Decolonizing The Body Of Christ

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Decolonizing the Body of Christ: Theology and Theory After Empire offers a preview of the editors' priority for multireligious, indigenous, and transnational scholarly voices. The goal is to expand the postcolonial debate by inclusion of contextual voices and disciplines once excluded by canonical leaders of postcolonial studies.

Religion and postcolonial theory once each other's arch enemy and cause of suspicion now become critical companions in shared analysis of major postcolonial themes. Review: Bold and innovative, this book shifts conversations on postcolonialism and religions from the Western academy to the Global South.

This theoretically rich and contextually engaged volume charts the departure of a new discourse. I highly recommend it. - Kwok Pui-lan, author of Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology This daring book and series set out to upset the dominance by Western scholars in postcolonial theorization by privileging a new style of scholarly engagement and foregrounding indigenous authors.

The long-overdue inclusion of religion as central to constructive destabilization in neocolonial societies sets this series apart from all others. - John C. Hawley, editor of Historicizing Christian Encounters with the Other and India in Africa, Africa in India The essays collected here call for a decolonizing theology that is at once self-reflexive about Christianity's problematic imperialist subtexts and proffers a theological-religious route to emancipation within a postcolonial frame.

The volume's overarching project of a determinedly postcolonial rewriting of colonial missions decodes not only the processes by which the ideology of empire inflected triumphalist stories and histories of Christianity but also the often skewed and geo-politically driven 'colonizing of the Christian legacy'.

This fascinatingly eclectic collection addresses questions and concerns of a decidedly postcolonial nature in the domains of subaltern lives even as they address gender issues, multiculturalism, and new forms of imperial domination. In its postcolonial unpacking of traditional signifiers like martyrdom, scriptural texts, exegetical traditions, and the institutional frames of eschatology the volume wonderfully combines theology with critical theory.

Decolonizing the Body of Christ is a major contribution to multiple disciplines in literary, historical, theological and mission studies. - Pramod K. Nayar, Dept. of English, The University of Hyde