In Counterpoint

Diaspora, Postcoloniality, and Sacramental Theology

Suna-Koro

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781532619908
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism

What does postcoloniality have to do with sacramentality? How do diasporic lives and imaginaries shape the course of postcolonial sacramental theology? Neither postcolonial theorists nor sacramental theologians have hitherto sought to engage in a sustained dialogue with one another. In this trailblazing volume, Kristine Suna-Koro brings postcolonialism, diaspora discourse, and Christian sacramental theology into a mutually critical and constructive transdisciplinary conversation. Dialoguing with thinkers as diverse as Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak as well as Francis D'Sa, S.J., Martin Luther, Mayra Rivera, and John Chryssavgis, the author offers a postcolonial retrieval of sacramentality through a robust theological engagement with the postcolonial notions of hybridity, contrapuntality, planetarity, and Third Space. While exploring the methodological potential of diasporic imaginary in theology, this innovative book advances the notion of sacramental pluriverse and of Christ as its paradigmatic crescendo within the sacramental economy of creation and redemptive transformation. In the context of ecological degradation, In Counterpoint argues that it is vital for the postcolonial sacramental renewal to be rooted in ethics as a uniquely postcolonial fundamental theology.

Part I

Compositio Loci

Exploring Diasporic and Postcolonial Lifeworlds of Theological Imagination

1.1.

Diasporic Sights and Sounds

A Fugue of Christ, Blue Cornflowers, and Wild Carrots

How does a theologian live with a haunted history—disjointed, constantly shifting, and refusing to be fitted into one piece?92

Kwok Pui-lan

Whatever else it might mean, being “haunted” does not stand for being settled comfortably in any geographical, linguistic, cultural, or confessional location. “Haunted,” that is, by the perplexities of belonging among divergent cultural memories, political allegiances, and theological traditions that co-inhere rather spontaneously in an intellectual sensibility marked indelibly by the experience of migrancy and diasporic life.

In this study, my critical peregrinations through the terrain of theological method and its Occidental colonial attraction to dualistic imaginaries of divine transcendence, sacramentality, and agency are “haunted” by the polyphony (cacophony?) of diasporic life. The polyphonous (and sometimes cacophonous!) diasporic life is almost instinctively drawn to interrogate the modes of relationality between the multiple, coexisting and conflicting, dimensions of experience and knowledge that so often seem altogether disagreeable at first glance. In this regard, being “haunted” stands for being always already embedded in a specific diasporic hybridity of cultural, linguistic and theological code-switching.93

But being “haunted” by cultural and theological hybridity is not necessarily a liability within a religious worldview that strives to affirm the Incarnation as its quintessential revelatory paradigm. If the culturally embodied human person as a historically enmattered soul or ensouled body indeed is the archetypical locus of encounter between divinity and humanity, then the “materiality of the particular”94 can and should be vigorously affirmed as a foremost interface of revelation and grace. The incarnate, crucified, and resurrected body of Christ intensifies the innate “sacramental potential of the particular” throughout the whole economy of creation and thus also the “perduring presence of God’s salvific power as mediated by particularity.”95 In other words, the sacramental potential of the particular is present in creation through primordial divine generosity. Its inclusive scope of diversity is nothing short of planetary. It permeates, liturgically speaking, “all times and all places”96 without any ideologically, politically, or historically imposed omission and segregation.

Furthermore, the sacramental potential of the particular is actually indispensable for a meaningful revelation within the incarnational hermeneutic: precisely through their sacramental potential particular forms of human embodiment engender nothing less than “true loci theologici.”97 Even though the Roman Catholic theological trio of Anthony Godzieba, Lieven Boeve, and Michele Saracino do not specifically delve into the geo-political intricacies of embodiment that are inescapably configured through glaringly inequitable power dynamics that postcolonial critiques would highlight, their hermeneutical thrust begs material elongation beyond unspecific “embodiment” into the realm of precisely those intricacies that shape particular human lives and agencies so uniquely and consequentially. Hence the incarnationally intensified sacramental capacity of material realities to mediate divine revelation indeed embraces a whole palooza of particular configurations of postcolonial hybridity and diasporic experience. Both constitute a locus theologicus in their own right, not just a fashionable vignette of “context” according to the presently solidifying scholarly etiquette in the Occidental academy. Without doubt, the sacramental potential within the particular facilitates an “always-vulnerable mediation.”98 But what avenue of revelation can ever achieve more, even if it manages to steer clear of idolatrous self-indulgence and hegemonic presumptuousness?

Postcoloniality Beyond Monochromatic Essentialisms

And yet there is another dimension to the predicament of being “haunted.” The postcolonial connotations and connections which are so pivotal for hybrid theological sensibilities such as mine—namely, being a white person of Eastern European origin—might appear rather puzzling outside of Europe. Of course, even Eastern European postcoloniality—one type of postcoloniality “from below” among others—can never be unambiguous.

In the context of my study, postcoloniality “from below” refers to the peoples, territories, cultures, and groups that have been on the receiving end of colonial subjugation and conquest not only politically and economically but also spiritually, culturally, intellectually, and affectively. Today, in the aftermath of the classic colonial era, both the formerly colonized and the former colonizers share the deeply ambivalent realities of postcoloniality. This sort of reciprocal entanglement in the colonial regimes of power is precisely what the postcolonial condition expresses and what postcolonial analyses interrogate. Yet both parties share the present global postcolonial condition differently; their reciprocity remains asymmetrical and their interconnection is often lopsided and always very complex.

Obviously, one must tread very carefully here. Taking the history of Western European colonialism into account, it comes as little surprise that today virtually all white people of European ancestry are often seen as inhabiting global postcoloniality “from above” almost by default. But if one asks, say, the Irish, or the Estonians, or the Roma—to choose the most geographically distant and culturally diverse examples of intra-European colonial histories—then their (usually unheard) stories may add some important nuances to postcolonial analysis. If attention is paid to the geo-cultural “small voice[s] of history,”99 even in Europe and Eurasia, then the racial anatomy of global colonial escapades must be further problematized to avoid precisely what postcolonial critiques have always deplored so incessantly—a reductive essentialization of identities and histories.

To remain vigilant about some quite entrenched postcolonial clichés, it is helpful to recognize that the globalized world of the early twenty-first century is a postcolonial world in toto by virtue of so many societies and countries having been involved—triumphantly or sorrowfully—in the global colonial system over many centuries of Western conquests. As I have argued elsewhere, several formerly colonized cultures in Europe, for reasons too complex to elucidate here, are typically ignored by postcolonial scholarship. On top of that, quite a few are not at all eager to join the postcolonial club “from below.” In Eastern and Central Europe this attitude is due to the simmering conundrum of racism (just think about the current refugee crisis in Europe and the racial and ethnic strife exemplified by Brexit!) that intermingles with a sense of cultural violation, memories of spiritual and political victimhood, and resurgent ideologies of nationalism. These lived paradoxes shape the postcolonial/postcommunist space in Eastern, Southern, and Central Europe since the collapse of the Soviet Union—a colonial empire that was “internally imperialist but (in its declared animosity to First World predation) externally anti-imperialist. . .”100

Perhaps nothing could serve this postcolonial/postsoviet milieu of Europe—at least from the diasporic North-American perspective—more fruitfully than entering into a dialogue with other postcolonial treasuries of critique and wisdom to help at least name the deeply unsettling colonial traumas as well as ambivalent imbrication in Western ideologies of imperialism. Such a dialogue draws from the widest range of postcolonial resources of imagination and wisdom with a sense of subaltern (horizontal) solidarity and with the sense of kinship in “minor transnationality.”101 The outcome is, not surprisingly, a certain kind of border thinking.

Which Borders and Whose Border Thinking?

It is precisely through the “border thinking” which unfolds across the planetary curvatures of subaltern solidarity and empathy, that postsoviet-cum-postcolonial lifeworlds can come to terms with their own deeply ambiguous and multilayered colonial past and move toward an...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Prelude I
• Prelude II
• Prelude III
• Part I: Compositio Loci
• Part II: Hybridity, Ethics, Theology
• Part III: Contemplating the Sacramental Pluriverse
• Coda: Postcolonial Ressourcement and Diasporic Method
• Bibliography