In the early years of the seventeenth century, as Europe pursued its conquest of new parts of the world, William Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, one of his final plays. The Tempest is the story of a group of European travelers who are shipwrecked on what we are told is “an uninhabited island.” But the island is actually not uninhabited—Shakespeare's dramatis personae for the play includes a listing for “Caliban, a savage and deformed slave.” Caliban is indeed portrayed as savage, practically half animal—his name itself is an anagram for “cannibal.”Footnote ¹

The figure of Caliban is often cited as a vivid template of how early modern Europeans imagined the inhabitants of the rest of the newly discovered world (of course, they imagined many of their fellow Europeans in similar terms). The type of cultural image Shakespeare created in Caliban would be repeated over and over in European literature, and it became a staple in early European and American ethnography and anthropology. These representations were an important component of the ideology of conquest, and they circulated not only among Westerners but also among non-Westerners, particularly those living under colonial control.

These representational dynamics constitute one of the key themes of postcolonial theory. Postcolonial theory is a central strand of the critical scholarly discourse that has gained academic prominence throughout the world since the 1960s. My purpose in this brief essay is to offer an overview of this scholarly movement and then to identify a set of basic questions relevant to assessing its value as a critical methodology. As I examine these critical questions, I will also consider some of the important resources postcolonial theory offers for the study of Christian history.

Contemporary postcolonial theory emerged largely as a critical response to the enormous impact of European and American colonialism on global culture. We can trace Europe's colonial expansion roughly from the conquest of the Americas, but it gained a fevered pitch particularly in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. The extent of Western colonial control of the non-Western world is extraordinary. By 1914, on the eve of the First World War, European powers and their emigrants occupied or controlled 85 percent of the surface territory of the globe.Footnote ² Scholars still work to parse the various factors that allowed Europe to become so remarkably successful in effecting this control, but by 1916 Lenin could declare that “for the first time the world is completely divided up, so that in the future only redivision is possible.”Footnote ³ With nothing left to conquer, European powers began to turn more directly on one another; the Carribean poet Aimé Césaire would conclude that mid-twentieth century fascism was merely colonialism brought home to Europe.Footnote ⁴

The Second World War so devastated most European colonial powers that their empires crumbled, and the majority of their colonized territories soon gained nominal independence, though most remain subject to Euro-American cultural and economic imperialism and military dominance. Postcolonial theory takes as its impetus the massive changes in global and national cultures that have occurred following the Second World War; it emerged from anti-colonial movements in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as activists joined with intellectuals in cultural resistance to colonialism and in the production of new forms of knowledge.Footnote ⁵

A convenient milepost for the emergence of postcolonial theory is the year 1952. In the early 1950s, high modernism dominated Western art and culture. But early in that decade significant cultural transformations began to emerge. France, particularly, was absorbing the repercussions of changes in its global power, as the futility of its efforts in Indochina and the bitter costs of the Algerian war for independence became increasingly apparent. In 1950 Césaire published an influential pamphlet—his Discourse on Colonialism attacking the violence and brutality of the colonial enterprise. Within a few short years Franz Fanon published his groundbreaking book, Black Skin, White Masks, and Fidel Castro defended his fight against the pro-American government in Cuba in a pivotal speech, “History Will Absolve Me.” The year 1952 also saw the first reference to the “Third World” by the French demographer Alfred Sauvy.Footnote ⁶

Throughout the 1950s, the leading figures of anti-colonialist discourse, writers like Fanon, Césaire, and the Tunisian Jewish theorist Albert Memmi, published a series of texts that shaped critical analysis of the operations and effects of colonialism. In 1958 the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe published Things Fall Apart, a powerful indictment of the bias and blindness of the West.Footnote ⁷ Other new fiction from colonized and recently decolonized peoples began to circulate, describing the effects of life under colonial domination.

The 1960s and 1970s saw major developments in anti-colonialist literature. Fanon was responsible for another milestone, his 1961 The Wretched of the Earth—an assault on Western racism introduced to Western audiences through an influential preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. In his introduction, Sartre lauded Fanon's mastery in displaying the “Manichean delirium” on which the West's self-understanding had been founded.Footnote ⁸ And then in 1978 Edward Said published Orientalism, which played a central role in the emergence of postcolonial studies as a distinct academic enterprise.Footnote ⁹

By the 1980s this mode of critical thought gained a prominent position within the international intellectual mainstream, as much greater attention was turned to how imperialism affected Europe's colonies and to the responses from former colonies and their peoples. In the decades since, new scholars from an array of traditions, nationalities, and disciplines have expanded and deepened these early analyses, moving this scholarship into a broad range of new directions.Footnote ¹⁰ Postcolonial theory is commonly framed as a form of political opposition or resistance, and a number of interlocking themes dominate: the complex cultural and national identities of colonized and decolonized societies (through permutations of gender, race, religion, and culture), the ways in which the power of the colonizer dominates the knowledge and representation of the colonized, and the dynamics of decolonization as the formerly colonized work to reconfigure their self-understandings and cultural identities.

This body of critical literature offers a number of important resources for our analysis of the place of religion in various social contexts and for how we narrate religious history.Footnote ¹¹ One of the most significant contributions of this critical method lies in the tools it offers in helping us analyze the dynamics of identity—the identities of individuals and the conflicting and interdependent identities of communities and cultures. At its best, postcolonial theory also offers nuanced analysis of the operations of power, both on the intercultural level and in its internalized forms.

Yet there are a number of important questions to be asked about this mode of critical analysis. In considering the value of postcolonial theory for the study of Christian history, let me focus on three central, interrelated lines of critique.

The first line of questioning begins with the term itself, “postcolonial” theory. The word “postcolonial” was coined in 1985 by the Australian cultural theorist Simon During,Footnote ¹² and this label was quickly adopted to encompass a broad range of critical literature arising in response to European and American colonialism.Footnote ¹³ This term, “postcolonial,” overtly signals a relation to the broad range of contemporary critical movements prominent in recent decades—postmodern, poststructural, post-Marxist, even post-feminist. These terms mark an important shift in literary and cultural theory, as scholars seek to intervene against the master narratives of Western discourse and to move new voices toward the center of various scholarly and social debates.

But of course all of these “post-s” are highly contested. For our purposes in considering the study of Christian history, note both the ambiguity in postcolonial theory between colonialism and its aftermath and also the complex—and competing—dynamics of identity formation that feed on this ambiguity. The term itself seems both to link and to divide a past and a present, the colonizer and the (de)colonized. This ambiguity reflects far broader conceptual debates about the nature and objectives of postcolonial theory. What exactly is the term intended to signal concerning the dynamics of domination and liberation? What types of voices are scholars seeking to recover, and how should claims to “authenticity” be gauged? Some critics argue that the very concept of postcolonialism immediately begins to deconstruct “because it designates far too many things, all at once.”Footnote ¹⁴

Contemplating this analytical muddle leads us to see both how dependent the identities of the colonizer and the colonized are on their foils and how unstable every identity ultimately is. As we consider the history of Christianity, we can see how the efforts to consolidate and maintain Christian identities constantly depend on the demarcation of the non-Christian, the heretic, the apostate. Identity depends on difference—difference that must be incorporated and internalized, even as it is disavowed—and yet difference itself is constantly changing.

Second, one of the central critiques of contemporary postcolonial theory involves the social position of those who do the theorizing. There are obvious, important differences—and conflicts—among theorists coming from Euro-American cultural and critical traditions, scholars who come originally from non-Western traditions but now work in the Western academy, and theorists from non-Western countries working in non-privileged academic or social settings. Most contemporary postcolonial theory is produced by a relatively narrow class of Western-trained writers and thinkers, and many critics question the politics of this form of knowledge. They argue that postcolonial theory needs to be understood as a product of globalizing capitalist social structures—a cultural mechanism serving largely to mask harsh material realities beneath a shallow, astheticizing moralism.Footnote ¹⁵

In the context of the study of Christian history, these lines of critique press us to consider exactly how critical the tools of postcolonial theory might actually be. At the same time, though, they compel us to maintain a focus on the material conditions that lead to the production of texts—both the social mediation of knowledge within the historical contexts and traditions we study and, then, the role of the historian in mediating between past and present. Some of the most significant contributions of postcolonial scholars can be found in their reflections on these dynamics of cultural mediation.

Finally, one of the central aspects of postcolonial studies is its focus on representation, particularly literature and other forms of textuality. A number of key postcolonial writers have found literature to be an extremely productive medium for political intervention, and postcolonial theory has been dominated by the study of texts—both texts like Shakespeare's The Tempest that participate in the framing of the cultural other and texts that talk back in a effort to undermine Western hegemony. Many theorists defend this emphasis by explaining that they focus on the political and ideological components of textuality, not simple aesthetics, and by arguing that representational politics is a central arena of class struggle.Footnote ¹⁶

But critics often point to the rarified nature of this analysis, its distance from concrete political engagement, and the ways in which it reflects the narrow class interest of the theorists themselves. As Ania Loomba states, in much postcolonial theory “the meaning of ‘discourse’ shrinks to text, and from there to ‘literary text,’ and from there to texts written in English,” since those are the texts most familiar to the critics.Footnote ¹⁷ The cultural superstructure dominates analytical attention at the expense of the more basic economic and material realities of exploitation.

Again what is the relevance of this challenge to the study of Christian history? On one level, of course, these tools of textual analysis are a great gift to historians who focus primarily on the analysis of texts.Footnote ¹⁸ Postcolonial methods are readily adaptable to the analysis of the archive. At the same time, though, the critics press us to think more directly about the relation of those textual traditions to political and economic dynamics beyond the texts. The challenge for historians is to think concretely and creatively about these dense dynamics—the ways in which ideology and social practices are interconnected, mutually constituting one another.

In his 1957 book The Colonizer and the Colonized, Albert Memmi argued that “the most serious blow suffered by the colonized is being removed from history.”Footnote ¹⁹ Colonizers have indeed exercised extraordinary power in defining what counts as history, who counts as a subject, and what counts as knowledge. But colonization has rarely succeeded in the effort to expunge the colonized from history. Just as postcolonial writing demonstrates the potential for fighting one's way into the revision of the historical narrative, so also the papers that follow offer new insights into how the historian can contribute to efforts to contest and amplify that narrative.