideology for the benefit of the whole of humankind leading to the progress of civilization and civilizing mission.[19]
On the contrary, Maya Jasanoff in her Dawn Watch defends Conrad as a cosmopolitan thinker in recognizing the savage as one of us or the civilized in a global world.[20] His accusation of colonialism and his experience of the global world is underlined in “Heart of Darkness,” which offered a very different perspective on imperialism in contrast to the world known through poems like Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden.”
Indeed, historical reality does not necessary fit literary fiction. The colonial military (Force Publique) was originally organized in 1885, which comprised of white officers, black enslaved, and African recruited soldiers at large outside the area of Congo. They were employed by the rubber companies to carry on their profits and economic extraction. This continues to characterize Christian character of capital accumulation, which was a sophisticated resurgence of Spanish forced labor system in the Americas.
White Man’s Burden and Effective History
A colonial type of concessions implies a colonial social organization, which focuses on extraction of natural resources with little investment in terms of collaboration with local leaders supported by the military tactics of violence. Its biopolitical governance is based on indirect rule of companies, which recruited outsiders to be armed with militias—together with European agents—as responsible for punishment, violence tactics, and death. A minimal productive investment was operative. This conceptual framework can be seen as a common thread across the many concessions granted during the colonial era even in Asia. [21]
Crucial in the colonial governance is racism, whose theory finds its modern form in Gobineau’s pre-Darwinian theory of race. In his writings the 1850s, the French aristocracy is purported to trace back to Germanic extraction, as compared with the mass of the French people in Gallic or Celtic origin. His assumption of superiority of the Germanic race was fabricated to thwart the rising ascendency of democratic movement since the French Revolution. Several decades later, it provided a racial ideology to the exponents of National Socialism.
Around that time in Britain and in America “the white man’s burden” was fabricated to justify Anglo-Saxon world domination against its orientalist colonialism.[22] The social Darwinist worldview reinforces the European competition for the benefit of the whole of humankind, by propagating civilizing mission and capitalist trade system. It led to colonial wars.
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), English journalist, poet, and novelist, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and published his poem, entitled “The White Man’s Burden” (1899). It was imbued with his British imperialism and widely reprinted in American newspapers by transposing such imperial ideology. It was a summon to the American war for carrying out colonial control over and annex the Philippines (the Philippine-American war, 1899-1902) after the Spanish-American War (1898).
As Thomas McCarthy states, “…social Darwnism became the dominant ideology in a period that saw the establishment of a racial caste system in the South, the competition of Indian removal in the West, the shift from continental expansion to internatonal imperialism in the war with Spain, and the rise of organized opposition to immigration from Southern and Estern Europe in the Northeast, and from Asia, especially China, in the West.”[23]
John O’Sullivan’s phrase “manifest destiny,” which was coined in the annexation of Texas (1845), was implicated in a racialized term. William Graham Sumner (1840-1910), an American chief disciple of Herbert Spencer, accepted the evolutionary, progressive view of society in accordance with the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest at the expense of ‘inferior’ others. The inherent ingerioty of the natives or the Blacks were deemed to be unfit for full citizenship, while incapable of competiting with whites. Their remaning hope for survival was to scumb to the discipline and guidance of superior race. Social Darwinist principle was to serve later American legal establishment such as Jim Crow segragation in the Southern United States and other areas from 1896 (upheld in the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson) until 1965.[24]
A project of taking up the white man’s burden in the late nineteenth century emphasizes the responsibility of all “civilized” people to bring indigenous people out of “darkness” and into the age of empire. Social Darwinism behind “The White Man’s Burden” strove to justify and disseminate a doublet of colonialism and racism not only in Britain, but also in the United States. It is politically overcharged in manufacturing a discourse of Orientalism and disseminating Euricentric scholarship within a framework of white supremacy.
Agnes M. Brazal introduces a Catholic theological endeavor in articulating liberation-postcolonial ethics in the Philippines. She is aware that the term “postcolonial” refers to an umbrella discourse, but its theory is typically taken from French poststructuralism (Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan). R. S. Sugirtharajah from India is credited as a postcolonial theologian, who represents postcolonial biblical hermeneutics.
Brazal formulates her theological method by appropriating Stuart Hall, a postcolonial neo-Marxist scholar. She also fosters vernacular cosmopolitanism, underwriting the wisdom of the local culture by opening it up to intercultural exchanges.[25] A vernacular virtue like hiya (shame) is retrieved to promote the universal common good as a way of overcoming political populism or fake news in the context of social media. This ideological situation plagues the social-political reality of the Philippines.
A notion of vernacular cosmopolitanism becomes innovative and challenging. It is concrete–universal rather than abstract-universal. In fact, Derrida retrieved and even misused Kant’s ideas of cosmopolitanism and hospitality for his poststructuralist direction. However, Kant’s racial injustice is already unveiled as a questionable regime by social scientists, such as Thomas McCarthy.[26]
Other than the transnational deconstructionism, Brazal’s project is concerned with a translation of vernacular ethical concepts in order to interpret Biblical language in inculturating manner. Local people are making their own history. She draws attention to Stuart Hall’s social scientific theory of articulation to enhance Catholic social ethical teaching in her own cultural and political matrix. She values Hall’s approach to the outline of commodity production in Marx’s Grundrisse and Capital. She paves a creative path to a correlation between liberation theology and postcolonial epistemology, while integrating the significance of comparative study of religion and culture by cutting across an unqualified accusation of self-Orientalizing quest.[27]
In this way, I draw attention to Louis Althusser, who develops a theory of articulation between social formation and human praxis. It can be allied with effective history of the diverse instances (politics, economics, religion, ideology, culture, race, and sexuality)—that is a complex reality of society and culture in stratification. The absence of problems and their presence within the problematics requires a symptomatic reading (or better, an archeological reading) of what is repressed in the text. It searches for an underlying contradiction or absence by which to unveil what cannot be said in the text.
In Althusser’s view, Foucault brings substantial insight into epistemological break or rupture in his study of cultural formation in different historical times and episteme. “There is nothing in true history which allows it to be read in the ideological continuum of a linear time that need only be punctuated and divided.”[28]
There is no correspondence within diverse spheres or instances (the economic, the ideological, the aesthetic, the philosophical or the scientific), because they “live in different times and know other breaks and other punctuations”. [29] The co-existence of a presence and absence, or articulation of two different moments can be regarded simply as “the effect of the structure of the whole in its articulated decentricity”.[30]
The backwardness, forwardness, survivals, and unevenness co-exist in the structure of the real historical present, in other words, the present of the conjuncture or combination of diverse events. This perspective features effective history (centered on break, decentricity, and difference), which reacts against the marching history of progress and technological rationality tainted with Western imperial power.
The effective history helps buttress a postcolonial stance in seeking to measure and appraise the dislocation of colonial histories and cultures against the line of a single continuous reference time. The latter regards the dislocation as backwardness or forwardness in terms of its ideological reference time. The effective history is constructed with the historical reference to and critical exposition of linear march and progress (Eurocentric position).
Effective History and Social Formation
Social scientific analylsis of effective history does not necessarily counter a symbolic-materialist theory of social formation. In deaing with the reality of social formation, Habermas draws attention to Lucacs’s heuristic synthesis of Hegelian-Marxian dialectics with Weber’s sociological analysis of rationalization, specialization, and Bureucratiztion. A theory of seeing the society from the standpoint of totality renews historical, materialist inquiry into social formation in its reality of reification by cutting through limitation and insufficiency of its economic-reductionism.
Social formation is organized and stratified embedded within the intersection of diverse fields or public spheres (politics, economic, education, culture, religion, sexuality, and race). In these fields there is class/status struggle for power, privilege, and prestige when it comes to multiple forms of capital (symbolic, cultural, social, and economic). This materialist-materialist position facilitates an endeavor in reformulating the civil society. According to Gramsci, civil society is distinguihed from political society, and culture is operative in the realm of civil society (family, education, institutions, realigion, and trade union).
If the conception of civil society is widened in terms of life-world, the realm of civil society is reified and coloniized in postcolonial condition beset by immigration, refuge, and multiculyiral pluralism. The civil society in postcoloial condition requires a politics of recognition and difference in inetrction with people of other faiths and cultures and their racial stratification. Effective history involves investigating the multiple reality of social, cultural strafication, social discourse (episteme), bureaucratic administration, and power relations. Effective history comes to terms with a critical theory of social formation, while explicatng the extent to which a reified reality is embedded within the intersection of diverse social fields in the postcolonial condition.
World Christianity and Postcolonial Mission
A social scientific theory of effective history helps unveil the western church historiography as retaining a dichotomy between church history and mission history. It tends to lose the unrecorded voices of Biblical women, evangelists, catechists, translators, and uncounted faithful laypeople in the history of mission. The history of victors in the colonial system of domination had the lion’s share of representing church history, which subordinates the local agency and role of missional project to Eurocentric historiography.[31]
This perspective becomes crucial in scholars of World Christianity, which focuses on inculturation and indigenous translation of biblical message to recasts postcolonial notion of God’s mission. Stephen Bevan and Roger Schroeder propose an interactive model which focuses on self-renewal and reconstruction of Christian identity, while challenging the painful history of colonial mission. Their study of Bartholome de las Casas in Spanish colonialism refers to his mission as liberation and solidarity with the indigenous people. The interactive model focuses on Matteo Ricci’s mission as inculturation and recognition in Chinese Confucian context, including Robert de Nobili in India. Bevan and Schroeder redefine God’s mission in terms of prophetic justice, interreligious dialogue, and a hermeneutic of appreciation.[32]
Postcolonial missional theologians such as Jonathan Ingleby confront the global reality of the Empire through a constant biblical theme. In a biography of Rudyard Kipling, the imperial mission is recommended to the colonization of the Philippines.[33] Ingleby advocates a prophetic tradition of the scriptures and other emancipatory voices in religion and politics. A new biblical exegesis focuses on the Old Testament, the apocalyptic writings in the gospels and Paul’s letters. Ingleby upholds anti-imperialist or postcolonial mission beyond Empire to overcome the structure of the legitimation and hegemony.[34]
A postcolonial notion of God’s mission is classified by interpolation, mimicry, archeology, extraordinary realism, palimpsest, and re-presentation. Incultural or transcultural translation relies upon local wisdom and language, and it becomes a commentary on interpolation, because the colonized uses the cultural capital to dismantle the imperial system. Colonialism has written off on a place by choosing names and ways of representing their interest through maps, monuments, and boundaries. In a piece of manuscript or a palimpsest missionaries wrote their own version of the Gospel under their cultural, linguistic biases. However, no inscription is indelible.
Ingleby is critical of a notion of mimicry and the role of mimic person whose identity is the indigenous yet with Western in taste. His/her role is to mediate between the colonial authority and the colonized, particularly as a colonial collaborator. A policy of mimicry is, however, not a deliberate strategy, having unhealthy consequences.[35]
Walter Benjamin’s anamnestic position remains crucial in Ingleby’s mission of resistance against European Fascism. “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another.” (thesis VII) [36]
A postcolonial passion of rewriting or re-presenting the side of effective history calls for an archeological skill in fight against Fascism and Eurocentric progress, and it seeks to decipher the irregular side of the downtrodden who is buried on the underside of history, religion, and culture. An archeological skill unearths history in the light of life-world as the constellation. There are many voices, stories, cultural patterns in the Arabic calendar like stars in constellations on the celestial sphere, which are irreducible to European scientific, technological revolution.
Global, Critical Trajectory: Orientalism and Eurocentrism
At a deeper level, effective history (Wirkliche Historie) is juxtaposed with history of effect (Wirkungsgeschichte). Such combination helps take a critical outlook of Eurocentrism and Orientalism, as seen through the lens of archeological interpretation and genealogical analysis of discourse and power relations.
Samir Amin seeks to unveil a myth of Eurocentrism over and against Islamic civilization, in accord with his tributary world-system. Such world-system was divided into core and peripheral areas (arranged from 500 BCE through Hellenism, then the birth of Christianity, and finally the birth of Islam to 1500 CE). In all tributary cultures there is the preeminence of the metaphysical and religious aspiration in the search for absolute truth.[37]
Tributary ideology and culture were already present in the accomplishments of ancient Egypt, Hellenistic-Eastern Christian, Islamic civilization, and European Christianity. Amin challenges any opposition between Greek thought and ‘Oriental’ thought, because the latter does not exclude Greece.
In Amin’s view, Said’s theory of Orientalism is insufficient and even at fault, because he has not managed to propose another system of scientific explanation, when it comes to socioeconomic basis for Eurocentric system of domination. Said is vulnerable to his provincialism, leading to inverted Orientalism.[38]
Therefore, Said’s theory of Orientalism is met with a serious critique, because he reiterates and accepts the objective scientific device fabricated in the Western scholarship, without reservation. According to Muslim intellectuals such as Tariq Ramadan, Said shares in the same objectives and the same tools which are utilized and abused among Western secular scholars. A European projection of Orientalism is justified and taken for granted by Said’s own ideological or self-invented position. Said lacks Islamic history and its religious, cultural tradition with the high civilization that he should have depicted.[39]
To cut through a Manichean dualism of binary opposition, it should be said that the Muslims in the sixteenth century and even into the seventeenth had reached the zenith in terms of political power and cultural creativity. According to Marshall Hodgson, a leading scholar in the history and civilization of Islam, “in the sixteenth century of our era, a visitor from Mars might well have supposed that the human world was on the verge of becoming Muslim. He would have based his judgment partly on the strategic and political advantages of the Muslims, but partly also on the vitality of their general culture.”[40]
A theory of ‘Islamdom’ in analogy of Christendom necessitates a juxtaposed notion of modern development in the sense of Oikumene. Ecumenical correlation in the universal history remains crucial in the comparative study of civilization between Christianity and Islam. A theory of Eurocentrism or Orientalism is discarded as a conspiracy theory in its abdication of Islamic civilization. Genealogy of power can be seen in the argument: Saudi theologians who claim for the authority of medieval Islamic texts are to be regarded locally, but Western scholars who rely on the authority of Western modern literature are to be taken universally.[41]
Furthermore, in my view, Said’s major problem can be noticed in his hermeneutical malnutrition in disseminating an anachronistic reference to historical, political life-setting. For example, Said cites in passing from Marx’s sentence in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “Sie kȍnnen sich nicht vertreten, sie műssen vertreen werden.”[42] They cannot represent themselves politically, but they must be represented.
In Marx’s own historical context, they (sie) refer to the poor peasantry, which was politically betrayed by Louis Bonaparte. Against the politics of Bonaparte, Marx advocates for the peasantry and their vulnerability by claiming their rights in the French political system. In sum, they have nothing to do with the poor Orient, as Said speculates. Representation in Marxian sense implies political advocacy, rather than defending an anachronistic theory of Orientalism and its panacea of representation.
Amin formulates his theory of Eurocentrism through the Renaissance; the very first traces are found in Italy, but coming to cover much of Europe. Perhaps, it would mark the transition from the Middle Age to the modern age.[43] After the fall of Constantinople in 1453 by the Ottomans, many eastern scholars fled to Italy, introducing important books and manuscripts and a tradition of Greek scholarship. This event was associated with Columbus’ voyage to the New World (1492) and the development of the Renaissance.[44]
However, Amin’s reliance upon European Renaissance appears to lack the high stage of Islamic civilization, which had influenced the European course of modernity. Unlike Amin, however, the Renaissance in the European context cannot be regarded as a point of departure in confirming European modern hegemony. In fact, the Islamic contribution to European Renaissance can be traced back to the translation of the works of Greek philosophers in Baghdad in the period from 750 to 850 under the rule of Abbasid caliphate. Cosmopolitan Baghdad had a valuable library, and with the help of Syrian Christian scholars, it contained Greek works of science, medicine, and mathematics. It includes philologically accurate translations of the works of Plato and Aristotle into Arabic.[45]
Furthermore, Cordoba, the capital of the caliphate in Spain, was the jewel of the earth in the tenth and eleventh century in terms of economic flourishing and cultural and intellectual aspects. One caliph’s library among seventy libraries retained 400,000 volumes.[46]
At the dawn of the sixteenth century Islam–the Ottoman in Anatolia, the Near and Middle East, North Africa, the Balkans and other European regions. The Safavid in the Fertile Crescent and the Iranian highlands; and the Mughal in northern India—was the most vital civilization in the world, and they had established good organization and reached prosperity which Occidentals had admired. They held a hegemonic potential over East and West.
This Islamic civilization, or Islamdom can be defined as the civilizational source of European Renaissance, since it had advanced the cultural characters in the political cities in vast geo-cultural areas.[47]
This global, critical trajectory renews Amin’s argument, which focuses on the origin of capitalist modernity only on the Renaissance, Protestant Reformation, and the Enlightenment. The year 1492 inaugurates European expansion, conquest, and massacre in biopolitical colonization. Biopolitical massacre, done by Spanish colonialism in America, was allied with a Christian character of capital accumulation, and it must become the point of departure for postcolonial study to engage in biopolitical governmentality, bureaucracy, and economic exploitation, military massacre, and racism.
Archeological Interpretation and Genealogy of Religion
“The postcolonial” that I have discussed implies a new method of effective history and archeological theory involving a semantic retrieval of the religious source. The term ‘archeological’ is a descriptive term in defining the site of history as not homogeneous with empty time; rather the archeologist attempts to fill time and rewrite present history by unearthing past materials, religious classics, wisdom, and life stories of local people in the tradition and history. ‘Hermeneutic’ refers to one’s interpretive reason in interaction with tradition, history, culture, and texts as the life-world, while exploring social discourse in one’s contemporary location or social topography. A hermeneutic archeologist is contrasted with conformism and historicism, which reaches culmination in the universal history of homogenizing every particular and dissimilar into empty time.
Interpretive reason is of anamnestic character in explicating the effective history by taking up what has been downtrodden in the underside of history and tradition. An Archeological hermeneutics is concerned with deciphering of effective history in many stories in the constellation with reference to meaning understanding, and truth, as interpreted in the multiple process of fusion of horizons. It implies a shift in historiography from Eurocentric mode of representation to polycentric description and constructive principle by problematizing the regime of the homogeneous, progressive-linear, and empty time.
Foucault’s notion of archeology concerned with discourse analysis can be enhanced to entail genealogical position in dealing with the significance of understanding and meaning (Gadamer). Foucault’s archeology does not necessarily oppose to meaningful regime of truth and subjectivity, which is irreducible to power.
However, Foucault’s archeology should be renewed with reference to history as effect or its meaningful influence upon interpretative reasoning in the sense of life-world. It involves meaning and deep layered intelligibility in the sense of fusion of horizon that Gadamer rightly deploys. Of course, history could be misused ideologically as progressive and homogenous time reference to support Eurocentric system of episteme and scholarship.[48]
In strengthening ideological-critical sensibility, I focus on Walter Benjamin’s creative view of history which synthesizes the effective history of the innocent victims with Messianic sense of historical and social transformation. His anamnestic reasoning, which is concerned with struggle for those downtrodden in the past, reinforces the social scientific experiment in unearthing realm of the effective history. As Benjamin writes on his thesis on the Philosophy of History, “nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history” (thesis III). “Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins” (thesis IV).[49]
Genealogy of effective history in the world of religions examines the way in which particular discourse and practices in religious symbols and cultural pattern have been foreclosed and discarded by dominant narrative of the sacred truth. A genealogy of religion takes issue with anthropological conception of religion as the system of symbols, which is imbued with its realism in an aura of factuality (Clifford Geertz). Archeological method appropriates a method of thick description and relocates it in the wider spectrum of sacred texts, religious narratives, material interests, and institutional power, which have run in different course from the religious source.
Having said this, Asad’s critique can be reviewed concerning Clifford Geertz’s approach to religion as a cultural system. Asad’s leaning to religion through power or coercion sidesteps Geertz’s anthropological deliberation of religious symbols and cultural practices (for instance, Balinese Cockfight as the Balinese meaningful way of life) in the local realm. Religion as cultural system is defined as an ensemble of semantic texts which is deciphered and thickly described for meaning and truth in a phenomenological, hermeneutical frame of reference. The culture of a people is an ensemble of text, in which local people are making their history and society.[50]
Accordingly, the Biblical symbol of reconciliation underwrites religious practice of recognizing the otherness of the other, which is accorded with each life-word in specific time and different place. The cultural realm of religious symbols and practices is irreducible to Asad’s power reductionism or coercion.[51]
Postcolonial God and Alternity
A genealogy of religion leads to a postcolonial articulation of God as the radical alterity, in other words, totaliter aliter imbued with relationality. It is relational in the presence of the divine speech act through the face of the Other. A hermeneutical reflection of God as an infinite horizon of speech act has multiple dimensions which embrace intra-textual narrative as well as extra-biblical narrative. It is inter-textuality, as it were, that underlines the Biblical symbol of reconciliation with reference to the life-world. A dynamic process of fusion of horizons transpires in involving the life-world in terms of dialogue, responsible critique of sedimented obscurities and prejudices, and emancipation. A semantic circle is moved in intertextual interaction by synthesizing biblical narrative with socio-biographical narrative in society and the world.
Emmanuel Levinas deserves merit in his distinction between the saying (living discourse) and the said (written text), which facilitates a postcolonial notion of God as relational totaliter aliter—God’s saying in the otherness of the Other. Dabar in Hebrew manner means speak, talk, and reveal in the ways that God’s speech act happens as promise, hope, and future.
Enrique Dussel proposes ana-lectical method and ethical hermeneutics by incorporating Levinas’ ethics of the alterity into emancipatory framework. His ana-lectical method begins with the discourse of the Other in Latin America and seeks to discover the analogical character of the word of the Other. Dabar entails ana-logy and a dialectical dimension in the sense of critique of social injustice and advocacy of grace for the poor.[52]
The language of analogy or parable is featured by approximation, tentativeness, and open-endedness. Analogical and parabolic narrative situates linguistic signifier to describe social reality in terms of powerful and creative tension between similarity and dissimilarity. The biblical symbol of God’s speech act is associated as meaningful signifier with Jesus’ use of secular parables and analogies in the life context of public sinners and tax collectors (massa perditionis). Such biblical signifier remains fulcrum for intertextuality, while protesting to all forms of idolatry, masculine domination, and absolutism.
A hermeneutical endeavor of intertextuality is required to re-read the comparative texts in terms of analyzing religious discourse, institutionalized knowledge system, social location, episteme, and cultural stratification. A new horizon of emancipation considers the regime of dissimilarity in dealing with gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity, which is hierarchically stratified in society and culture.
Comparative Study and Axial Age Theory
It is a well-known fact that the comparative study of religion has been under much criticism because it attempts to typify whole religious traditions and result in gross simplification underwriting an apologetic purpose. However, in recent approaches to comparative religious ethics, there is a shift of emphasis on refining the hermeneutical-dialogical approach, which uses intercultural moral theorizing and praxis. It involves the quest for cross cultural understanding and the fusion of diverse moral and religious horizons.[53]
Robert King in his postcolonial study of religion contends that Said has left the ways in which indigenous people of the East have constructed their own critical response to colonialism. A legitimate re-presentation and rewriting of the Orient is required on the part of the colonized for comparative study of religion, culture, and morality by resisting traditional Orientalist discourse of misrepresentation. [54]
A sociological analysis of religious ideas in the texts can be undertaken in explicating the extent to which its elective affinity would be imbedded with material and ideal interests in the historical course of time and driven by institutional support, legal dominion, and bureaucracy. It is genealogically invested in discourse formation and institutional power and disseminated in terms of rationalization (underlying a general idea of order or existence), motivational action and religious disposition, discipline, exclusion of difference, institutional bureaucracy. When the religious discourse functions as a disgrace effect of a knowledge system (episteme) to support the powerful by betraying its prophetic, critical source, it should be subject to the immanent critique, which first comes from the source of the text, then from historical differential and social location.
Framed in the comparative study of religion, a notion of axial age and its critical principle deserves attention. The social concern and alternative critique to the prevailing system of domination had always remained crucial in the visions of the great world religions, as developed from the Axial Age (c. 700 B.C.E. to 200 B.C.E.).
In all the civilizations of axial age “there is a profound tension between political powers and intellectual movements. New models of reality, either mystically or prophetically or rationally apprehended, are propounded as a criticism of, and alternative to, the prevailing models.”[55]
Liberation theologians such as Ulrich Duchrow and Franz J. Hinkelammert advocate the notion of axial age in the global civilization for spirituality, wisdom, and ethics of world religions to confront life-destroying civilization; the latter is inscribed and manifested in economic injustice and ecological destruction in the thread of global capitalism.[56]
In the sociohistorical analysis of antiquity and religions, they focus on the Judeo-Christian position of economic justice and solidarity in the comparative study of the Buddhist critical stance against greed, aggression, and illusionary consciousness, which finds its significance in the Buddhist alternative to capitalist modernity. They also include Islam as a renewal of axial age spirituality in post-Axial period in terms of Muslim liberation theology cutting through the institutionalizing greed and capitalism.[57]
Accordingly, the socioeconomic inquiry facilitates a social scientific method in taking on the elective affinity between religious ideas, ritual practices, material interests, and power relations in monetizing and stratifying a given social formation. In fact, it unveils the character of a human being as the monetized being. Greek principle of participation in the cosmic rite of passage is of critical, democratic, and communal character in the ancient polis. But in ancient India the monarch is of archaic character, becoming the center of the power and ritual sacrifice in underlying the mystical union of the one’s inner self with cosmic principle; it is undertaken in terms of monetization, power monopolization, and colonial hierarchy.[58]
In the principle of the Axial Age (critique, social justice, and solidarity) religion entails one of the most distinguished features in protesting to the hierarchy of the prevailing system, power hegemony, and stratification of economic injustice. Such position finds its validity in a postcolonial study of comparative religions to advance toward alternative modernity or trans-modernity in overcoming the reification of the monetized fetish being and masculine system of domination penetrated into in a neoliberal global capitalism.
Comparative Theology and Narrative Experience
A constructive theology of comparative religions in postcolonial formation implies an attempt to refine one’s religious identity in conversation with a variety of religious traditions and resources. Resources from other cultural traditions (emic theory of thick description) help enrich theological epistemology (hermeneutical self).
Francis Clooney conceptualizes comparative theology in commentarial and exegetical manner, in which practice of reading together plays the most important role in shaping substantial features of his comparative reasoning of faith seeking understanding. His comparative theologyis characterized by Homo Lector and self-effacement, and argues therefore against an attempt, which reduces the studied traditions and other traditions’ faith to mere safe and disposable information for the apologetic manner. Rather, he respects the transformative power and its claim to universal validity, without distorting the other tradition.[59]
Clooney envisions comparative theology as a project of collectio (reading together) “intends a rethinking of every theological issue and a rereading of every theological text” in light of other sacred texts.[60] A homo lector requires self-effacement before the text, allowing for the textual world to disclose productive ways of thinking and transforms the reader. This perspective explains Clooney’s experiment for theology after Vedanta.
However, I sense that a composed textual world by the comparative theologian tends to violate the source of life-world; a comparative reader replaces such a regime without analyzing the textual world in connection with religious ethics, material interests, disgrace effect, and power relations, all of which affect and even distort the source of the religious texts. A self-effacement should be reformulated in phenomenological notion of suspense. It does not necessarily discard a character of critical, constructive stance and problematization of doctrinal regime and its authority for rich application of the two different religions for semantic retrieval and emancipation.
If the religious discourse is inscribed into material interests and justifies the social system of power structure (the caste in Indian society), to what extent would comparative theology reinterpret the religious belief system and its doctrinal regime as the source of the immanent critique of social injustice? For this task, constructive theology of comparative religions undertakes a sociological-hermeneutical inquiry in which a semantic notion of synthesis of meaning is compared in the two traditions through fusion of horizons. It further frames such semantic experiment in a symbolic, materialist analysis of power relations within social stratification or in the reality of postcolonial condition.
A bio-political reading strategy finds itself in the problematization of or critical distance from questionable regime by suspending what is taken for granted. Such inquiry remains crucial within the framework of each life-world, and it requires commentarial, exegetical work on religious texts in accord with immanent critique, solidarity, and emancipation. The sacred literatures are historically conditioned, socially located, and interest-bound. This sociological or more specifically, archeological hermeneutics allows for self-effacement in the initial stage of appreciation in authentic listening to and learning from other sacred texts; it then proceeds to explicate elective affinity between religious ideas and material interests among religious carriers inscribed into discourse formation, and technical rationality, and biopolitical domination.
Thus, homo lector cannot be separated from homo socius and ethicus, and this sociological articulation takes issue with a mere submission to the hierarchical elements of the religious texts and their problematic discourse in justifying religious authority and its symbolic violence.
In the comparative practice of reading together, interpretive reasoning cannot avoid the plurality, multiplicity, difference, and ambiguity which affect all religious texts. A hermeneutical self takes issue with the history of religions and their practice, which are vitiated by appalling litany of genocide, inquisitions, crusade, just wars, obscurantism, exclusion of the Other.
The self is a telling creature in which a narrative is at the heart of personal identity. A Christian identifies with biblical narrative and living Word of God, while a Christian comparatist seeks to find its meaningful discourse in other religious narratives in the transcultural context.
Narrative experience finds its prophetic significance in a thread of cross-cultural effectiveness; it is reported that the Russian novelist Tolstoy (1828–1910) made impact on Gandhi (1869–1948) in his ascetic non-violent life. Religious narrative finds its emancipatory import in a later generation committed to civil rights movement and protest to the Vietnam War: Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968), Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972), Thich Nhat Hanh (1926–), and Malcolm X (1925–1965).[61]
Concluding Thesis: Postcolonial Theology
Postcolonial theology appropriates postcolonial epistemology, which facilities unveiling the Eurocentric mode of representation or politically charged discourse of Orientalism. It denounces the Eurocentric system of scholarship, domination, and violence as a conspiracy theory, as analyzed through social scientific experiment. It takes as a point of departure biopolitical colonialism and massacre in Americas and its subsequent transatlantic trade system propagating Christian character of capital accumulation, slavery, genocide, and racism. Such colonial legacy perpetuates its logic of structural system of violence in the neo-colonial phase of Empire, which vitiates and reifies our life-world through political governmentality, a new form of social racism, and hierarchy of social cultural stratification.
Postcolonial theology is a constructive way of articulating Christian faith and intelligibility in terms of the Biblical symbol of reconciliation and through religious practice of recognition with reference to significance and validity of life-world in each specific culture and society. God the totaliter alter is of relational character by addressing ethical challenge through the face of the Other.
Postcolonial theology utilizes social scientific inquiry in critically explicating the extent to which religious discourse would be intertwined with material interests, biopolitical governance, bureaucracy, and institutional power in the aftermath of colonialism. It penetrates today’s globalized world, which reifies and stratifies cosmopolitan relation between the metropolis, semi-periphery, and the periphery.
Postcolonial theology is concerned with civil society and its public spheres, which are being integrated into the reality of postcolonial condition in which liminal consciousness and hybridity are increased along with immigration problem and neo-racism. These are organized in social stratification with its hierarchical spectrum.
Against the marching history of Eurocentric modernity, postcolonial theology takes issue with its pathology or iron cage, while it conceptualizes a notion of effective history in archeological-anamnestic frame of reference. Postcolonial reasoning takes into account the correlation of universal history between the West and the East. Islam and its great civilization are appreciated as one of the greatest sources for a different path to modernity, democracy, economic justice, and civil society.
Postcolonial theology implies a constructive theology involving the world religions in terms of the principle of Axial Age. Therefore, it actualizes religious compassion, moral stance, economic justice and integrity of nature in our global phase of the second Axial Age. It frames constructive theology of comparative religions in the formation of interreligious solidarity and emancipation, featuring a significance of alternative modernities in transcending Eurocentric form of modernity and its colonialist pathology.
There are some basic features of constructive theology of comparative religions in explicating the degree to which religious discourse and textual exegesis would be embedded with the role of agency, economic force, and institutional power. This complex reality is to be explicated in the stratification of society and culture through the genealogical lens of effective history for renewal and change. A comparative practice of reading together is articulated on the basis of comparative reader as social being imbued with ethical practice in solidarity with those downtrodden in the world of religions. It is concerned with rewriting of a narrative of effective history, which relates to the area of sexuality, gender, race, and ethnicity in the postcolonial condition, which is fraught with hybridity, liminality, and multitude, and wave of immigration.
Postcolonial theology of God and alterity entails concrete-universal horizon in the light of Biblical symbol of reconciliation, which does not deprive of claim and validity of each life-world. A passion of metanoia and the renewal of church’s responsibility can be heard in a prophetic voice of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “The Church confesses that she has witnessed the lawless application of brutal force, the physical and spiritual suffering of countess innocent people, oppression, hatred and murder, and that she has not raised her voice on behalf of the victims and has not found ways to hasten to their aid. She is guilty of the deaths of the weakest and most defenseless brothers and [sisters] of Jesus Christ.”[62]
[1] Kwok, Pui-lan (2007): Fishing the Asia Pacific: Transnationalism and Feminist Theology. In Rita Nakashima et al (eds.): Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women’s Religion and Theology. Louisville (Westminster John Knox), 16. Endnote 47.
[2] Gandhi, Leela (1998): Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. New York (Columbia University Press), 8.
[3] Westhelle, Vitor (2010): After Heresy: Colonial Practices and Post-Colonial Theologies. Eugene (Cascade), xvi.
[4] Said, Edward (1978): Orientalism. London (Routledge).
[5] Kwok (2005): Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology. Louisville (Westminster John Knox Press), 2.
[6] Westhelle (2010), After Heresy, 8, 14.
[7] Arrighi, Giovani (1994): The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London: (Verso).
[8] McCarthy, Thomas (2009): Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development, Cambridge (Cambridge University Press),7.
[9] Sara Lowes and Eduardo Montero, Concessions, Violence, and Indirect Rule: Evidence From the Congo Free State
Working Paper 27893, National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge. Mass.:2020), 6-7. 6-7
[10] Ibid., 5.
[11] David Van Reybrouck, The Epic History of a People, trans. Sam Garret (New York: HarperColins, 2014)
[12] Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa” in Things Fall Apart: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed Francis Abiola Irele.1st Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008). 176 [169-81].
[13] Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 19.
[14] Ibid., 29.
[15] Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness: A Norton Critical Edition. 4th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 36.
[16] Ibid., 10.
[17] Ibid., 5.
[18] Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1897), 1: 44. 411.
[19] McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development, 81.
[20] Maya Jasanoff, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (London: Penguin, 2017)
[21] Melissa Dell and Benjamin A. Olken, “The Development Effects of the Extractive Colonial Economy: The Dutch Cultivation System in Java,” The Review of Economic Studies, 2020, 87 (1), 164–203.
[22] Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development, 311.
[23] McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development, 69.
[24] Ibid., 77.
[25] Brazal, Agnes M. (2019): A Theology of Southeast Asia: Liberation-Postcolonial Ethics in the Philippine. Maryknoll ( Orbis Books), xxxiii.
[26] McCarthy (2009: Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development,
[27] Brazal (2019): A Theology of Southeast Asia, 41.
[28] Althusser, Luis and Etienne Balibar (1979): Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster. London (Verso), 103.
[29] Ibid., 104.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Sanneh, Lamin “World Christianity and the New Historiography.” In Wilbert R. Shenk (ed.) Enlarging the Story: Perspectives on Writing World Christian History. Maryknoll (Orbis Books), 94.
[32] Bevans, Stephen B. and Schroeder, Roger P: (2004): Constants in Context: A Theology of Mission for Today. Maryknoll (Orbis), 176-95.
[33] Ingleby, Jonathan (2010): Beyond Empire: Postcolonialism and Mission in a Global Context. Milton Keynes (Author House), 32.
[34] Ibid., 29.
[35] Ibid., 51.
[36] Benjamin, Walter (1968): Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Hannah Arendt (ed.). New York (Schocken), 256.
[37] Amin, Samir (2009): Eurocentrism: Modernity, Religion, and Democracy. New York (Monthly Review Press), 100.
[38] Ibid., 176.
[39] Ramadan, Tariq (2012): Islam and the Arab Awakening. Oxford (Oxford University Press), 87.
[40] Hodgson, Marshall G. S. (1999): Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam, and World History. Cambridge: (Cambridge University Press), 97.
[41] Asad, Talad (1993): Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore and London (Johns Hopkins University Press), 8.
[42] Ibid., 87.
[43] Ibid., 152.
[44] Amin, Eurocentrism, 152.
[45] Hans Kung (2007): Islam: Past, Present and Future. Oxford (Oneworld),366.
[46] Ibid., 376.
[47] Salvatore, Armando Salvatore (2009): “Tradition and Modernity within Islamic Civilisation and the West.” In Muhammad Khalid Masud, et al (eds.) Islam and Modernity, Key Issues and Debates. Edinburgh (Edinburgh University Press), 3.
[48] Chung, Paul S. (2012): Postcolonial Imagination: Archeological Hermeneutics and Comparative Religious Ethics (Hong Kong).
[49] Benjamin, Walter (1968): Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Hannah Arendt (ed.). New York (Schocken), 254. 255.
[50] Geertz, Clifford (1973): The Interpretation of Cultures. New York (Basic Books), 452.
[51] Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 34.
[52] Barber, Michael D. (1998): Ethical Hermeneutics: Rationalism in Enrique Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation. New York (Fordham University Press), 50-1.
[53] Twiss, Summer B. and Bruce B. Twiss, (eds.) (1998): Explorations in Global Ethics: Comparative Religious Ethics and Interreligious Dialogue. Boulder (Westview), 1.
[54] King, Richard (1999): Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India, and “The Mystic East.” London (Routledge), 95.
[55] Momigliano, Arnaldo (1975): Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenizations. Cambridge (Cambridge University Press), 8-9.
[56] Duchrow, Ulrich and Franz J. Hinkelammert (2012): Interreligious Solidarity for Just Relations: Transcending Greedy Money. New York (Palgrave Macmillan), 1-6.
[57] Ibid. 74-83. 85-96.
[58] Seaford, Richard (2020): The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and India: A Historical Comparison. New York (Cambridge University Press).
[59] Clooney, Francis X (1993): Theology after Vedanta: An Experiment in Comparative Theology. New York (State University of New York Press), 5–6.
[60] Ibid.
[61] Fasching, Darrell J. et al (2011): Comparative Religious Ethics: A Narrative Approach to Global Ethics. New Jersey (Blackwell), 4-5.
[62] Bonhoeffer, Dietrich (1995), Ethics. New York (Macmillan), 114.