11 Postcolonial Interpretation
jin young choi
Postcolonial biblical criticism is a relatively recent, but rapidly growing,
subfield in biblical studies. While historical criticism, as the predominant paradigm of modern biblical studies, seeks to discover the meaning
as intended by the original author of the biblical text in its historical
context, postcolonial criticism, like any kind of ideological criticism or
contextual interpretation, underlines the present reader’s social location and perspective.1 White Anglo-European interpreters do not
address their identity or social location due to their underlying assumption of whiteness as normative. However, some white-critical scholars
concede that historical-critical studies is not only a product of the
seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries’ Enlightenment that promoted
human reason and scientific objectivity, but it was also developed at the
peak of European colonialism.2
The diversification of biblical scholarship, which also brought
changes in methods and discourses, only started in the 1970s when
scholars from the non-Western world, along with women and racial/
ethnic minorities in the West, were accepted into the Western academy
of biblical studies.3 Feminist biblical criticism and liberation hermeneutics were the earliest of such developments. In the 1980s, race/ethnicity studies and queer/sexuality studies were introduced into biblical
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Although postcolonial interpretation does not adhere to a methodological framework,
I will still use the term “criticism” for a postcolonial approach to biblical
interpretation because it is a part of a competing paradigm with historical and
literary criticisms. Also, postcolonial criticism involves not only the interpretation
of the biblical text but also the interpretation and critique of the ways the biblical text
has been interpreted and used.
David G. Horrell, Ethnicity and Inclusion: Religion, Race, and Whiteness in
Constructions of Jewish and Christian Identities (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
2020), 325.
R. S. Sugirtharajah’s Voices from the Margin: Interpreting the Bible in the Third
World (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1991; 2nd ed., 1995; 3rd ed., 2006; 25th anniversary ed.,
2016) is one of the earliest anthologies of non-Western biblical interpreters.
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studies. Finally, in the mid-1990s, postcolonial criticism, focusing on
power relations and dynamics in geopolitics, emerged in the discipline.4
Such advancements were a part of the aftereffects of social change
movements in the 1960s, such as the civil rights, anti-Vietnam War,
gay rights, and feminist movements, which transformed academic disciplines. Prior to these movements, the European colonial powers’ control over 85 percent of the globe at the time of the First World War was
ended by national liberation movements after the Second World War.
Such events sparked a burst of interest in postcolonialism in the latter
half of the twentieth century, and postcolonial studies has become one
of the most preeminent and divergent fields in literary and
cultural studies.
As postcolonial biblical criticism emerged against these social,
institutional, and disciplinary backgrounds, it not only draws on disparate bodies of knowledge in postcolonial studies and other fields but also
interrogates legacies of European colonialism and the roles of the Bible
and Euro-North American biblical scholarship in imperial-colonial formations in the past and the present. With interdisciplinary,
intersectional, and liberative concerns, postcolonial biblical criticism
claims suppressed voices from the margins both in and outside the West
and attends to the ongoing phenomena of empire, colonialism, and
decolonization. This essay starts with basic concepts in postcolonialism, though defining the “postcolonial” itself is highly
contentious. Then, it peruses how postcolonial studies and biblical studies converge, examining different interests and foci in postcolonial
biblical criticism. Last, it proposes a brief prospective of postcolonial
biblical criticism.
postcolonial studies
Since the emergence of European states as empires in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, imperial formations of the West through colonialism have continued until the twentieth century. Whereas
“imperialism” is a mode of dominance in the center of empire, “colonialism” conveys imperial control on distant territory as a consequence of
4
Segovia lays out critical developments in the discipline from historical through
literary and sociocultural to ideological paradigms of interpretation. Fernando
F. Segovia, Decolonizing Biblical Studies: A View from the Margins (Maryknoll:
Orbis, 2000).
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imperialism.5 Formal colonialism was concluded with anticolonial,
national liberation movements between 1945 and 1960. The term
“anticolonialism” stands for the political struggle of the colonized
against institutions, ideologies, and practices of colonialism.
Anticolonial struggles rest on the ideal of a precolonial past to galvanize
opposition and resistance to colonial power, and they often appropriate
a discourse of anticolonial nationalism based upon the model of the
modern European nation-state.6
However, even after national liberation or independence, colonialism carries on in new forms of domination. Neoimperialism and
neocolonialism signify the presently continuing force of colonization,
in the form of globalization. Especially, emerging superpowers like the
United States have advanced imperialism-colonialism through new
instruments of indirect control such as international organizations and
multinational corporations. While “postcolonialism” is used more
broadly to depict the remaining influence of the former colonial powers
over ex-colonies, it also points to the persisting colonial enterprise to
perpetuate its power in subtle forms such as cultural production, academic knowledge, and social practices.
Edward W. Said, Homi K. Bhabha, and Gayatri C. Spivak constitute
the “Holy Trinity of colonial-discourse analysis” (also called postcolonial theory or postcolonialism as a reading strategy).7 In his 1978 book,
Orientalism, Said examines European colonialism in terms of discourse – a “system of knowledge and beliefs about the world within
which acts of colonization take place.”8 He describes the West’s construction of the Orient, particularly the Middle East, as an exotic,
irrational, and depraved Other and uses such knowledge to wield power
through military and economic domination in the name of civilizing
mission. Thus, Orientalist or colonial discourse is not only the system
of knowledge indoctrinated in the centrality of Europe, but it also
organizes colonial relationships, according to the “positional
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Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 8.
It is recognized that the work of anticolonial liberationist thinkers, such as C. L.
R. James, Aimé Césaire, Albert Memmi, Chinua Achebe, and Frantz Fanon, precede
postcolonial theory as produced in the metropolitan West. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth
Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (London:
Routledge, 2013), 15–16.
Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London:
Routledge, 1995), 154.
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 7.
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superiority” of Western consciousness through colonial textuality.9 By
doing so, colonial discourse constitutes reality to the extent that the
colonized see themselves within this knowledge system and internalize
the coerced and conflicted view of the self and the world.
Historians of the Subaltern Studies group in South Asian Studies in
the early 1980s attempted to recover the history of “subaltern” classes,
subject to the hegemony of the ruling classes, in society.10 Spivak
critiques problems of such subaltern historiography for its essentialist
notion of subaltern identity. Representing the subaltern seems impossible as long as the dominant discourse provides “the language and the
conceptual categories with which the subaltern voice speaks.”11
Similarly, she resists the problematic construction of the “ThirdWorld subject” as the term essentially presupposes Western, White,
capitalist superiority.12
In comparison to Said and Spivak, Bhabha’s postcolonial theory
draws extensive interest from biblical scholars. The colonizer/colonized
relationship is characterized by ambivalence, as colonial subjects are
simultaneously resistant to, and complicit in, colonial dominance.
Colonial discourse desires the subjects to mimic the colonizer in reproducing colonial assumptions, values, and institutions – thus reproducing the subjects “almost the same, but not quite.”13 The subjects’
mimicry equivocally can turn into mockery and thus disrupt colonial
authority. Such subjectivities are constructed in the “Third Space” of
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For Said, European colonialism is a discourse – the project of representing and
administering the Orient “through textual codes and conventions.” Colonial
textuality manifests itself in various textual production – from colonizers’ writings,
such as memoirs, biographies, letters, translations, and legal documents, to English
literature and education. Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction,
2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 142–43.
Guha and others gathered to study subaltern themes as an attempt to give voices to
the oppressed within elitist historiography and produced five volumes of Subaltern
Studies. Cf. Ranajit Guha, Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi; New
York: Oxford University Press, 1982).
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313, first published in the journal Wedge (1985). Ashcroft,
Griffiths, and Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies, 244–46.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,”
in Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills (New
York: Routledge, 2003), 306–23, originally published in Critical Inquiry 12 (1985).
Susan Abraham, “Critical Perspectives on Postcolonial Theory,” in The Colonized
Apostle: Paul through Postcolonial Eyes, ed. Christopher D. Stanley (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2011), 28.
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 122.
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hybridity where existing cultural boundaries are blurred, and new forms
of cultural meanings and identities are produced, thus precluding any
“claims to inherent originality or ‘purity’ of cultures.”14
As postcolonial theory has gained prominence across disciplines,
biblical studies has also appropriated theoretical concepts such as Said’s
Orientalism, Spivak’s subalternity, and Bhabha’s ambivalence, mimicry, and hybridity.15 Postcolonial theory, focusing on its discursive
power with substantial use of poststructuralist theory, is often challenged by materialist critics because of its inclinations to “textualism
and idealism,” while lacking historical specificity.16 The “postcolonial”
becomes a universal category when heterogeneity of locations and temporalities, as well as the material effects of colonial conditions, is disregarded.17 However, material conditions and the discourse of colonialism
are not necessarily in conflict as the latter provides theoretical and
conceptual frameworks to analyze discourses, strategies, and legacies
of empire and colonialism of a particular historical time.
As such, postcolonialism’s analytical tools for examining European
territorial conquests and colonial institutions and discourses, as well as
subjects’ responses, can be employed in studying world empires in
biblical times and the biblical texts produced in historically specific
conditions of empires. In addition, postcolonial biblical criticism
inquires how Christian religion and particularly the Bible have been
used to both reinforce and resist Western colonialism.18 Given the
impacts of European imperialism on academic discourses of religion
and Bible, Eurocentric modern biblical studies warrants postcolonial
inquiry, as well.
The following section discusses types of postcolonial biblical criticism: (1) empire studies focusing on ancient empires as the historical
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Bhabha, Location of Culture, 55.
Stephen D. Moore lists biblical interpretations using those concepts. See his “Paul
after Empire,” in The Colonized Apostle, ed. Stanley (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
2011), 258, n. 9.
As often mentioned, Said draws on the work of Michel Foucault, Bhabha on Louis
Althusser and Jacques Lacan, and Spivak on Jacques Derrida. Materialist postcolonial
critics include such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Benita Parry, Aijaz Ahmad, and
Arif Dirlik. Young, Colonial Desire, 154.
The critics, who emphasize materiality and locality of various postcolonial
experiences, insist on using the hyphen in “post-colonial” to “distinguish
postcolonial studies as a field from colonial discourse theory.” Ashcroft, Griffiths,
and Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies, 204.
For a useful resource for the role of the Bible in colonialism, see Tat-siong Benny Liew
and Fernando F. Segovia, eds., Colonialism and the Bible: Contemporary Reflections
from the Global South (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018).
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contexts of literary production of biblical writings, (2) liberation hermeneutics and oppositional readings that challenge Western colonialism and colonial discourse, (3) cultural studies that provides systemic
and theoretical analyses of discursive and material conditions of
imperial-colonial formations, and intersectional approaches concerning
various subjective formations in postcolonialism such as (4) migration
and race/ethnicity and (5) gender and sexuality.19
postcolonial biblical criticism
Empire Studies
Empire or empire-critical studies investigates historical, social, and
economic conditions and literary impact of empires in biblical times,
such as Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome. Empire
studies’ primary approach is historical criticism, accompanied by classical and archaeological studies, and limits its interest to antiquity.
Hebrew Bible scholars investigate empires in the ancient Near East
and early Judaism,20 but more extensive work has been done in early
Christian studies, starting from Adolf Deissmann in the early twentieth
century and continuing most productively in the work of Richard
A. Horsley and Warren Carter since the 1990s.21 In contrast to
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This classification, particularly the first three, is indebted to other scholars’ works.
Stephen Moore and Fernando F. Segovia, “Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: Beginnings,
Trajectories, Intersections,” in Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: Interdisciplinary
Intersections, ed. Fernando F. Segovia and Stephen D. Moore (London: Bloomsbury,
2007); Stephen D. Moore, Empire and Apocalypse: Postcolonialism and the New
Testament (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2006), 3–23; and R. S. Sugirtharajah,
“Postcolonial Biblical Interpretation,” in Voices from the Margin, ed. Sugirtharajah
(2006), 64–84.
Jon L. Berquist, “Resistance and Accommodation in the Persian Empire,” in In the
Shadow of Empire: Reclaiming the Bible as a History of Faithful Resistance
(Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008), 41–58; David M. Carr, An Introduction
to the Bible: Sacred Texts and Imperial Contexts (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010);
Andrew T. Abernethy, Mark G. Brett, Tim Bulkeley, and Tim Meadowcroft, eds.,
Isaiah and Imperial Context: The Book of Isaiah in the Times of Empire (Eugene:
Pickwick, 2013). Anathea Portier-Young deals with the Seleucid Empire in
her Apocalypse against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011).
Richard A. Horsley’s work includes Paul and Politics: Ekklesia, Israel,
Imperium, Interpretation: Essays in Honor of Krister Stendahl (Harrisburg: Trinity
Press International, 2000); and Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New
World Disorder (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2002). For a few of Warren Carter’s
publications see Matthew and Empire: Initial Explorations (Harrisburg: Trinity Press
International, 2001); and John and Empire: Initial Explorations (New York: T&T
Clark, 2008). Also see John Dominic Crossan, God and Empire: Jesus against Rome,
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depoliticizing and spiritualizing biblical interpretation, empire studies
engages the sociopolitical dimensions of the imperial world, rereading
biblical writings as antithetical or resistant to the empire. Whereas
empire scholars argue that Jesus’ followers and early Christian communities resisted Roman imperial cult, theology, and ideology, others, like
Carter (and those discussed at the end of this section), emphasize that
early Christians were ambivalent and negotiated imperial realities.
Nevertheless, empire studies exclusively focuses on ancient
empires detached from contemporary empire, colonialism, and social
structures.22 Its dependence on historical and philological approaches is
liable to conceal the interpreter’s ideological stance. Additionally,
empire studies utilizing social-scientific and anthropological studies
cannot avoid European orientalizing tendencies.23 Furthermore, when
empire studies highlights what the Bible presents as an alternative
empire, this not only portends the later development of Constantinian
Christianity but also is inclined to rescue the Bible from its abuse in
colonial history. The prominence of Rome in empire studies reflects its
indispensable role as a paradigm for successive empires in the West and
its civilizing mission over the rest of the world.24
Some empire studies engage contemporary empires or postcolonial
theory, going beyond the view of empire as the historical background of
literary production or as a critical lens of interpretation. Neil Elliott
aims to provide liberative visions and political acts of justice in the
context of US Empire, emphasizing Paul’s rhetoric as both subverting
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Then and Now (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2007); and Tom Thatcher,
Greater than Caesar: Christology and Empire in the Fourth Gospel (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2008).
A few exceptions mentioned in Moore and Segovia, “Postcolonial Biblical Criticism,”
8, are the following: Richard A. Horsley, Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in
Roman Imperial Society (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1997); and Wes
Howard-Brook and Anthony Gwyther, Unveiling Empire: Reading Revelation Then
and Now (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1999).
While some refer to Deissmann as one of the earliest works that paralleled imperial
cult and the cult of Christ, it has been noted that his view of the New Testament,
Jesus and Paul, and even the Roman Empire reflects Orientalism. “Jesus and Paul were
sons of the East . . . the New Testament is a gift from the East.” Adolf Deissmann,
Light from the Ancient East: The New Testament Illustrated by Recently Discovered
Texts of the Graeco-Roman World (New York: Hodder & Stoughton, 1909), 2. Cf. R. S.
Sugirtharajah, “Postcolonial Biblical Criticism,” in Voices from the Margin (2016),
135–36.
Moore points out that the biblical texts were initially “produced in the margins of
empire, but with the Christianization of Rome and the Romanization of Christianity
the margins moved to the center.” Moore, “Paul after Empire,” 22.
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and reinscribing imperial ideology and practices.25 While asking the
historical question about Mark’s stance toward the Roman Empire,
Hans Leander explores the interconnection between nineteenthcentury scholarly interpretations of Mark and European colonial expansion.26 He argues that commentators reproduced the orientalist discourse in which the three interrelated binary divisions – Greek/
Semitic, Jewish/heathen, and spiritual/worldly – place Europeans in
the position of the “enlightened.” Utilizing postcolonial concepts such
as mimicry, ambivalence, hybridity, and Third Space as heuristic tools,
he reveals modern historical biblical scholarship’s epistemological
assumptions and interest and seeks to “uninherit” its colonial heritage.
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza also challenges empire studies because,
like all malestream studies, it rarely engages critical feminist studies,
which we will discuss later.27
Liberation Hermeneutics
Unlike empire studies’ reluctance to recount contemporary imperialcolonial contexts as essential to interpretation, contextual hermeneutics prioritizes the interpreter’s sociocultural location.28 The precursor of
postcolonial biblical criticism is liberation hermeneutics – a contextual
interpretation addressing the economic exploitation of the poor as the
locus of biblical interpretation.29 Mexican liberation theologian Elsa
Támez traces the liberationist reading (or “popular reading”) of the
Bible by exploited and impoverished populations in Latin America and
the Caribbean back to the indigenous people’s rejection of the Bible due
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Neil Elliott, Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the
Apostle (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1994); and Arrogance of Nations: Reading Romans in the
Shadow of Empire (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008).
Hans Leander, Discourses of Empire: The Gospel of Mark from a Postcolonial
Perspective (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2013). While using postcolonial lenses, the work of
Leo G. Perdue and Warren Carter provides a more historical account of Israel’s
interactions with a succession of empires. Israel and Empire: A Postcolonial History
of Israel and Early Judaism, ed. Coleman A. Baker (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, The Power of the Word: Scripture and the Rhetoric
of Empire (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 3.
Sugirtharajah’s oft-quoted statement best presents postcolonialism as contextual
hermeneutics: postcolonialism “enables us to question the totalizing tendencies of
European reading practices and interpret the texts on our own terms and read them
from our own specific locations.” R. S. Sugirtharajah, “Biblical Studies after the
Empire: From a Colonial to a Postcolonial Mode of Interpretation,” in The
Postcolonial Bible, ed. R. S. Sugirtharajah (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1998), 16.
Thus, early liberation theologians, such as José Miranda and Jorge Pixley, draw upon
Marxist economic analysis of the biblical interpretation.
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to its use to justify the European conquest and colonization of the
Americas.30
From the mid-1990s, liberation hermeneutics adopted the term and
ideas of postcolonialism so that the Bible and the postcolonial began to
converge. Michael Prior critiques the colonial use of biblical texts to
support land possession and conquest, particularly in the Spanish colonization of Latin America, Apartheid in South Africa, and the Zionist
settlement in Palestine.31 Some contributors to Postcolonialism and
Scriptural Reading point out the connection between the biblical conquest of the “promised land” and the founding ideology of modern
nation-states. As indigenous peoples see “the suppressed subtext of
Canaanite experience” in the Exodus narrative, the volume editor and
Cherokee scholar, Laura E. Donaldson, suggests “reading like a
Canaanite” to prevent the religious academy from reproducing past
colonialist practices.32
Sugirtharajah’s critique of privileging certain biblical motifs like
exodus extends to liberation hermeneutics for its modernist and triumphalist tendencies.33 According to him, its universal Christian claim
of liberation discounts the truth claims of other religious traditions and
overlooks the history of Christianity as at once a source of emancipation and oppression. Additionally, liberation hermeneutics contradicts
its contextual premise when it essentializes the poor so that it fails to
address multiple other forms of oppression in terms of gender, sexuality,
or race/ethnicity.
While ambivalent, Sugirtharajah reorients contextuality focusing
on local traditions and indigenous practices. His vernacular hermeneutics emphasizes culturally specific settings of the Third World to celebrate the local and the marginalized, which often make vernacular
hermeneutics look indistinguishable from nativism or cultural
nationalism. Employing the reader’s own cultural resources (ideas, narratives, and social experiences) as analogous to biblical narratives, it
30
31
32
33
Elsa Támez, “The Bible and the Five Hundred Years of Conquest,” originally delivered
as a lecture in 1992 and included in Sugirtharajah, ed., Voices from the Margin (2006;
2016). Also, Indian dalit and Korean minjung hermeneutics are regarded as
liberation hermeneutics.
Michael Prior, The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique (Sheffield: Sheffield
Academic, 1997).
Laura E. Donaldson, Postcolonialism and Scriptural Reading (Atlanta: SBL Press,
1996), 11.
Sugirtharajah, “Postcolonial Biblical Interpretation,” 64–84; Postcolonial Criticism
and Biblical Interpretation, 103–23.
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reclaims the identities and cultures that colonial Christianity had
repressed and removed.34 It centers the struggle of the marginalized
and indigenizes biblical interpretation, disrupting not only established
interpretation but also the idea of Eurocentricity, modernism, and internationalism. Yet vernacular interpretation also acknowledges the
danger of posing an oppositional binary between the vernacular and
metropolitan, especially in the rapidly changing global world.35
A less oppositional reading practice is what Said calls “contrapuntal
reading” – a practice of re-reading the imperial sources in juxtaposition
with other texts. The purpose is to expose and relativize the cultural
assumptions of dominant discourse, allowing discrepant experiences or
dissident voices to interact with the dominant. Rereading a cultural
archive “not univocally but contrapuntally” means acknowledging the
tension between metropolitan history and other histories suppressed by
the dominating discourse.36 Building on possible Buddhist influences on
the Johannine writings, Sugirtharajah employs a contrapuntal reading
that prioritizes “orally transmitted knowledge” and “conceptual similarities,” as well as textual juxtapositions.37 While prioritizing local
cultures and indigenous resources, contextual or vernacular hermeneutics challenges universalizing discourse in both Western biblical scholarship and Euro-American critical theories. Yet, partly because of
relatively easier access to postcolonial theory than resistant literature
in the Third World as a primary source of postcolonialism, it is more
common to employ postcolonial theory in biblical studies.
Cultural Studies
Fernando F. Segovia, who, with Sugirtharajah, laid the groundwork for
postcolonial biblical criticism, places it within the paradigm of cultural
studies in biblical studies.38 Such a paradigm combines such critical
approaches as social theory, literary theory, Marxism, feminism,
poststructuralism, and postcolonialism. For Segovia, cultural studies is
34
35
36
37
38
R. S. Sugirtharajah, The Bible and the Third World: Precolonial, Colonial and
Postcolonial Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 175–202.
Sugirtharajah, Bible and the Third World, 198.
Said, Culture and Imperialism, 51.
Sugirtharajah, “First, Second, and Third Letters of John,” in A Postcolonial
Commentary on the New Testament Writings, ed. Fernando F. Segovia and R. S.
Sugirtharajah (New York: T&T Clark, 2007), 418.
Fernando F. Segovia, “Cultural Studies and Contemporary Biblical Criticism:
Ideological Criticism as Mode of Discourse,” in Reading from This Place, vol. 2,
Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in Global Perspective, ed. Fernando
F. Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 1–17.
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used interchangeably with ideological criticism, which engages systems
of power in which social hierarchies and uneven power relations, such
as class, gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, and geopolitics, are produced.39 Postcolonialism is particularly concerned with geopolitics –
the spatial aspects of imperialism in the center and colonialism in the
periphery.40 The “postcolonial optic” is necessary to analyze imperialcolonial formations across cultural contexts and historical periods,
which include empires in the production of Jewish and early Christian
texts, colonizing impulses in Western interpretation, and the biblical
critic in the situation of new imperial formations.
While analysis includes both cultural production and material conditions, there are sustained critiques of postcolonial discourse built on
postmodern theory, particularly poststructuralism. Although poststructuralism questions the fundamental conceptual oppositions through
deconstruction and celebrating otherness, its emphases on textual
indeterminacy and understanding of power as diffuse are viewed as a
“contemporary form of Western liberalism.”41 Postmodern theory often
fails to represent the violent historical experience of the Other who does
not own such language to represent themselves.
Placing postcolonialism in the condition of postmodernity and
neocolonialism, Stephen D. Moore draws upon Bhabha’s analytic categories such as hybridity, ambivalence, and mimicry to examine the
ideas of nation, empire, and apocalypse in the Gospels and Revelation
and their complex stances toward the Roman Empire.42 Similarly, Tatsiong Benny Liew employs the postmodern theory of “intertextuality”
but resists indeterminacy and politicizes deconstruction.43 Liew argues
that by promising the destruction of both Jewish and Roman authorities
in Jesus’ parousia, Mark mimics or duplicates the tyrannical and exclusionary politics of his colonizers. In Liew’s reading, personal
39
40
41
42
43
Moore and Segovia, “Postcolonial Biblical Criticism,” 10.
For a collection of postcolonial interpretations that deal with geopolitical and spatial
aspects of postcolonialism, see Musa W. Dube and Jeffrey L. Staley, eds., John and
Postcolonialism: Travel, Space and Power (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2002).
Segovia, “Mapping the Postcolonial Optic in Biblical Criticism,” in Postcolonial Biblical
Criticism, ed. Moore and Segovia, 31–33; citing Seamus Deane, “Imperialism/
Nationalism,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2nd, ed. Frank Lentricchia and
Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 356.
Moore, Empire and Apocalypse. Cf. Erin Runions, Changing Subjects: Gender,
Nation and Future (London: Sheffield Academic, 2001).
The theory of intertextuality emphasizes a “web of relationships between a literary
work and other non-literary forces.” Tat-siong Benny Liew, Politics of Parousia:
Reading Mark Inter(Con)Textually (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 26.
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commitment to social change turns intertextuality into intersubjectivity, which requires the embrace of alliance politics.44
Still, some critics argue that postcolonial biblical criticism necessitates a more constant Marxist critique because modern imperialism’s
capitalist expansion has evolved in neoliberal global capitalism.45 As far
as postcolonial biblical criticism understands its fundamental task as
articulating a critique of unequal power relations in geopolitics,
materiality of colonial history remains critical to subject formations.
In this regard, the modern construction of race or politics of identity
should be addressed in terms of geographical translations of people from
homeland to other lands – whether forced or voluntary, undergoing the
process of un-settlement, travel, and re-settlement.46
Geopolitics and Identity Politics
From the late sixteenth century onwards, the migration of European
colonialists was accompanied by uprooting Africans and other peoples
from their lands and forcing them into exile in foreign lands. Imperial
projects such as social Darwinism, scientific racism, and eugenics that
evolved from the second half of the nineteenth century further determined the inferiority and subjection of indigenous and enslaved people
in colonies. Christian justifications for imperialism and white supremacy also come into play. Steed Vernyl Davidson contends that the Bible
in its canonical form is “a product of imperial formations . . . [and] is
both raced (as the sacred text of Western civilization) and actively
involved in racializing (as the sacred text of Western epistemologies).”47 Segovia’s hermeneutics of diaspora reflects his own
experiences (displacement, exile, and diaspora) and those of other
Two-Thirds World biblical interpreters residing and working in the
metropolitan center.48 Their positionality as diasporic intellectuals
44
45
46
47
48
Liew, Politics of Parousia, 164.
For example, Boer critiques not only Said, Spivak, and Bhabha for their discourses as
estranged from the Marxist tradition but also postcolonial biblical critics, like
Sugirtharajah, who dismiss Marxism or class analyses. Roland Boer, “Marx,
Postcolonialism, and the Bible,” in Postcolonial Biblical Criticism, ed. Moore and
Segovia, 166–83; Gerald West, “Doing Postcolonial Biblical Interpretation @Home:
Ten Years of (South) African Ambivalence,” Neot 42.1 (2008): 147–64.
Fernando F. Segovia, ed., Interpreting beyond Borders (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic,
2000), 14.
Steed Vernyl Davidson, “Writing/Reading the Bible in Postcolonial Perspective,” Brill
Research Perspective in Biblical Interpretation 2.3 (2017): 68.
Fernando F. Segovia, “Toward a Hermeneutics of the Diaspora: A Hermeneutics of
Otherness and Engagement,” in Reading from This Place, vol. 1, Social Location and
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in the in-between space not only generates multiple identities as the
reader but also leads them to see the construction of identities amidst
colonialization and marginalization at the core of biblical discourses.
Observing the central role of displacement in Judean identity,
Davidson’s reading of Jeremiah decenters the Babylonian colonizers
and focuses on the survival and resistance of both the displaced and
in-place colonized.49 His reading also emerges from his own experience
of diasporic life. Similarly, Uriah Y. Kim argues that the
Deuteronomistic History not only was written to reconstruct Israel’s
ethnic and political identity but that such reconstruction is embedded
in the reception of this history entangled with the rise of the modern
nation-state and imperialism.50 While Kim’s reading exposes biblical
scholarship loyal to the Western narrative of history, his racialized
identity as an Asian American leads him to read the story of David
casting not only the king as building a hybridized kingdom but also
Uriah the Hittite as a disposable foreigner despite his loyalty to the
nation.51
Nineteenth-century African America forged an African American
identity defined by double-consciousness. Lynne St. Clair Darden
argues that when the Euro-American myth of origin was made up based
on the dual biblical themes of chosenness and conquest, African
Americans countered it with a sacred narration of nation, that is,
“strangeness of home.”52 This counter-remembering is a contrapuntal
praxis that both exposes the underside of unequal power relations of
binary and constructs fluid identity in the interstitial space. As such,
African American hermeneutical tradition is a hybrid hermeneutics
that simultaneously mimics and mocks the Euro-American narration.
Thus, in her reading of Revelation, John’s sacred narration of “almost
the same but not quite like” the colonizer signifies John’s hybridized
colonial identity.
49
50
51
52
Biblical Interpretation in the United States, ed. Fernando F. Segovia and Mary Ann
Tolbert (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 57–73.
Steed Vernyl Davidson, Empire and Exile: Postcolonial Readings of the Book of
Jeremiah (New York: T&T Clark, 2011).
Uriah Y. Kim, Decolonizing Josiah: Toward a Postcolonial Reading of the
Deuteronomic History (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2005).
Uriah Y. Kim, Identity and Loyalty in the David Story: A Postcolonial Reading
(Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2008).
Lynne St. Clair Darden, Scripturalizing Revelation: An African American
Postcolonial Reading of Empire (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2015).
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Likewise, Shanell Smith’s postcolonial womanist interpretation of
Revelation develops the hermeneutics of “ambiveilence” appropriating
W. E. B. Dubois’ “veil” of double-consciousness and Bhabha’s postcolonial “ambivalence.”53 Smith sees John’s ambivalent depiction that does
not address oppressions of race, ethnicity, and class as troubling because
African American women have suffered enslavement, sexual abuse, and
impoverishment. At the same time, the ambiguity of complicity and
contest is embodied in the reader’s position as a privileged African
American woman. Instead of responding to the forces of empire via
capitalism, racism, and sexism in a singular oppositional mode, these
readings attempt to dismantle “the confining notions of a homogeneous
or fixed identity construct.”54
Intersection of Gender and Sexuality
Postcolonial biblical criticism engages gender and sexuality as critical
categories of analysis as gendered language is employed to depict colonial dominance. Territorial conquest is often represented in sexual
terms. Moreover, the mission of civilization presupposes gender
oppression that provides justification for White men’s “saving brown
women from brown men.”55 Davina C. Lopez’ empire- and gendercritical study of Paul’s mission visualizes the conquered nations (ethneˉ )
personified as “ethnically specific women’s bodies.”56 Whereas Lopez
reads Paul’s writings as a counternarrative to Roman military violence,
Esther Fuchs argues that it is the nationalistic ideology inscribed in
prophetic literature that represents the nation as woman’s body sexually violated at the critical moment of political demise.57 Joseph
A. Marchal’s postcolonial feminist interpretation of Philippians characterizes the community as colonized and feminine, in contrast to an
53
54
55
56
57
Shanell T. Smith, The Woman Babylon and the Marks of Empire: Reading Revelation
with a Postcolonial Womanist Hermeneutics of Ambiveilence (Minneapolis: Fortress
Press, 2014), 4.
Darden, Scripturalizing Revelation, 80. Darden’s “bifocal vision that revolves around
a countermemory” is similar to “yin yang eyes” as an “effective strategy to counteract
the problem of representational fixity,” in Tat-siong Benny Liew, “Reading with Yin
Yang Eyes: Negotiating the Ideological Dilemma of a Chinese American Biblical
Hermeneutics,” BibInt 9.3 (2001): 309–35.
Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 296.
Davina C. Lopez, Apostle to the Conquered: Reimagining Paul’s Mission (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2008), 125.
Esther Fuchs, “Women as Prophets/Women in Prophets: Gender, Nation, and
Discourse,” in Feminist Theory and the Bible: Interrogating the Sources (Lanham:
Lexington Books, 2016), 95–113.
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“imperial Paul” who travels to various contact zones and constructs a
political space of heavenly politeuma.58 This “politics of heaven”
obscures the authority and difference of women who might have been
traveling missionaries just like Paul.59
In contrast to these readings, Musa W. Dube’s postcolonial feminist
criticism emerges in the wake of the HIV/AIDS crisis in Southern
Africa. She develops a decolonizing feminist model titled “Rahab’s
reading prism” to read Rahab (Joshua 2) with other stories such as that
of the Canaanite woman (Matt 15:21–28; cf. 28:19) to configure the
foundational narratives of imperial ideology. Here again travel, contact,
and textual practices play essential roles, and particularly the contact
with women signifies the conquest of the land. Women like Rahab and
the Canaanite woman speak for the native women whose struggles for
survival force them to support imperial territorial conquest.60 They are
complex figures who are oppressed by, and caught in the quandary of,
imperialism and patriarchy simultaneously. If Rahab’s prism exposes
empire-building founded on four Gs – God, gold, glory, and gender – the
final step of Dube’s decolonializing feminist reading introduces the
Semoya reading of women of African Independent Churches (AICs) to
cultivate a vision of liberating interdependence.61
Donaldson’s oppositional postcolonial reading also resists Western
imperializing reading and recovers narratives of indigenous women. She
indigenizes Ruth to contest imperial exegesis and empower aboriginal
peoples by relating Ruth the Moabite to the daughters of Lot, on which
Ruth’s ethnic and sexual identity is constructed (Gen 19:36–37) and to
her other mother-in-law, Rahab. Hence, Ruth is not a paradigmatic
convert but an indigenous woman who occupied the Promised Land
before the invasion of the Israelites and then becomes a foreigner among
Israelites. When reading through the reader’s perspective as a Cherokee
woman, Ruth – like Pocahontas – foregrounds the use of intermarriage
as an assimilation strategy, while Orpah, who returns to her mother’s
house, functions as a counternarrative.62
58
59
60
61
62
Joseph A. Marchal, The Politics of Heaven: Women, Gender and Empire in the Study
of Paul (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), 99, 122.
Marchal, Politics of Heaven, 114.
Musa W. Dube, Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (St. Louis: Chalice,
2000), 169–84.
Dube, Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation, 111–24.
Laura E. Donaldson, “The Sign of Orpah: Reading Ruth through Native Eyes,” in Hope
Abundant: Third World and Indigenous Women’s Theology, ed. Kwok Pui-lan
(Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2010), 138–51. Cf. Kwok Pui-lan, “Making the
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While colonial dominance is portrayed using the terms of gender
and sexuality, a queer postcolonial approach is scarcely ever
employed.63 Interpreting colonial confrontation from postcolonial feminist and queer perspectives, Marcella María Althaus-Reid argues that
Rahab’s betrayal toward “her nation corresponds to a heterosexual,
mono-loving mentality of only one nation, one God and one faith,”
and thus her sexual otherness is normalized into an androcentric and
patriarchal system of colonial oppression.64 Althaus-Reid argues that
Joshua 2 is a foundational text that could be called “the origin of Queer
betrayal” because what Rahab eventually betrays is her queerness.65
She parallels Rahab with women who joined the guerrilla movements
in Latin America in the times of imperialist expansion and the
Cold War.
postcolonial optic for a future
In his 2007 article, Segovia traces the trajectory of postcolonial biblical
criticism from 1996 and lists concerns addressed thus far.66 First, postcolonial biblical criticism has foregrounded empire and colonial relations both in texts and interpretation, reclaiming suppressed voices.
Second, it has challenged dominant scholarship by contesting colonial
63
64
65
66
Connections: Postcolonial Studies and Feminist Biblical Interpretation,” in
Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology, ed. Kwok Pui-lan (Louisville:
Westminster John Knox, 2005), 82.
Jeremy Punt, “Postcolonial Biblical Criticism and Queer Studies,” in The Oxford
Handbook of Postcolonial Biblical Criticism, ed. R. S. Sugirtharajah (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2018), doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190888459.013.8. In the context of
Asian America in US racial politics, my postcolonial feminist interpretation discusses
the imperial construction of the colonized in sexual terms and the subjects’ agency
operating through embodying Jesus’ broken body in Mark’s narrative. Jin Young Choi,
Postcolonial Discipleship of Embodiment: An Asian and Asian American Feminist
Reading of the Gospel of Mark (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 109–32.
Marcella María Althaus-Reid, “Searching for a Queer Sophia-Wisdom: The PostColonial Rabab,” in Patriarchs, Prophets and Other Villains, ed. Lisa Isherwood
(London; Oakville: Equinox, 2007), 134.
Althaus-Reid, “Searching for a Queer Sophia-Wisdom,” 138; also cited in Suzanne
Scholz, “Convert Prostitute or Traitor? Rahab as the Anti-Matriarch in Biblical
Interpretations,” in In the Arms of Biblical Women, ed. Mishael Caspi and John
Greene (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2013), 153–86.
Segovia distinguishes two phases: a phase of formation and definition (1996–99) and a
phase of expansion and consolidation (2000–7). Whereas a variety of efforts to apply
the postcolonial optic across the discipline in 2000, the publication of A Postcolonial
Commentary on the New Testament Writings in 2007 marks a climax of the entire
period. Segovia, “Postcolonial Criticism and the Gospel of Mathew,” in Methods for
Matthew, ed. Mark Allan Powell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 195.
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assumptions and practices in interpretation and opting for the
marginalized. Last, it has provided a discursive space for interpreters
from previous colonized places who are committed to social change.67
Concerns calling for attention include intersecting structures of colonial oppression, the complexities of colonial contacts, and hybridity of
cultures beyond binary oppositions. And Segovia emphasizes postcolonial studies as a resource for postcolonial biblical criticism to advance
the comprehensive “analysis of the geopolitical relationship of power in
the worlds of antiquity, modernity, and postmodernity.”68
Since then, scholarly interest in postcolonialism in the field has
grown and publications in postcolonial biblical criticism have proliferated to the extent that they cannot be fully covered here. Not only
diasporic minoritized scholars in the metropolis, but also EuroAmerican scholars, are interested in postcolonial discourse.
Postcolonial theory is appropriated to study not only Exodus and conquest narratives, the Gospels, or Revelation, but texts like James and
Maccabees.69 The field of postcolonial studies itself has expanded to
include various issues around globalization such as imperialism’s relationship with globalization and neoliberal economics, ecological
imperialism, questions of border and borderland, transnationalism,
etc. Most importantly, however, postcolonial studies has recently given
increased attention to the complicit and complex role of religion in
imperial-colonial formations, particularly through mission, and thus
recognizes a “postcolonial sacred” as a critical topic in a “post-secular
age.”70
Twenty years after the convergence of biblical studies and postcolonialism, Sugirtharajah still believes that “as long as there are (a)
markets to explore and exploit; (b) cultures which believe that their
way of life is superior and that others should conform; and (c) sacred
scriptures interpreted to promote the idea of a chosen people of God and
sanction conquest and conversion, postcolonialism will have a critical
role to play.”71 These aspects have not changed much. In addition, new
forms of imperial-colonial formations through neoliberal capitalism,
67
68
69
70
71
Segovia “Postcolonial Criticism,” 207.
Segovia “Postcolonial Criticism,” 216.
David A. deSilva, “Using the Master’s Tools to Shore Up Another’s House:
A Postcolonial Analysis of 4 Maccabees,” JBL 126.1 (2007): 99–127; K. Jason Coker,
James in Postcolonial Perspective: The Letter as Nativist Discourse (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2015).
Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies, viii, 226.
Sugirtharajah, ed., Voices from the Margin (2016), 142.
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White supremacy, and religious exclusivism require further examination by postcolonial biblical criticism. First, its interdisciplinary pursuit should go beyond employing postcolonial theory as another
traveling theory to revisit anticolonial and historical texts and attend
to current material conditions under imperial-colonial domination.
Second, intersectional concerns should be extended to the areas that
have scarcely been considered such as queerness, disability, racial capitalism, information technology, and climate change. Last, as postcolonial studies emerges from the reality of the actual lived experiences of
particular forms of colonialism, postcolonial biblical criticism must
continue to engage previously neglected voices from the margins, especially those from the global South. After all, postcolonial biblical criticism is not an objective inquiry into the text and history but political
commitment to social change.
further reading
Davidson, Steed Vernyl. “Writing/Reading the Bible in Postcolonial
Perspective.” Brill Research Perspective in Biblical Interpretation 2.3 (2017):
1–99.
Dube, Musa W. Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible. St. Louis:
Chalice, 2000.
Dube, Musa W., and Jeffrey L. Staley, eds. John and Postcolonialism: Travel,
Space and Power. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2002.
Gossai, Hemchand, ed. Postcolonial Commentary and the Old Testament.
London: T&T Clark, 2018.
Moore, Stephen D. Empire and Apocalypse: Postcolonialism and the New
Testament. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2006.
Moore, Stephen D., and Fernando F. Segovia, eds. Postcolonial Biblical
Criticism: Interdisciplinary Intersections. London: T&T Clark, 2005.
Segovia, Fernando F., and R. S. Sugirtharajah, eds. A Postcolonial Commentary
on the New Testament Writings. New York: T&T Clark, 2007.
Stanley, Christopher D. The Colonized Apostle: Paul through Postcolonial Eyes.
Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011.
Sugirtharajah, R. S. Postcolonial Criticism and Biblical Interpretation. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002.
Sugirtharajah, R. S., ed. The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Biblical
Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/
9780190888459.001.0001.
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