Towards a Network of Theological Enquiry
A question of mission – a mission of questions
Freedom of the human spirit from captivity
Theological and ethical issues in the age of globalisation
Towards an Asian theological agenda for the 21st century
Impulses in Caribbean theology
Beyond partnership – Towards a global theological agenda
The people of God among all God's peoples
Globalisation: A myth without a vision?
Democratic impulses in Buddhism
Today, I want to approach this very important topic of an Asian theological agenda by introducing to Asian theology a new conversation partner: post colonial theory. Due to the many common issues which the two bodies of literature share, I believe, a conversation between Asian theology and post colonial theory will shed light on where we would position Asian theology as regard to where we are now and to where we might want to go.
In the following, I shall first underline what I mean by post colonial theory and in what ways I find the convergence of the two bodies.
Post colonial theory has become an important tool of analysis especially for cultural critique in the formerly colonised world. Building on Edward Said's seminal work in Orientalism,1 post colonial theorists question the distinction between 'pure' and 'political' knowledge and work to destabilise the former. For most Third World intellectuals involved the discussion which comes to identify specifically with the term 'post colonial' begins with changes in power structures after the official end of colonialism as well as colonialism's continuing effects. For them post colonial theory is an umbrella term that has gradually come to cover different critical approaches which deconstruct European thought in a wide-range of areas including philosophy, history, literary studies, anthropology etc.
In this perspective, post colonial discourse involves literature and criticism not of a simple periodisation but rather a methodological revisionism which enables a wholesale critique of Western structures of knowledge and power, particularly those of the post-Enlightenment period.2 In sum, it does not only bear "witness to those unequal and uneven processes of representation by which the historical experience of the once-colonised Third World comes to be framed in the West",3 it also aims to dismantle the 'West-as-centre'."4
There is a certain ambiguity involved when we pose the discussion of colonialism and postcoloniality in Asia. The subject of colonialism has not been raised in Asia as openly as it has been in countries from Africa or the Caribbean and Latin America. For instance there are people who argue that not every country in Asia had experienced colonialism and hence the irrelevance of a post colonial discourse; others argue that neo-colonialism, much more than postcoloniality, plays a major role in Asia's socio-political and economic scene. Rey Chow, a Hong Kong native now teaching in the States, argues to the contrary. For her, the importance of post colonial critics lies exactly in the fact that imperialism continues its ideological role in constituting our everyday culture and value as Asians today.5
It is in this understanding that Asian Theology, since its inception, has also taken part in the post colonial discourse. It has contributed to a body of critics by the once colonised peoples who seek to take their place, forcibly or otherwise, as historical subjects. Asian theology carries with it a critical scrutiny of the colonial relationship and sets out in one way or another to resist colonial perspectives. It, too, aims at a change in power and a symbolic overhaul and a reshaping of dominant meanings within and without the Christian world. Borrowing from Elleke Boehmer's comment on post colonial theory, Asian theology as a post colonial discourse is deeply marked by experiences of cultural division under empire. It delineates the complexity of colonised experience and seeks to undercut thematically and formally the discourses which supported colonisation – the myths of power, the race classification, the imagery of subordination,6 and in the case of Christianity, the one universal system of knowledge of the Divine.
From the beginning Asian theology has shouldered an anti-imperialistic task. It has been marked with a bitterness toward the Western heritage of Christian theology and a strong urge to find its own place and identity in the overall theological discourse. In one of his sarcastic, figurative analogies, C S Song compares Christian theologians who try to absorb everything passed on to them from the West to a "big-bellied man" troubled with indigestion.7 He calls for an Asian way of 'doing' Christian theology, in his address to the inauguration of the Program of Theologies and Cultures in Asia in 1987:
"(It) is (about) a theological movement to change the ways we (Asian Theologians) have been doing theology for many decades, to reclaim our own Asian-ness of our theological tasks, and to be able to carry on our theological responsibility with our fellow Asians."8
Over the years since the Second World War (and before this in China and India), numerous theologians all over Asia have made important efforts in living up to this task. The theological movement of indigenisation and contextualisation came to a full bloom during the harsh years of nationalistic struggle in various Asian countries after the Second World War, with important pioneers such as M M Thomas, D T Niles, Aloysius Pieris, C S Song, Marianne Katoppo, and many others (including some of our friends here) have contributed to 'exorcising' the 'omen' of an imperialistic Christianity. For more than fifty years Asian theologians have called for a discontinuity with Western theology and denounced the usefulness of a theology that allied itself with colonial powers and their dominance.
As such, Asian theology shares with post colonial theory one major site of resistance and contest: the politics between the East and the West. With the help of the critical debate on this issue of non-western identity in post colonial theory I shall take a critical look at the very foundation of Asian theology – this polemics between the East and the West – and by doing that, examine issues such as identity, power and resistance with respect to Asian theology's possible future development.
Let me first outline Edward Said's analysis of the power dynamics involved in the polemics of East versus West in his seminal work in post colonial theory, and its implicated issues in the construction of the identity of the East – the Orient. Having critically examined 'Orientalism' as a field of study in the West, Said explicates one by one colonialism's hierarchies of subjects and knowledges – the coloniser and the colonised, the civilised and the primitive the scientific and the superstitious, the developed and the underdeveloped, the West and the East. Among others, two following insights are most helpful for our reflection on Asian theology. They are: first, that the Orient (the East) was an invention of Europe (the West); and second, that 'Orientalism' as a system of knowledge and practice has enforced in history an absolute demarcation of the East and the West, which eventually serves the interests of the West.
One of Said's most important theses on Orientalism is that the Orient was a European invention. It was an invention for the making of 'Europe', ie a construction to provide for the latter the contrasting image, idea, personality and experience. In short, it was the 'other' to the 'European' self. As such Orientalism substantiates a series of characterisation for both parties: the Oriental – the irrational, depraved (fallen), and childlike, 'different' to the European – the rational, virtuous, mature, and 'normal'. Building on such logic: the Westerners dominate; the Orientals must be dominated, which meant having their land occupied, their internal affairs rigidly controlled, their blood and treasure put at the disposal of one or another Western power.9
For Said, these dichotomies did their best to reduce complex differences and interactions to the binary logic of colonial power. The Orient is hence made up of opposites. On one end, it was overvalued for its pantheism, its spirituality, its stability, its longevity, its primitivity, and so forth; and on the other end, the Orient was as suddenly undervalued as lamentably underhumanised, antidemocratic, backward, barbaric, and so forth. The Orient in the Orientalists eyes is a self-containing and self-reinforcing closed system and has remained fixed in time and place for the West.10 These generalities, Said argues, have been used historically and actually to press the importance of the distinction between different groups of people usually towards not especially admirable ends. After a series of research and analysis of categories like Oriental and Western, the distinction is polarised – the Oriental becomes more Oriental, the Westerner more Western. For years now the human encounter between different cultures, traditions, and societies have been channelled into a West or an East compartment based on such hard-and-fast distinctions.11
Thus Said contends, the demarcation of Occident and Orient enforces a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony. Through this hegemony, European culture gained in strength and identity by selling itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self. It promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, 'us') and the strange (the Orient, the East, 'them'). Whereas Orientalism is produced as a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction between the Orient and the Occident, the Orient is contained and represented by dominating frameworks.12
The critical analysis of the polemics of East and West as a power construction of identities is helpful for a self-understanding of Asian theology. As we are all aware of, Asia is a region of great diversities. Asia is in no way unified if it is not constructed opposed to the West. As early as the nineteen-fifties, K M Panikkar, an Indian historian and philosopher of religions maintained that a 'unifying' of Asia was hitherto unknown until the latter half of the twentieth century. Rather than a result of an internal initiative from among Asian countries to 'unite' for progress, Asian-ness was created out of a "determination to resist the foreigner who was pressing his attack in all directions, political, social, economic and religious." In other words, the Europeans.13 In this sense, Asia as a regional identity is also an 'imagined community' constructed to serve a particular political purpose in time.14 Understood in this way Asian theology also becomes an alternative name for 'non-Western' theology.
Similarly, Gyan Prakash, an Indian-American post colonial critic, finds in nationalists an essentialised nation created out of colonial polarities. While these polarities help to form a unity and constitute a national essence opposed to that of colonisers, they are maintained at the cost of keeping the East/West division intact. Suffice it to say that Asia as an entity is constructed to serve particular purposes in time, but if Asian theology takes this constructed opposing identity as otherwise it would risk joining Orientalism in fixing the Orient in time and place and thus continue to legitimate the dominance of the Western discourse. Further, as Prakash warns us, the cost of producing this unity is the suppression of social, regional and ethnic differences: the unity is forged in the space of difference and conflicts.15
Following what Prakash suggests for post colonial discourse, Asian theology must find ways to shake the whole legacy of colonialism, to shake loose from the domination of categories and ideas it produced – coloniser and colonised, white, black, and brown: civilised and uncivilised: colonialism loose from the stillness of the past and throw open for realignment the conflictural, discrepant, and even violent processes that formed the precipitous basis of colonial power.16
My contention of the possible danger of a fixed self-identification of being Asian in our 'doing' theology is now in want of a more concrete example. I shall therefore, in the following, highlight such a problem in the way Asian women are positioned in the development of a feminist theology in Asia.
With reference to the above polemics of East versus West, Asian theology claims its distinctiveness in 'doing' theology with Asia's great religio-cultural traditions and rich cultural resources such as folklores, people's stories, songs, and festivals, etc. This emphasis on the 'Asian-ness' of doing theology in Asia is echoed by what post colonial discussion calls a 'fictional' return (of the colonised) to one's indigenous history and culture. However, while Asian theologians try to reconcile the 'foreign-ness' of Christianity with our awakened national consciousness and strive to define theology of the post-colonial Asia in a profoundly different way we have to a degree fixed Asian women in an anti-imperialistic framework which essentialised women in Asian theological discourse.
According to Chandra Talpade Mohanty the result of a strict demarcation of East (regional/national) and West (colonial) is the production of unity and difference based on the notion of a singular monolithic subject of the 'Third World woman' in contrast to First World feminists. In the discursive exchange between feminists of the East and the West, Third World women are represented as a uniform group of victims: they are victims of male violence, victims of the colonial process, victims of their traditional familial system, victims of the economic development process, and finally, victims of their cultural religious code.17
On a deeper level, such a static conception of Third World women is posited in contrast to a privileged, self-representation of Western women as educated, modern, having control over their own bodies and sexualities, and enjoying the freedom to make their own decisions.18 The implicit norm or referent is built on a white, Western (read progressive/modern)/non-Western (read backward/traditional) hierarchy that freezes Third World women in time, space, and history.19
More paradoxical, Julie Stephens, an Indian anthropologist, argues that heroic women in the feminist discourse on Third World women is a reverse of the same coin, the production of a 'Third World' subject hood according to the norm of a white Western and thus progressive and modern woman. Whereas Third World women are often portrayed as through and through victims in the societies, the most 'qualified' liberated women are often the non-elite rural or working class women who are consistently described as "vigorous," "toiling," "labouring," "struggling" or "fighting".20
Unfortunately, this norm of either an all-round victimised woman of the so-called Third World or a non-elite rural or working heroine fighting and struggling for a national cause that is set more or less in reference to Western modern woman is rather welcomed by Asian theologians including some of us, and women theologians of Asia.
For instance in a passage where C S Song describes the culture of Asia as a culture of suffering within a culture of domination, he invokes a story of the suffering of a daughter-in-law in the traditional Chinese family system. He retells the "Story of the Sharp-tongued Li Ts'ui-lien" of the late thirteenth century China, where Li refused to submit to the unreasonable demands and complaints of her in-laws. Rejected by her in-laws as well as her parents Ts'ui-lien resorted to be nun in the end. Here Song commends his 'liberated' heroine.
Is there not plenty of feminist theology in this Chinese folk drama? We do not have to turn to the West for it. Here Asia feminist theology has deep roots in the culture of suffering. We must explore that culture in lives narrated in stories, dramas, songs and poems. We then will discover that feminine theology has been a living theology in Asia for thousands of years.21
Among the many early Asian theologians Song is one of the most devoted in his championing of the cause of Asian women. Apart from his major contention against an imperialistic missionary theology of the West, he invokes, throughout his various works, the suffering of women under Asian patriarchal traditions and cultures: the suffering of a poor Vietnamese widow, a newly-wed Indian woman, the poverty-stricken mother who produces no milk for her child, a Korean mother of a political prisoner, the wailing Lady Meng and the socially rejected daughter-in-law Ts'ui-lien above.22
Moreover, Song also includes, among his theological pieces, reflections on the meanings of birth pangs and the female face of God in the woman's womb.23 But all in all, as his retelling of the Ts'ui-lien's story shows, women in Asia are presented as victims who 'liberate' themselves and challenge the hierarchical structures of Asian societies. Most important for him, these victimised and then liberated poor women stand for thousands of years of living theology in Asia.
Similar antithetical themes of women's suffering – metonymised in the poor woman and women's courage – metonymised as the heroine are found everywhere and in almost every feminist piece of theological writings in Asia, and a similar tie between women victim/heroine and the indigenous history and culture of Asia are used throughout.24 Kumari Jayawardena, a Sri Lankan political scientist, argues that the nationalist impulse in many Asian political movements asserts national identities on the basis of their own past histories as a form of resistance to Western influence. When the nationalists went back to their cultural or religious roots and reinterpreted them to foster a national identity which served as the basis for national aspirations, they made women the embodiment of this national identity.
It was claimed that the women of the 'East' were more spiritual: that they were heirs to the wisdom of centuries; that although they might be educated and take part in political struggles they were still the custodians and transmitters of national culture. Ultimately, the net effect of all these tendencies was to keep women within the boundaries prescribed by the male reformers and leaders. Hence, we have everywhere the nationalistic 'new women' who fought and sacrificed for the cause of their countries and yet at the same time asked to uphold the entire religio-cultural code of their traditions.25
1 Cf Edward Said, Orientalism, New York, Vintage Books, 1978.
2 Padmini Mongia, "Introduction", in idem, ed, Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, London, Arnold, 1996, p
3 Homi K Bhabha, "'Caliban speaks to Prospero': Cultural Identity and the Crisis of Respresentation", in Phil Mariani, ed, Critical Fiction, Seattle, Bay Press, 1991, p 63.
4 Cf Cornel West, "The New Cultural Politics of Difference", in Russel Ferguson et al, eds, Out There: Marginalisation and Contemporary Cultures, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1990, pp 19-36.
5 Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies, Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1993, pp 7-8.
6 Elleke Boehmer, Colonial & Postcolonial Literature, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995, pp 2-3.
7 C S Song, Theology from the Womb of Asia, New York, Orbis Books, 1989, p 3.
8 Idem, "Freedom of Christian Theology for Asian Cultures Celebrating the Inauguration of the Programme for Theology and Cultures in Asia", in Asia Journal of Theology 3:1, 1989, p 87.
9 Said, pp 1-3.
10 Ibid, pp 109, 150.
11 Ibid, pp 45-46
12 Ibid, pp 36-40.
13 K M Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance, London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1959, pp 237, 322.
14 Cf Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, Verso, 1991.
15 Gyan Prakash, "Introduction", idem, ed, After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1995, p 9.
16 Ibid, pp 5-6.
17 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse", in Mohanty et al, eds, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1991, p 57.
18 Ibid.
19 Mohanty, "Introduction", Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, in ibid, p 6.
20 Julie Stephens, "Feminist Fictions: A Critique of the Category 'Non-Western Woman' in Feminist Writings in India", in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds, Selected Subaltern Studies, New York, Oxford University Press, 1988, p 95.
21 C S Song, Theology from the Womb of Asia, Maryknoll, Orbis Books, 1986, p 74.
22 Stories of these poor women can be found in Song's various works, including: Third Eye Theology, Maryknoll, Orbis Books, 1979, pp 124-128, Tell Us Our Names: Story Theology from an Asia Perspective, Maryknoll, Orbis Books, 1984, pp 89-90, The Tears of Lady Meng: A Parable of People's Political Theology, Maryknoll, Orbis Books, 1982, and Theology from the Womb of Asia, pp 112-113, especially 110-119.
23 Idem, Third Eye Theology, pp 124-140.
24 Major collections of feminist theological pieces of Asia are found in the following anthologies: Virginia Fabellaand Mercy Amba Oduyoye, eds, With Passion and Compassion: Third World Women Doing Theology, Maryknoll, Orbis Books,1988, Virginia Fabella and Sun Ai Lee Park, eds, We Dare to Dream: Doing Theology as Asian Women, Hong Kong, Asian Women's Resource Centre for Culture and Theology, 1989, and Ursula King, ed, Feminist Theology from the Third World: A Reader, Maryknoll, Orbis Books, 1994. The most important journals for the collection of Asian women's theological contribution are Asian Journal of Theology, Voices from the Third World, and In God's Image.
25 Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, London, sed Books Ltd, 1986, p 257.