Multiple Faiths in Postcolonial Cities

Living Together after Empire

Jonathan Dunn, Heleen Joziasse, Raj Bharat Patta, Joseph Duggan, Jonathan Dunn, Heleen Joziasse, Raj Bharat Patta, Joseph Duggan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030171438
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030171445
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book addresses the challenges of living together after empire in many post-colonial cities. It is organized in two sections. The first section focuses on efforts by people of multiple faiths to live together within their contexts, including such efforts within a neighborhood in urban Manchester; the array of attempts at creating multi-faith spaces for worship across the globe; and initiatives to commemorate divisive conflict together in Northern Ireland. The second section utilizes particular postcolonial methods to illuminate pressing issues within specific contexts—including women's leadership in an indigenous denomination in the variegated African landscape, and baptism and discipleship among Dalit communities in India. In the context of growing multiculturalism in the West, this volume offers a postcolonial theological resource, challenging the epistemologies in the Western academy.

© The Author(s) 2019

Jonathan Dunn, Heleen Joziasse, Raj Bharat Patta and Joseph Duggan (eds.)Multiple Faiths in Postcolonial CitiesPostcolonialism and Religionshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17144-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Jonathan Dunn¹ , Heleen Joziasse^{2, 3} and Raj Bharat Patta⁴

(1)

Department of Theology & Religious Studies, University of Chester, Chester, UK

(2)

Mara Foundation, The Hague, The Netherlands

(3)

Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

(4)

Lincoln Theological Institute, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

Jonathan Dunn (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Heleen Joziasse

Raj Bharat Patta

End Abstract

The Continuing Relevance of ‘Living Together After Empire’

The chapters in this volume were presented in May 2016 at a conference at the University of Manchester, entitled ‘Multiple Faiths in postcolonial cities: Living together after Empire’. On 22 May 2017, one year after the Manchester conference, people were startled by a terrorist attack, which took place at the end of a concert of a teen pop-idol, Ariana Grande, in the Manchester Arena. The attack claimed 23 lives (including the attacker) and wounded many people.¹ Two days later, religious leaders—Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and leaders of other religious denominations—rallied and showed unity, giving a powerful message of resilience, demonstrating the strength of multiple faiths joining together to address and defeat the forces of hatred and prejudice.² These events point to both the continued challenges of living together after empire faced in many post-colonial cities, and the attempts by faith communities to meet those challenges. The theme of the 2016 conference and this volume, ‘Living together after empire’, addresses concerns which are evidently faced in many urban contexts, and not exclusively those of Europe and Northern America. Indeed, African capitals, such as Nairobi and Bamako, have also witnessed terrorist attacks, as have Dhaka and Jakarta, to name but a few. This project then, attempts to engage with these concerns and to resource the meeting of the challenges of living together ‘after empire’.

While power structures of ‘after empire societies’ are tested, and often symbols of Western hegemony are targeted, religious communities, usually represented by male leaders, speak powerful words to refute diversifying powers and show a resilient society. In doing so, religious communities reveal themselves to be able to respond to these challenges in a way which offers hope of resolution. The revelation of this resilience contests dominant narratives which problematize religious belief in its diverse forms in a way which, at the least, implies that religious belief makes living together more difficult. These responses also highlight and test the limits which political agendas place on the expression of religious belief. For, while in formerly Christian but presently secular or post-secular societies, religious expressions of different faith communities are foregrounded, especially in times of ‘personal crises’, this foregrounding comes with restrictions on religious expressions, which force religious actors (or people of faith) to express their faith in a politically correct way.

The nature and scale of these restrictions on religious expression vary across the many contexts touched upon by this volume. Indeed, this volume is offered with an awareness of these variances and other significant differences between the contexts it covers. For while change is apparently in the air in one context, in another it remains elusive, despite being sought-after and mistakenly perceived. For the people of Manchester, and across a British context still struck by the collapse of an empire, change appears imminent, and the prospect is often met with a sense of foreboding. The vote in favour of ‘Brexit’ on 23 June 2016 has been widely interpreted as signalling a turn away from the rest of the world. With concerns over immigration , particularly the economic migration of people from Eastern Europe, apparently motivating many among the narrow majority who voted to quit the European Union, such an interpretation appears compelling. In contrast to the perception of imminent change in that context, in countries which have had to endure both conquest by colonial entities such as Britain, and Western cultural hegemony, there are no overt signs of change nor are there clear signs of a new ‘era’: Power relations continue, while cultural and economic hegemony feeds migration. However, a post-colonial theory and theology reveals counter hegemonic ideas and practices. This is, for instance, the case in a Kenyan context: Various religions and religious expressions are integrated in public life, and in a context of marginality, agency is used to respond to religious and cultural hegemony. So, it is in the Indian context, where caste epistemologies dominate the public sphere, Dalits and such oppressed communities have been contesting such epistemologies and have been engaging in alternative visions of public spheres.

The Problematic Idea of ‘After Empire’

In reflecting on attacks such as those in Manchester and elsewhere, a post-colonial approach raises pressing questions. Not least, that of whether these attacks are symptomatic of life after empire, or whether this deathly violence was in fact targeting empire. Indeed, the posing of this question points to the existence of a prior question, a question which continues to be at the heart of post-colonial studies: Are we actually living after empire or are we still witnessing empire, clothed in the garments of globalization?

The question of whether empire can be consigned to history, or remains very much alive under new guises, persists. Indeed, it is the persistence of this question, and its necessary relevance and centrality for post-colonial studies, which brings an interrogative dimension to this volume’s title, ‘Living together after empire?’ This volume, and the conference which gave rise to it, has proceeded on the basis that the death of empire cannot be assumed. To some extent, the question ‘are we “living after empire”?’ hangs over every attempt to explore and imagine life after empire.

What exactly the ‘post’ of post-colonial denotes and how it relates to the notion of living after empire are questions which many working within this field have attempted to address. Among them is the Zimbabwean theologian, Edward Antonio, who argues that ‘post’ literally designates an ‘after’ and intimates a real ‘beyond’. Hence, post-colonial theory seems to point at something about, or gestures to a possibility of, the end of formal colonialism and its political and cultural aftermath. Yet, Antonio also recognizes that globalization is experienced, especially in the formerly colonized countries and by the people who belonged to these countries, as a continuing form of colonialism; globalization iterates, repeats and reproduces the social, economic and cultural imbalances which once characterized imperial rule. Notwithstanding this observation, Antonio holds that without speaking of ‘after’ or post, it is not possible to locate the possibility of re-describing new power relationships. Hence, to talk about ‘post’ enables one to take seriously power relations in the past and in the present.³ Therefore, in favour of the ‘after’ and post-colonial theory, he holds:

To deny any division between the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of colonial time in the name of political sensitivity is not only to freeze colonial relations in the synchronic space of an ever present domination, it is also, in the end, to display the most condescending political insensitivity. Does not such a denial privilege the colonial by insinuating its eternity?⁴

Moreover, Antonio states that the denial of the ‘after’ in the ‘post’ of post-colonialism would imply a freezing of the agency of the colonially subjugated, leaving no space for possible transformation. As a theologian, furthermore, he argues that religion has always been constitutively central to colonial and post-colonial relationships and therefore the post-colonial or the post-colony is structured by the religious imaginary.⁵

This project employs a contested epistemology, with oppositional k...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Collecting Stories of a Manchester Street, Living Together as People of Multi-Faiths
• 3. Multifaith Space: Religious Accommodation in Postcolonial Public Space?
• 4. Remembering Together: Co-Memoration in Northern Ireland
• 5. A Postcolonial Ethnographic Reading of Migrant/Refugee Faith Communities in Bengaluru
• 6. Worshipping God in a Mabati Church: Bishop Jane Akoth’s Leadership in the African Israel Nineveh Church
• 7. Discipleship as Living Out Baptism: A Dalit Public Engagement with Theology of Bonhoeffer
• 8. Immanuel Kant Believed in Zombies: Multiculturalism and Spirituality in the Postcolonial City
• Back Matter