When the theme for the 2009 spring meeting of the American Society of Church History was announced as “Mission and Empire in the History of Christianity,” the moment seemed ripe to propose a session on “Postcolonial Theory and the Study of Christian History.” Three of the papers from that session, in revised form, are offered here.
The first, by Randall Styers, provides a succinct survey of the development of postcolonial theory, a critique that emerged as formerly colonized areas of the world gained at least nominal independence from Western powers. Indigenous peoples were joined by cosmopolitan intellectuals in protest—political, to be sure, but also literary and artistic—against the effects of colonization and its aftermath. This critique of the master narratives of Western discourse, Styers notes, raises challenges for historians of Christianity. The imperialism of modern European nations and the United States, as well as that of ancient Rome, offers an excellent arena for exploration. Two brief case studies illustrate these points.
Jeremy Schott explores the construction of “imperial knowledge” in the writings of three late-ancient intellectuals (two Neo-Platonic philosophers and Eusebius of Caesarea) who mined “wisdom” from distant times and foreign places to promote the superiority of their own present claims to knowledge and power. Centuries-old ritual practices and classical theories of language provided ammunition for late-ancient philosophers' struggle to appropriate, and hence control, the mysterious wisdom of ancient Egypt. The Christian Eusebius, for his part, worked to carve out an “imagined” conceptual space for the new religion: existing in a limbo between Hellenism and Judaism, Christianity had descended from “Hebrewness” but had cast off “Jewish” ethnic particularity. Borrowing from other peoples' books, Eusebius crafted a transcendent, universalizing, “placeless” Christianity.
Denise Kimber Buell probes intersections between the early twentieth-century Western obsession with Spiritualism, inspired by “occult” currents in India, and the developing study of ancient Christianity. In an era when “Gnostic” texts were becoming known in the West, Indian spiritualists seemed to offer a comparable source of ancient mystic wisdom. Buell explores how a British scholar of early Christianity (B. H. Streeter) claimed the powerful mystique emanating from a native Indian Christian who purported to hear the voices of “Christian” spirits—spirits that importantly challenged the rival claims of Theosophists in India. Streeter thought his adventure in India comparable to experiencing “the Greco-Roman Empire of the second century,” an experience that enabled his ability to historicize (in postcolonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty's phrase) a “subaltern past.”
Both Schott and Buell show how native “pasts” can be raised up to aggrandize intellectuals of a present dominant culture in their struggle with competitors—whether that “present” was situated in the early fourth century or the early twentieth. Both show the instability of temporal borders, as the past becomes a resource for constructing and retaining present hegemony. Moreover, ancient and modern imperialism's exploitation of raw materials in their colonies forms a parallel to dominant intellectuals' appropriation of the wisdom of the colonized for their own purposes, whether they mine it from bearers of ancient, mysterious spirits or from libraries stuffed with ancient, arcane texts.
The papers by Schott and Buell, different in subject matter, converge in the questions they pose. Can the practices, indeed, the very language, of a “subordinated” culture be translated into that of the dominant group without losing something—a loss that concerns issues of power? How, as scholars of religious history, do we treat questions of agency and subjectivity—so central to postcolonial theory—when the people whom we study claim that there are “agents” beyond the human? Do not such claims violate the canons of rationality to which historians (along with ancient philosophers) agree to conform? As Buell asks, “What might it mean to recover pasts that destabilize our sense of what constitutes rationality and agency?”
As all three panelists note, postcolonial theory raises unsettling questions. Who is entitled to engage in this theorizing? Whose voices get recovered? Can Westerners “authentically” represent the views of those whom their own cultures have repressed? Does not the formation of Christian identity, like all identity-construction, depend upon setting up an “other” as a negative foil, in this case, the non-Christian, the heretic, the apostate? Have political and economic—“material”—forces become submerged in the academic discussion of “representation,” of literature and textuality? Has the history of the colonized been lost in the process?
These brief essays, we hope, will stimulate further discussion of postcolonial theory in relation to the history of Christianity.
