R.S. Sugirtharajah, Professor of Biblical Hermeneutics at the University of Birmingham, writes about Challenges to postcolonial Criticism: "The constant challenge a postcolonial critic faces is how to maintain marginal status. How to be on the edge. How to remain an outsider. (...) The dilemma of the outsider is poignantly captured by Virginia Woolf: "I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps to be locked in." (in: A Room of One's Own (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1945), pp. 25-26 (...) What postcolonial biblcal criticism has done is to treat texts (...) as a system of codes which interpreters must disentangle in order to reveal the hidden power relations and ideologies lurking in supposedly innocent narratives. (...) Brilliant textual analysis itself, though, is not enough. We are not going to overcome the social deprivation or the marginalization by simply decoding texts. Poverty, war, suicide bombings, caste killings, racial discriminations, and sexual harassments are not imaginary constructs which will disappear if properly deconstructed." in: R.S. Sugitharajah, Exploring Postcolonial Biblical Criticism, (History, Method, Practice), Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, 2012, pp. 185-186 |