Sunday, June 30, 2019

Thinking again about Postcolonialism in the wake of CWM-DARE Global Forum in Taiwan



     I was honoured to participate in this year’s CWM’s (Council for World Mission) DARE Global Forum held in Taiwan last June 19-21. I didn't quite understand the raison d'etre of CWM-DARE before the event but after having participated in the conference, I've begun to grasp its rationale and crucial importance. I'm really thankful for having been given this wonderful opportunity to participate in this forum and especially to learn from the insightful reflections of so many of my colleagues who attended the event.

Here is the report published at the CWM website.This article describes succinctly what happened at the said meeting:

Dare to engage radically and envision creatively a just world

Discernment and radical engagement are at the heart of the mission that makes CWM what it is. Attentive to the signs of the time and in response to imperial powers and powerholders that exploit, divide, despoil and threaten the world, CWM’s DARE program is a voice of counter-imperial consciousness.

This year’s DARE Global Forum was held from 20-21 June in Taiwan, a location we chose in solidarity with the Taiwanese people and especially with our member church Presbyterian Church in Taiwan (PCT) for their continuous struggle for democracy. During the opening service at Lo-Tong Presbyterian Church, CWM General Secretary delivered the keynote address and launched “Scripture and Resistance” – the second book in the “Theology in the Age of Empire” series.

The DARE Forum was a platform where theological and biblical scholars, activists and interested peoples engaged creatively to critique mainline scholarships, confidently rooted their views upon on the ground struggles and concerns and shared their radical engagements with global readership.

At the gathering, each presenter presented an academic paper, attended and engaged with the presentations by other participants of their stream, and submitted the revised paper for publication. There were six streams – earth, class, race, gender, occupation, and artificial intelligence (AI) – this year, and presenters were encouraged to discern and engage radically, creatively and justly.


Here are my most salient takeaways from the event:

Taiwan’s Plight as the Context for our Reflections

     I was really struck at the plight and marginalized international status of Taiwan. Taiwanese pastor-scholar Rev. Omi Wilang’s talk on his indigenous culture was particularly significant. There he emphasized the status of Taiwan as an international orphan which refers to its state of international isolation because of mainland China's continuing efforts to literally coerce the international community to recognize the "one China policy" by which only mainland China is legitimately recognized as the “real” China and Taiwan as an illegitimate entity.

     I ruefully reflected though that, recalling what I learned in younger days, when the Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-Shek fled the mainland and established their base in Taiwan in 1949, it was Taiwan that was trying to convince the world that it was the legitimate China and not the Communist-led government that had taken over the mainland. Fast-forward 70 or so years later when China has become the gigantic and impossible-to-ignore military and economic powerhouse that it is today, the tables have been completely turned and Taiwan is at the mercy of the Chinese empire.


Resisting Empire

     I ended the conference thoroughly struck at and convinced once again that <reflecting critically-doing scholarship-theologizing or even just engaging in the very basic activity of thinking about life> in the context of empire (and postcolonial and decolonial critique) is a serious and most urgent task. Why? For the simple reason that imperial ways (known by many alternative names such as the basic human "lust for power and/or domination") have tried and largely succeeded to rule humanity itself and our world from the very beginning of history in countless forms. Imperialism is practically built into many of the structures in which we find ourselves. This time in Taiwan, however, I was made more acutely aware of empire's destructive effects because they threaten now more than ever the very existence of our earth-home through an impending ecological disaster.


My Own Modest Part in the Forum 
      
     There were several streams to reflect critically on the themes of empire, resistance and critical engagement at the conference: Land, Race, Gender, Occupation, and Artificial Intelligence. For my very modest part, I presented the significance of Paul's religious experience for the concept of artificial intelligence. I basically suggested that to retrieve the origins of how we imagine Artificial Intelligence as a “super intelligence”  (as expressed particularly in some science fiction movies), it may be worth looking more closely at what happened to Paul as a consequence of his religious experience and how he envisioned everyone and everything as “One in Christ” (Gal. 3:27-28). I didn’t have the time and space to reflect more on the implications of this for the theme of empire and power but I intend to touch on that aspect as well in my final paper. My proposal was originally prepared for the 'Race' stream but it seemed to have been well received by my AI group. 


Why Postcolonial Thought? (Revisited)

     At last year's SBL meeting in Denver, CO, I attended a session of the Theological Interpretation of Scripture unit in which the topic was, broadly speaking, postcolonial efforts to interpret the Bible theologically. During the Q&A session, someone asked this fundamental question: "What is it even necessary to do this postcolonial theological interpretation of scripture?"

     That question still keeps ringing in my ears after all these months and it was brought to the fore and answered in many ways in Taiwan. It is just incredible that there is still a substantial number (even of scholars, particularly, Roman Catholic theologian-colleagues of mine) who have not thought about or are not yet convinced why a postcolonial critique of theology and religious studies is even necessary. 
    
     To this question, I can only offer once again what I already stated in my 2012 book How Immigrant Christians … Interpret Their Religion (56).

What is the value of a postcolonial framework? Edward Said has, in my opinion, expressed most eloquently the need for a critical academic sense vis-à-vis the problem of imperialism when he states, “we are at a point in our work when we can no longer ignore empires and the imperial context in our studies.”(Culture and Imperialism, 1993, p. 6). He further remarks that, “whether or not to look at the connections between cultural texts and imperialism is therefore to take a position in fact taken – either to study the connections in order to criticize it and think of alternatives for it, or not to study it in order to let it stand, unexamined and, presumably, unchanged (ibid., 68).

The implications of Said’s remarks are staggering. If we ignore imperial ideology in our critical studies, we are in reality actively contributing to its continuing unjust oppression of people. In short, we cannot remain neutral on such a key issue. There is a major ethical issue at stake here. Ignoring imperialist elements in our fields of study places a large interrogative against the integrity of all our endeavors. If we further reflect on the fact that many of us who are engaged in the Christian theological field have a confessional interest in Jesus of Nazareth proclaimed as the Christ and that his most pressing concern seems to have been the ushering in of the reign of God’s justice in the world to the detriment of this world’s unjust empires, the issue of integrity becomes all the more urgent.

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