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Towards a Decolonial Theology: Perspectives from the Caribbean

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Decolonial Christianities

Part of the book series: New Approaches to Religion and Power ((NARP))

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Abstract

This chapter develops the following topics: (1) The linkages between the Iberian conquest and Christianization of Latin America and the Caribbean, and the emergence of modernity, global empire, and capitalism. Latin America and the Caribbean became the cradle of modern expressions of Western imperial domination and missionary enterprises. It was an imperial process vindicated, but also contested, by theological arguments and scriptural hermeneutics, as attested by the writings of Francisco de Vitoria, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, José de Acosta, and others. (2) The ways in which contemporary biblical studies engage the voices of oppressed peoples and articulate decolonizing perspectives. Biblical Israel was a small nation subject to the ambitions of several powerful empires—Egypt, Syria, Assyria, Babylon, Macedonia, and Rome. Jesus’ crucifixion was a lethal expression of imperial repression in connivance with colonized hierarchies. (3) The emergence of contemporary decolonizing theologies, in conjunction with the Exodus paradigm and the hope for God’s kingdom that characterize Christian Scriptures. These theologies dare to discern critically the signs of times and radically engage the imperatives of human liberation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    José Trías Monge, Puerto Rico: The Trials of the Oldest Colony in the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

  2. 2.

    The war between the United States and Spain concluded with the Treaty of Paris, signed December 10, 1898. Spain, militarily defeated, was forced to relinquish its dominion over the Philippines, Cuba, Guam, and Puerto Rico to the new American colossus. Alfonso García Martínez, ed., Libro rojo/Tratado de París: Documentos presentados a las cortes en la legislatura de 1898 por el ministro de Estado (Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1988).

  3. 3.

    Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire (New York, NY: Henry Holt, 2017).

  4. 4.

    Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987).

  5. 5.

    A classic exposition of the North American ideological mythological construct of “manifest destiny” is Albert K. Weinberg, Manifest Destiny : A Study Of Nationalist Expansionism in American History (Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1935).

  6. 6.

    Quoted in Kinzer, The True Flag, 132.

  7. 7.

    Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993); Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2001); Gayatri C. Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 1998); Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1995).

  8. 8.

    Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1968); Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965).

  9. 9.

    Aníbal Quijano, “Colonialidad del poder, cultura y conocimiento en América Latina,” Anuario Mariateguiano , 9, núm. 9, 1998, 113–121; “The Colonial Nature of Power and Latin America’s Cultural Experience,” en R. Briceño & H. R. Sonntag, Sociology in Latin America (Social Knowledge: Heritage, Challenges, Perspectives), Proceedings of the Regional Conference of the International Association of Sociology (Caracas, 1998), 27–38; “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla, No. 3, 2000, 533–580.

  10. 10.

    Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (New York: Knopf, 1999).

  11. 11.

    James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 18.

  12. 12.

    V. S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men (New York, Macmillan, 1967).

  13. 13.

    Enrique Dussel, 1492: el encubrimiento del Otro (Santafé de Bogotá: Ediciones Antropos, 1992).

  14. 14.

    Christopher Columbus, A New and Fresh English Translation of the Letter of Columbus Announcing the Discovery of America, translated and edited by Samuel Eliot Morison (Madrid: Gráficas Yagües, 1959), 15.

  15. 15.

    Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “ Can the subaltern speak?,” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (25th anniversary edition) (New York: Random House, 2003), 335.

  16. 16.

    Angelo Falcón, Atlas of Stateside Puerto Ricans (Washington, DC: Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration, 2004).

  17. 17.

    As Princeton University professor Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones has beautifully shown, in his book El arte de bregar: ensayos (San Juan: Ediciones Callejón, 2000), Puerto Rican culture cannot be genuinely assessed if the creativity of its diaspora community is neglected or its significance diminished.

  18. 18.

    Elazar Barkan and Marie-Denise Shelton, eds., Borders, Exiles, Diasporas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

  19. 19.

    Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 5.

  20. 20.

    Franz Fanon, Peau Noir, Masques Blancs (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952).

  21. 21.

    Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (London: Penguin Books, 1990, orig. 1940), 102.

  22. 22.

    This was the case for two creative Caribbean writers, marginalized and despised in their homelands, the Cuban Reinaldo Arenas and the Puerto Rican Manuel Ramos-Otero, who found in New York a wider horizon for their literary talents, a greater realm of personal freedom, and AIDS related death. See Rubén Ríos-Avila, “Caribbean Dislocations: Arenas and Ramos Otero in New York,” in Sylvia Molloy and Robert M. Irwin, eds., Hispanisms and Homosexualities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 101–122.

  23. 23.

    Elazar Barkan and Marie-Denise Shelton, “Introduction,” Borders, Exiles, Diasporas, 5.

  24. 24.

    Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

  25. 25.

    The Location of Culture, 164.

  26. 26.

    Jason DeParle, “The Sea Swallows People,” The New York Review of Books, Vol. LXIV, No. 3, February 23, 2017, 31.

  27. 27.

    Luis N. Rivera-Pagán, “Xenophilia or Xenophobia: Towards a Theology of Migration,” The Ecumenical Review (World Council of Churches), Vol. 64, No. 4, December 2012, 575–589.

  28. 28.

    See the poignant article by Jeremy Harding, “The Deaths Map,” London Review of Books, Vol. 33, No. 20, 20 October 2011, 7–13.

  29. 29.

    John Bowe, Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy (New York: Random House, 2007); Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004); Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity, 2004).

  30. 30.

    Slavoj Žižek, Refugees, Terror and other Troubles with the Neighbors (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2016).

  31. 31.

    Branko Milanovic, “Global Inequality and the Global Inequality Extraction Ratio: The Story of the Past Two Centuries,” (The World Bank, Development Research Group, Poverty and Inequality Group, September 2009); Peter Stalker, Workers Without Frontiers: The Impact of Globalization on International Migration (Geneva: International Labor Organization, 2000).

  32. 32.

    Michelle Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven (New York: Plume Books, 1996, orig. 1987), 189.

  33. 33.

    James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1946, orig. 1914), 131–132.

  34. 34.

    Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004).

  35. 35.

    The Location of Culture, 256.

  36. 36.

    Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), 79.

  37. 37.

    “The Epistle to Diognetus,” in Johannes Quasten and Joseph C. Plumpe, eds., Ancient Christian Writers: The Works of the Fathers in Translation, vol. 6 (Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1961), 139.

  38. 38.

    Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, A Biblical Theology of Exile (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002).

  39. 39.

    René Krüger, La diáspora: De experiencia traumática a paradigma eclesiológico (Buenos Aires: ISEDET, 2008).

  40. 40.

    Edward Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 16–17.

  41. 41.

    Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 243.

  42. 42.

    Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), xv.

  43. 43.

    Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2006), 284.

  44. 44.

    William Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics In the Time of Many Worlds (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 6–7.

  45. 45.

    Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999), 216–217.

  46. 46.

    Stephen D. Moore and Fernando Segovia, Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: Interdisciplinary Intersections (London/New York: T & T Clark, 2005); R. S. Sugirtharajah, ed., The Postcolonial Bible (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998); R. S. Sugirtharajah, Postcolonial Criticism and Biblical Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); R. S. Sugirtharajah, ed., The Postcolonial Biblical Reader (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2006); Musa W. Dube, Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2000); Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and Empire: the Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003); Richard A. Horsley, Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1997); Richard A. Horsley, Paul and the Roman Imperial Order (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2004); Leo G. Perdue and Warren Carter, edited by Coleman A Baker, Israel and Empire: A Postcolonial History of Israel and Early Judaism (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

  47. 47.

    Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 37.

  48. 48.

    João B. Libânio e Maria Clara L. Bingemer, Escatologia Cristã: O Novo Céu e a Nova Terra (Petrópolis, Brasil: Vozes, 1985); Pablo Richard, Apocalipsis: reconstrucción de la esperanza (San José: DEI, 1994) and Brian K. Blount, Can I Get a Witness?: Reading Revelation Through African American Culture (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005).

  49. 49.

    Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).

  50. 50.

    R. S. Sugirtharajah, “Complacencies and Cul-de-sacs: Christian Theologies and Colonialism,” in Catherine Keller, Michael Nausner, and Mayra Rivera, Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2004), 22.

  51. 51.

    Catherine Keller, God and Power: Counter-Apocalyptic Journeys (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005); Mark Lewis Taylor, Religion, Politics, and the Christian Right: Post-9/11 Powers and American Empire (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005); Kwok Pui-lan, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005); Wonhee Anne Joh, Heart of the Cross: a Postcolonial Christology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006); Joerg Rieger, Christ & Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007); Keller, Nausner, and Rivera, Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire (2004).

  52. 52.

    Fernando Segovia, “Mapping the Postcolonial Optic in Biblical Criticism: Meaning and Scope,” in Moore and Segovia, Postcolonial Biblical Criticism, 23–78.

  53. 53.

    Ibid., 73.

  54. 54.

    Ibid., 74–75.

  55. 55.

    Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (London and New York: Routledge, 1998). Sometimes their disregard for the sixteenth-century imperial formations leads them into egregious mistakes, like asserting that “in 1503, Bishop Las Casas . . . proposed . . . systematic importation of blacks” as “an alternative to indigenous labor” (ibid., 212). In 1503 Bartolomé de Las Casas was not yet a bishop and he did not propose to bring Black slaves to the new Spanish territories till the middle of the second decade of that century. Cf. Luis N. Rivera-Pagán, A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992), 180–195. See also Luis N. Rivera-Pagán, “Freedom and Servitude: indigenous Slavery in the Spanish Conquest of the Caribbean,” General History of the Caribbean. Volume I: Autochthonous Societies, edited by Jalil Sued-Badillo (London: UNESCO Publishing and Macmillan Publishers, 2003), 316–362. Several of their statements regarding Latin America are not to be trusted (“the slave system . . . persisted in the Caribbean and some South American areas until the 1830s” [ibid., 214]—whereas slavery was not abolished in Puerto Rico until 1873, in Cuba until 1886, and in Brazil until 1888), which only shows the lack of attention of some postcolonial scholars to the colonial history of Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean.

  56. 56.

    Curiously, Chinua Achebe is mentioned once in Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin’s textbook, but his 1958 classic novel, Things Fall Apart, one of the foremost literary assessments of the convergence between European colonization of African and Christian missions, is not even alluded to.

  57. 57.

    Enrique Dussel, Política de la liberación. Historia mundial y crítica (Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2007), 186–210.

  58. 58.

    Francisco de Vitoria, “On the American Indians” (De indis, I), Political Writings, trans. Jeremy Lawrance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 231–292.

  59. 59.

    Bartolomé de las Casas, In Defense of the Indians, trans. Stafford Poole (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992).

  60. 60.

    José de Acosta, De procuranda indorum salute (2 vols.), translated and edited by G. Stewart McIntosh (Tayport: Scotland, UK: Mac Research, 1996).

  61. 61.

    Mignolo , The Darker Side of the Renaissance and Local Histories/Global Designs; Enrique Dussel, Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” & the Myth of Modernity (New York: Continuum Publishing Co., 1995).

  62. 62.

    Lewis U. Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949); Lewis U. Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1959); Lewis U. Hanke, All Mankind is One; A Study of the Disputation Between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550 on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indians (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974). Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Anthony Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990); Anthony Pagden, Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c.1500–c.1800 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995).

  63. 63.

    Luis N. Rivera-Pagán, A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992); Entre el oro y la fe: El dilema de América (San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1995). Among theologians, Joerg Rieger is a distinguished exception. He devotes a chapter of one of his books to the critical analysis of Bartolomé de las Casas’ Christology in the context of the sixteenth-century imperial expansion. Christ & Empire, 159–196.

  64. 64.

    Luis N. Rivera-Pagán, “God the Liberator: Theology, History, and Politics,” in Essays from the Margins (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2014), 63–83.

  65. 65.

    T. S. Eliot, “Murder in the Cathedral” (1935), in The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1952), 195.

  66. 66.

    Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God (New York: Knopf, 2000).

  67. 67.

    Willis H. Logan, ed., The Kairos Covenant: Standing with the South African Christians (New York, NY: Friendship Press, 1988), 27, 33.

  68. 68.

    David Hume, The Natural History of Religion (London: A. & C. Black, 1956).

  69. 69.

    Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994).

  70. 70.

    Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

  71. 71.

    Franz Hinkelammert, El grito del sujeto: del teatro-mundo del evangelio de Juan al perro-mundo de la globalización (San José, Costa Rica: DEI, 1998).

  72. 72.

    Jorge Pixley et al., Por un mundo otro: alternativas al mercado global (Quito, Ecuador: Consejo Latinoamericano de Iglesias, 2003).

  73. 73.

    Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, edited by Eberhard Bethge (London: Folio Society, 2000), 16.

  74. 74.

    Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectuals (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 35, 113.

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  1. Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Luis N. Rivera-Pagán

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Correspondence to Luis N. Rivera-Pagán .

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  1. Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Raimundo Barreto

  2. Hope International University, Fullerton, CA, USA

    Roberto Sirvent

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Rivera-Pagán, L.N. (2019). Towards a Decolonial Theology: Perspectives from the Caribbean. In: Barreto, R., Sirvent, R. (eds) Decolonial Christianities. New Approaches to Religion and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24166-7_3

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