Negotiating Cultural and Religious Identity in the Postcolony

Abstract

It is critical to conceptualize “identity” theologically in the contemporary political context provided by postcolonial theory. Identity, religious or political, is not fixed. It is a product of ceaseless negotiations, in the presence of unequal power. The theological stance on conceptualizing identity will affect debates on religious identity, cultural identity, and conversion in places such as India with their histories of European Christian attempts to colonize, as well as debates of a more political nature. Moreover, the more public face of theology such as a contemporary Roman Catholic theology of mission given such imperializing histories is complicated by the awareness forwarded in postcolonial theory of continued colonization and collusion with Western economic and political power. How can Roman Catholic postcolonial theologians rethink the connections between cultural and religious identities in India in such a context is the question that this chapter attempts to answer. Consequently, I engage Homi Bhabha and Karl Rahner in a creative dialogue on identity, conversion, and mission, and challenge their frameworks to become more accommodating of religious subjectivity and awareness of power asymmetries in each of their respective proposals. In this conversation, Rahner functions as a theological voice to critique the secularized mode in which Homi Bhabha constructs his theory of hybridity of identity.

There is a kind of narrative or image of power … that somehow assumes that power works because somewhere prior to a particular exercise of authority it has been fixed. It works because it has already been institutionalized; it has been prefixed in a way. And I think to some extent, of course, this is true. You enter into a negotiation only because there is a disequilibrium or an inequality. But I think how you negotiate depends very much on how you read the weight and sedimentation of that prior fixing or prefixing … it’s to try and rethink the context of that prefixing, to suggest that this prefixing may also be disarticulated or unfixed …

—Homi Bhabha, 1999, 23–24.