R.S. Sugirtharajah, Professor of Biblical Hermeneutics at the University of Birmingham, writes about Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: It interrogates the text in various ways, posing questions such as: (...) How has the empire been depicted - as benevolent or evil? (...) How does the author represent the occupied - as victims or as grateful beneficiaries? (...) Second, postcolonial biblical criticism is vigilant about representation and asks how biblical interpreters in their exegetical works, philological studies, and commentaries on biblical books represent the empire. Do they reflect the imperial perspective of the Western powers or neo-colonial impulses, or do they try to unsettle colonial ambitions? How do they represent the land, and the people mentioned in the Bible whose land has been taken away from them? (...) Third, postcolonial biblical criticism has embarked upon retrieval hermeneutics, and three tasks can be identified here. The first is to retrieve sidelined, silenced, written-out, and often maligned biblical figures and biblical incidents and restore their dignity and authenticity. (...) The second task is to unearth the imaginative ways in which those once colonized had formulated their response to the empire and how they resisted some of the missionary hermeneutical impositions.(...) The third retrieval task is to recover hermeneutical works of the missionaries and European administrators who were part of the colonizing process but ambivalent about the purpose and the logic of the empire. (...) Forth, postcolonialism has been able to intervene in the area of biblical translation and repair some of the cultural and theological damage done in that process. Biblical translatory activity gives contradictory signals. Positively, it has helped to revitalize a number of languages and finesse their grammar. Negatively, culturally insensitive theological injections carried out in the name of certain Christian theological values have neutralized some egalitarian values intrinsic to local cultures.(...) Finally, postcolonialism has been vigorous in addressing issues caused by the movement of people, such as diaspora, migrancy, multiculturalism, hybridity, and nationhood. These issues were the resultant issues of colonialism and postcolonialism. (...) To these one could add postcolonialism's scrutinity of the public nature of biblical studies through its professionalized and specialized guilds and bodies. How do these organizations structure themselves? Whose interests do they serve? What religious ideology do they reflect? What kinds of critical theories and reading practices get attention in these academic gatherings? (...) (...) what sort of space is given to minority hermeneutics? in: R.S. Sugitharajah, Exploring Postcolonial Biblical Criticism, (History, Method, Practice), Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, 2012, pp. 46-51. |